Chie Nagai

Chie Nagai is a soprano, improviser and music teacher living in Kassel who works primarily in the field of improvised and contemporary music. She studied classical singing and elementary music education in Tokyo and Kassel.

She has been working as a teacher at the Kassel Music School since 2018 and has had a teaching position there since 2022. The focus of her pedagogical work is on leading parent-child groups, early musical education, instrument carousel, courses with seniors and voice training.

In addition to her work as a music teacher, she is active as a singer both in Germany and abroad, has a diverse repertoire from baroque to contemporary music and sings many world premieres. As a student, she worked on projects with Christian Wolff and Charlotte Seither. Together with the mandolinist Gertrud Weyhofen, she recently premiered works by Yoshinao Kobayashi and Alois Bröder. In 2018, she appeared as a composer and performer with the Interrogation Quartet at the Days of New Music in Weimar. In 2019, she sang “Die Sieben Lieder der Tage” for voice solo by Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Stockhausen courses and concerts in Kürten and took part in a performance of Steve Reich’s “Drumming” at the Minimal Music Festival Kassel. As an improvisational musician, she has worked with Eddie Prévost, Tomomi Adachi, Chie Mukai, Makoto Oshiro, Haco, Ken Ikeda, Johnny Chang and Liping Ting, among others. Together with Joshua Weitzel, she was co-curator of the 7-part concert series Chamäleon Verbindung 2020 in Kassel. This concert series addressed the connections and references within the broad field of contemporary music in Kassel, with two concerts explicitly aimed at children.

In 2021 she received a scholarship from the Hessian Ministry of Science and Culture and developed a program for solo children’s concerts for experimental music.
In addition, together with Hada Benedito, she developed a children’s concert format for experimental and improvised music as a duo, which has been supported by the Berlin Academy of Arts since 2022.