About

Artist-In-Residence, The Performance Project at University Settlement (2021-22)
Featured Artist, MATA Presents (2021-22)

I am a composer who grew up in Hong Kong and Winthrop, Massachusetts. I am based in Reno, Nevada, where I serve as the Assistant Director of Nevada Humanities, the state of Nevada’s affiliate to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

My recent composition projects center on what I term “musical placemaking”, which is to create music intimately connected with the place where it is performed and heard. My current project, Passage, was awarded a 2022-23 General Research Fund grant from the Research Grants Council of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong. The award will provide approximately US$61,000 of funding toward a new oral history and geolocation-enabled app focusing on the ethnic minority communities of Hong Kong.

Other recent musical placemaking projects include a site-specific opera in 2011 inspired by former cigarette factories in Durham, North Carolina, and a concert band work in 2017 based on scenes from the town of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. More recently, my work The Emigrants (2018) – commissioned by the cello-percussion duo New Morse Code – is based on collected oral history recordings from various emigrant musicians living or working in Queens, New York City, one of the most ethnically diverse urban areas in the world. In these interviews, I focus on how the experience of leaving home has shaped the musicians’ identities and why they have chosen to stay. The recorded speech is interwoven with instrumental music, blurring the lines between recorded reality and its musical representation. As a result, I explore how the absence of a visual record can create space for an aural and musical documentary form. The Emigrants was supported by grants from CUNY and the Queens Council on the Arts. New Morse Code premiered the work at the Queens Museum on December 8, 2018, and we released the work as a digital EP in 2020. My latest musical placemaking project, titled Family Association, is an app-based soundwalk in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood that combines collected oral history recordings with instrumental music inspired by the recorded speech. The work was co-commissioned by University Settlement and Music At The Anthology (MATA) and premiered in May 2022.

In addition to musical placemaking, I also focus on opera and writing for the voice. As the 2018 Composer-in-Residence for the Chautauqua Opera Company, I composed two works for voice and piano (Sissieretta Jones, Carnegie Hall, 1902 / O patria mia on a poem by Tyehimba Jess; Such Sweet Sorrow on a poem by Allison Joseph) and a new work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (Underwater Acoustics on a poem by Rajiv Mohabir). My recent operas include the 2018 collaborative opera Rumpelstiltskin, created with co-composer Ruby Fulton and librettist John Clum, as well as the 2015 one-act opera Heartbreak Express also with a libretto by John Clum. I am also an alum of The American Opera Project’s Composers & The Voice workshop.

I previously served as an associate professor and the B.A. Program Director at the Academy of Music, Hong Kong Baptist University, and as an assistant professor of music at York College, The City University of New York. I also co-founded the artist-run new opera ensemble Rhymes With Opera.

Photo above from Marble City Opera’s 2022 performances of Heartbreak Express; courtesy of Kathryn Frady and Marble City Opera.