Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music and freely improvised practices, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.
She is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Recherche, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, Curious Chamber Players, The Crossing Choir, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, the Aizuri Quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet and violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, pianist Shai Wosner and Joel Fan among others.
Wang Lu has received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020), the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. She won first prize at Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s Young Composers Forum in 2010 and shared the Tactus International Young Composers Orchestra Forum Award in 2008. She was selected for a Tremplin commission by IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2010 and the International Composition Seminar with the Ensemble Modern in 2012. She has also received two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.
Wang Lu’s music was programmed on festivals such as the 2022 New York Philharmonic’s Sound On series curated by Nadia Sirota, 2014 New York Philharmonic Biennial, MATA Festival, Cresc. Biennale in Frankfurt, Gaudeamus Music Week, Tanglewood, Cabrillo Music Festival, Beijing Modern, Pacific and Takefu festivals in Japan, Mostly Mozart, Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Havana New Music Festival. She has also been a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell and Hermitage Artist Retreat. Collaborations have included an installation at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery with artist Polly Apfelbaum and an evening of poetry and music with poet Ocean Vuong. In 2019, her music was featured on portrait concerts at Miller Theater with ICE and Yarn/Wire, with Ensemble Recherche in Paris, and with Ensemble Mosaik plus soloists Ryan Muncy and Wu Wei in Berlin. In 2021, her projects include Aftertouch a flute electronic and video piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036; a solo piano work Lacuna for Shai Wosner in honor of Chinese American architect I.M. Pei; a new work for the LongLeash trio supported by New Music USA; November Airs for the Talea Ensemble commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University; At Which Point a choir and electronic work for The Crossing, and episode V of TV opera desert in, produced by the Boston Lyric Opera.
Wang Lu was the Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre (2020-22). Her full-length chamber opera The Beekeeper in collaboration with librettist Kelley Rourke was concert premiered at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center in March 2021.
Her upcoming premieres in 2022-23 season include a new orchestra work Surge commissioned by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation for the New York Philharmonic (Jan. 2023), a large ensemble work commissioned by the Barlow Foundation for the Seattle Modern Orchestra (Jun. 2023), a large ensemble work commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts for Chicago based Ensemble Dal Niente, and a new string quartet for the Parker Quartet. Other international ensembles performing Wang Lu’s compositions this season also include: Ensemble Sillages in France, Phoenix Ensemble in Basel Switzerland, Tapiola Sinfonietta in Espoo Finland, Jennifer Koh at Phoenix Symphony’s new music festival REVERB.
Wang Lu is a mentor at Luna Composition Lab that provides mentorship, education, and resources for young female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13-18. She will be teaching at Yarn/Wire Institute and Music on the Point in summer 2023.
Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, “Urban Inventory” (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avant-garde… The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.”
http://wanglucomposer.com/
