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About Jooyong Ahn
Conductor -Jooyong Ahn is a citizen of the United States and native of Seoul, South Korea. He was educated at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, majoring in violin and viola performance. He performed with major orchestras around the world at many notable music venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall and Philadelphia’s Academy Hall. He holds two Master of Music degrees, one a graduate degree in Orchestral Conducting from the prestigious Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, Texas, May 1985. He counts among his many honors to date the 1988 invitation to attend Tanglewood Music Festival. More recently he was honored by a favorable review by Washington Post music critic Daniel Ginsberg on the orchestra and his conducting skills at the debut of the newly formed Washington Korean Symphony Orchestra in November 2002 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D. C. Ahn has held the music directorship of orchestras in Korea and the United States and guest conducted many orchestras on three continents: In Europe he conducted the Estonian National Symphony, Latvian Chamber Orchestra, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Slovak Sinfonietta and Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra of Bulgaria.
He toured the Slovak Sinfonietta’s first American tour in 1993 and guest conducted the ’95 International Festival in Tallinn, Estonia; In Asia he held music directorship of South Korea’s Taejon Philharmonic Orchestra with guest conducting of Seoul Philharmonic , Busan Philharmonic, Taegu Symphony and Suwon Philharmonic Orchestras; In China the Pan Asia Symphony, Hong Kong and Canton International Art Festival orchestras; In the United States he was music director of Symphony orchestras in Pennsylvania and Kentucky and South Carolina most recently founding the Atlantic Southeast Ballet Orchestra in Charleston and guest conducting the Charleston Symphony and Metropolitan Civic orchestras at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina 2003 and 2004.
He has been a tenured professor of conducting at three universities beginning in 1987; Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, Chungnam National University and Western Kentucky University. He served on the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts from 1988-90 and taught at Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts at Mercyhurst College in Erie, 2001 and 2002.He is presently professor of conducting and Director of Orchestras for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga since 2004. In August 2005, he was chosen to serve as a juror for the Jordania International Conducting Competition in Kharkov, Ukraine with five other jurors from Europe and the United States and he continued to serve its first competition held in the United States in 2006.Maestro Ahn has recorded and produced two compact discs, one with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, which featured Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4 and Fingal’s cave overture on the Excelsior label is available at amazon.com, and another with the Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring three bassoon concerti on the SungEum label