Residency Overview
The Arts Institute is pleased to welcome artist in residence Fred Ho to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Fall 2008. The Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program brings world-class artists to campus to teach semester-long, interdepartmental courses and to publicly present their work for campus and community audiences.
Fred Ho is a one-of-a-kind revolutionary Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, political activist, and leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and the Monkey Orchestra. Ho is breaking new ground in the world of contemporary music while remaining committed to political and social transformation. For two decades, he has innovated a new American multicultural music embedded in the most soulful and transgressive forms of African American music, with musical influences of Asia and the Pacific Rim. In addition to founding the Afro Asian Music Ensemble in 1982 and the Monkey Orchestra in 1990, Ho co-founded the Brooklyn Sax Quartet in 1997, and founded Caliente! Circle Around the Sun in 2005.
Ho has been an innovator in the field of Asian American Studies and in his published work. He helped to found the East Coast Asian Students Union, the Asian American Resource Workshop, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. He is co-editor with Ron Sakolsky of Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution, which won the 1996 American Book Award, and lead editor of Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian/Pacific America. His Wicked Theory Naked Practice and his co-edited anthology with Bill Mullen, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans are both forthcoming.
Ho’s numerous awards include the McKnight Foundation Composer/Residency award, 5 Rockefeller Foundation grants, 2 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, 3 New York Foundation for the Arts Music Composition fellowships, the 1988 Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Musicians Conference, and the 1987 Harvard University Peter Ivers Visiting Artist award.
While at UW–Madison, Fred Ho will teach the course “Afro-Asian Multidisciplinary Performance Workshop: Revolutionary Sound and Word.” Students will interrogate the western musical genres of jazz, opera, and text, and provide a context for the creation of a new sound fusion inspired by Afro-Asian music and aesthetics. Ho will work with students to develop a performance composition that integrates music and sung and/or spoken text inspired by the nexus of the African-Asian, African American, and Asian American histories and struggles. The piece will be performed as part of his public concert “Revolutionary Earth Music and Performance: People and the Planet Before Profit!” on November 22, 2008 at 8 pm at the Wisconsin Union Theater.
Fred Ho is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and by the School of Music. Subsidiary co-sponsors include the Dance Program, the Department of Theatre and Drama, the Department of Afro-American Studies, and the Multicultural Student Coalition.
Inset artwork based on photo by Robert Adam Mayer.