BMI Presents 12th Annual BMI Bursary Award to Kichul Park and Christopher Lyons in London

BMI recently presented the 12th annual BMI Student Bursary Award to Royal Academy of Music student composers Kichul Park and Christopher Lyons. The award was presented in London by Brandon Bakshi, BMI Executive Director, Writer/Publisher Relations, Europe & Asia. The Bursary Award is a financial stipend given each year through BMI’s London office to graduating students enrolled in the Royal Academy’s Music & Applied Media program.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1985, Kichul Park is a Music Composition student at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studies with Paul Patterson. He studied piano for ten years before turning to composing at the age of 17. He studied with Young-ah Kim, a former graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and a professor of Seoul University. He subsequently joined the Royal Academy of Music in 2006. He has written in a variety of forms, such as songs, a piano trio, a brass duo, solo pieces for different instruments and orchestral works. His works have been performed by students of the Royal Academy of Music and a string quartet piece, “Thread of Ariadne,” was performed as a work-in-progress by members of the Seoul Classical Players in 2005. He is especially interested in studying harmonisation, analysis of Romantic period of music and orchestration.

Christopher Lyons is an Edinburgh-born composer and performer. He began studying the piano at the age of six and the violin at the age of seven, joining the City of Edinburgh music school shortly thereafter. Chris was selected at the age of eight for the ECAT young composers’ forum with his piece Nocturne, a competition aimed largely at undergraduates. Chris began his jazz performance career at the age of 14, playing both piano and guitar; at 16 he was performing with Scotland’s most renowned musicians and with the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra, and has successfully led his own jazz trio for two years. He was commissioned to write both the libretto and music to a musical, which was performed in the Edinburgh Festival. Chris was also a prize-winning poet as a boy, spending a period in St. Petersburg as a result of his winning the Alexander Pushkin prize for poetry at the age of 12.