Hyo-Won Woo

Hyo-Won Woo (also Hyowon Woo, , born 1974) is a South Korean composer, especially of choral music. She uses elements from both Korean music and Western contemporary composition techniques. Career Woo was born in Seoul in 1974. Her father was an artist, her mother a pianist. She graduated from Sungshin Women’s University. In 1995 she became composer in residence with the Seoul Ladies’ Singers, conducted by Hak-Won Yoon whom she had met singing as a student in the Yongrak Presbyterian Church Choir which he also conducted. She received a commission to compose a missa brevis for women’s choir to be performed on an Asia tour in 1996. From 1999 she composed for the Incheon City Chorale, also conducted by Yoon. In 2002 she composed Gloria for a concert tour of the Asian Youth Choir. She wrote an oratorio, Moses, in 2011. In several works, she combines influences from Western contemporary music and from Korean traditional music, creating new Korean choral music. The musicologist Yoonchung Chang analysed the combination specifically for Gloria in a 2012 thesis. Traditional elements include scales and rhythmic patterns. She also uses Sikimsea, Korean melodic ornaments with “subtle shading an