Blog

Chinese composer Gao Weijie 高为杰 turned 80 this year. It’s hard to imagine having come to China without his keen insights and encouragement along the way. Gao Ping 高平 had organized a festschrift in his honor in the fall and asked me to contribute a chapter; the book was published last week by Southwest China Normal University Press (西南师范大学出版社).

This photo accompanies the article — it was taken at his birthday party in Spring 2015, a few months after I first came to Beijing.

---

智者、严师、乐人、挚友：高为杰80寿辰庆贺纪念雅集 | “Sage, Strict Teacher, Musician, Friend: Gao Weijie’s 80th Birthday Celebration Anniversary Collection” 

Xia YuYan 夏雨言 performed my recent pipa solo 空 in Lisbon last week at 21st CHIME (European Foundation for Chinese Music) Conference – Chinese Music as Cross Culture. Below is the poster and a picture of her performing with our friend Jiang Shaofeng 姜少峰 as part of their pipa and tap dance collaboration.

A few pictures from the rehearsals of my new work for YuYan over the past two weeks and of our recording session earlier today:

I had a great time presenting on my work at the Women in the Creative Arts conference in Canberra in August.  I am back in Beijing now on a one year fellowship at Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar and am writing a few new works for Chinese instruments.

The Guardian ran a nice preview article on the Women in the Creative Arts conference taking place at ANU in two weeks here. Looking forward to exchanging ideas and listening to new music!

I recently finished up a new percussion solo for Yongyun Zhang (excerpt below) that she’ll be premiering in late November in Cincinnati. Since then I’ve been putting down notes for a few new collaborations with sheng and recorder, respectively.

A photo from Colleen’s performance of Water Music yesterday in Nashville:

I spent most of the winter writing a percussion concerto that Colleen Phelps, Alexander Colding Smith, and the Soundbox Orchestra premiered earlier this month on the New Concerto Project. Here are a few belated photos from the event:

The Cincinnati Enquirer did a feature on my new percussion concerto – read more here.

Cellist My Hellgren and soprano Madeleine Jonsson Gille performing my work Reverberations (2015) at the Kungliga Operan in Stockholm yesterday:

I’ve been named a 2018 Schwarzman Scholar, receiving a one year full fellowship to pursue a Masters of Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  UC did a profile of me on their website.  The official announcement from the Schwarzman Scholars can be read here and the full list of 2018 scholars is available here.