Alexina Louie is a Canadian composer of Chinese descent. Born in Vancouver in 1949, she studied at the Jean Lyons School of Music as well as at the University of California. Her compositional works include pieces for orchestra and piano and may be labeled as being of a variety of different musical genres, from electronic music to string quartet to operatic works. She has also composed for film (Orford, 2014).
Her social and political context is situated in latter decades of the 20th century, from the 1980s onward, thus putting her at her creative height during the Reaganomic years, the post-Vietnam return of Establishment politics, and the fallout from disillusionment with both right and left culturally speaking (Stone, Kuznick, 2012). The 1990s were a decade of disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, disaffection, and distaste -- expressed musically in the emergent sounds of the grunge rock era, and reflected in Louie's discordant melodies and atonal rifts (Kim, 2009).
Her style is situated in the post-modern collection of musicians and composers who develop an atmospheric sound, though Louie has borrowed from the classical composers of the past, such as Wagner and Mozart for her own mini-operas. Thus, she infuses a modern style into the Old World Classical-Romantic styles to create something new and fresh that resonates in an age that has been turned off from reality by the phony economic systems and betraying political systems of the modern era. There is a voice of protest in her music, but also a feeling of vitality, determination, and struggle for peace and transcendence.
Louie has worked independently for a number of years, producing scores for her sister's documentaries as well as her own works. Her husband is Alex Pauk, who is a conductor of the Esprit Orchestra, and they have worked together as well. Alexina Louie has a diverse resume that is as eclectic as her overall style. She has not written about music but a number of her scores have been published and other writers have written about her, such Esther Yu-Hui Chu (1997) who...
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