On Saturday, June 16, 2012 at 7 PM, the Museum of Making Music presents the Global Spotlight Concert Series featuring world renowned pipa virtuoso Wu Man with special guest Kartik Seshadri performing on sitar.

Tickets are $25; $20 for Museum Members and $18 for students.  For more information or to purchase tickets, please call 760-438-5996.

Recognized as the world's premier pipa virtuoso and as a leading ambassador of Chinese music, U.S.-based, Chinese-born musician Wu Man has carved out a career creating and fostering projects that give this ancient instrument a new role in today's music world, not only introducing the instrument to new audiences, but commissioning and premiering over a hundred new works to grow the core repertoire.  A Grammy Award-nominated artist, her adventurous musical spirit has also led to her becoming a respected expert on the history and preservation of Chinese musical traditions, reflected in her recorded and live performances and multi-cultural collaborations.

Adamant that the pipa, a lute-like instrument with a history of more than 2,000 years, does not become marginalized as only appropriate for Chinese music, numerous projects have brought Wu Man and her pipa together with a wide array of international artists and ethnicities.  Her 'Wu Man & Friends' concerts and recordings have created lively musical conversations between the pipa and instruments from East Africa, America's Appalachian mountains, the Ukraine, Taiwan, India, Alaska and Central Asia, including Tajikistan and the Uighur region.  Projects she has instigated have resulted in the pipa finding a place in new solo and quartet works, concertos, opera, chamber, electronic, and jazz music as well as in theater productions, film, dance and collaborations with visual artists including calligraphers and painters. These efforts were recognized when she was made a 2008 United States Artists Broad Fellow.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa.  Wu Man moved to the U.S. in 1990 and in 1992 was selected as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University.  In 1999, Wu Man was selected by Yo-Yo Ma as the winner of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in music and communication.  Wu Man continually collaborates with some of the most distinguished musicians and conductors performing today and she has performed in major concert halls worldwide as a soloist with many of the world's leading orchestras.  She is a principal member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and since 1993 she has also regularly performed and recorded with the Kronos Quartet, their most recent work together being the multi-media work, A Chinese Home directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.  She is also the first artist from China to have performed at the White House.

Wu Man's expansive discography reflects the broad spectrum of her live performances. Her most recent recording is Immeasurable Light (Traditional Crossroads) that combines reconstructed ancient pipa melodies with her own contemporary compositions.

Kartik Seshadri is a world-renowned force in the field of Indian Classical Music. As a sitarist, he attracted widespread attention when he began performing fulllength solos at the age of 6 in India. The sitar maestro is now hailed as an “amazingly accomplished” musical powerhouse noted for his music’s “expressive beauty, rich tonal sensibility, and rhythmic intricacy,” praised the Washington Post while the Times of India (2011) noted that Seshadri’s concert was “a show stopper that transported the audience to soak soul deep in his mesmerizing performance.”  The prestigious Songlines Magazine (U.K.) has in its February 2012 issue has declared his latest album “Sublime Ragas” as one of the world's top ten albums.

A multifarious confluence of musical influences, Seshadri has trained with several greats including sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar and is hailed as his foremost protégé.  In 2005 and 2010, Seshadri collaborated with prominent composer Philip Glass on the critically acclaimed Orion project.  Seshadri performs extensively in his homeland and around the world ranging from venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia, to the Dover Lane, ITC, Sawai Gandharva and Saptak Sammelans in India to name but a few.

Seshadri is also a distinguished composer and educator of Indian Classical Music that includes his Quartet for a Raga and his latest “Concerto #1 for Sitar and Chamber Orchestra” received its world premier last October in San Diego.

As an educator Seshadri heads one of the largest programs of Indian Classical Music at the University of California, San Diego besides being regularly invited as a distinguished guest faculty member at various musical establishments around the world.