3ème prix du Concours Dutilleux 1999

Christina Viola Oorebeek was born on November 7, 1944 in Port Washington, New York. She is a dual national (American/Dutch) and lives in The Netherlands since 1972.

Education

After two years of studying Theatre Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles, at the age of 21, she chose to leave formal education to learn to improvise music on piano and guitar in jazz, blues and pop. In that same period she also became interested in non-Western music and spent three years studying Indian classical music at the schools of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (1965-1967) in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In The Netherlands she studied piano with Willem Brons at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam and graduated with a B-diploma in 1982. In 1990 she took private composition lessons with Jeff Hamburg and Ron Ford and from 1994 to 1999 she studied composition with Klaas de Vries at the Conservatory of Music in Rotterdam. Since 1997 she also studies instrumentation with Theo Verbey at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Music. She followed workshops a.o. with Magnus Lindberg and the Akiyoshidai Music Festival and Seminar (Japan).

Activities

In the early seventies she played piano and wrote songs for pop groups in San Francisco and London. Another field of activity has been playing piano for dance companies and collaborating with dance choreographers in various projects. She teaches music at the Dance Department of the Theatre Faculty of the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.

Compositions

Christina Oorebeek is striving for integration of the musical and extra-musical influences from her past in her contemporary work.

Prizes

In 1996 she won a shared first prize at the second International Young Composers' Meeting sponsored by the Gaudeamus Foundation for (into)The Heart of the Matter and in 1999 she won the 3rd prize at the Dutilleux Concours in France with Tremors and Quakes for piano.