Du Yun - Vaux Composer-in-Residence

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present

 

DU YUN

(Jean Macduff Vaux Composer-in-Residence)

 

“At first glance, the one predictable thing about Du Yun, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and multimedia artist, is her unpredictability. Dig deeper, though, and you can sense the conjoined strands of curiosity and compassion that run through everything she makes.” Steve Smith, The New Yorker

 

Program includes:

 

The Last Post

     fixed media

 

Tattooed in Snow

     Del Sol String Quartet

 

Quatrain: Slow Portraits III

     Kyle Bruckmann: oboe

     William Winant: percussion

     Stephen Harrison: cello

     Jennifer Ellis: harp

     Kyle Ko: horn

     David Tanenbaum: guitar

     Hrabba Atladottir: violin

     Steed Cowart: conductor

 

Solo for Oboe

     Kyle Bruckmann: oboe

 

The Ocean Within

     Jennifer Ellis: harp

__________

 

Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai and currently based in New York City, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre,  cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Hailed by The New York Times as a “leading figure in China’s new generation of composers” and often cited as a key activist in New York’s “new movement in new music,” Du Yun’s music is championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras, and organizations around the world.

 

Describing her as “protean” and “chameleonic,” NPR voted Du Yun one of 100 composers under 40 in 2011 and The Washington Post named her one of the top 35 female composers in classical music. She is known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience (The New Yorker). In 2017, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, Angel’s Bone, with libretto by Royce Vavrek. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, and the same year was named one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation. Her work Air Glow, is a 2019 GRAMMY nomination in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

 

Du Yun is currently on the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University and distinguished visiting professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), served as the Artistic Director of MATA from 2014-2018, conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival, and founder of the FutureTradition Initiative in China.