Hugh Livingston is a cellist, composer and sound installation artist. He has degrees in contemporary music from Yale, the California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California San Diego. His special areas of interest are improvisation, collaboration with visual artists, electroacoustic music, and Asian music, particularly Japanese and Chinese. Hugh is a member-director of the ensembles Mapa Mundi, The Orbis Factor, and The Seven Saties. He plays a 1928
Fagnola cello from Montiglio Italy. His CDs include Strings & Machines and Process & Passion, on EMF and Pogus, respectively. Hugh is the director of the ARTSHIP Recordings, which is a catalog of 54 improvised solos recorded on a 491-foot Art Deco cruiseliner, available on Mini-CD. Hugh composes situational music, responses to spaces, artists, architecture and design, history and people. He has catalogued 120 different pizzicato techniques for the cello and conducted extensive research in China on contemporary and historical music, funded by the Asian Cultural Council. His sound installation, Listen Edgemar, in a Frank Gehry-designed building in Santa Monica, opens May 16, 2004 and will run indefinitely. Hugh graduated cum laude in music form Yale, and was the recipient of the Yale Bach
Society Prize for excellence in musicianship and contribution to musical life at Yale.