Biography
Du Yun earned the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017, yet her output resists easy categorization, spanning, in the phrasing of her own website, "orchestral [music], opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, pop music, oral tradition, visual arts, electronics and noise." She likewise eludes simple assignment to either a Chinese or an American identity.
Born in Shanghai on June 18, 1977, she received her initial training at the Shanghai Conservatory during the period when Western-oriented musical institutions were being reestablished in China after the Cultural Revolution, studying composition and piano from childhood onward. Additional formative experiences arrived in the 1990s once Western popular culture gained access to the country; together with Kenyan exchange students she organized a reggae band in Shanghai, while also absorbing alternative rock and indie pop that reached listeners through unofficial bootleg cassettes rather than sanctioned distribution.
After relocating to the United States and entering the composition program at the Oberlin Conservatory, she cultivated an approach that proved not merely eclectic but, as TimeOut New York observed, marked by a "boundless, almost childlike sense of curiosity about the world around her -- she reinvents herself daily, and so does her music." She later completed a PhD in composition at Harvard University and joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Purchase in 2006.
Her catalog has encompassed conventional instrumental forms and opera alongside popular song, electronics, performance art, collaborations with visual artists, and additional territories. Commissions from prominent performers such as Matt Haimovitz, who recorded two of her pieces on the album Figment, and Hilary Hahn, for whom she wrote When a Tiger Meets a Rosa Rugosa, included on the collection In 27 Pieces, elevated her visibility. One of her ambitious projects, the orchestral work Mantichora, received its premiere from the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in 2011. Although she steered clear of overt Chinese references for much of her early career, she has indicated that her practice embodies an Asian sensibility favoring reconciliation among opposing forces; by the 2010s she had also begun sustained engagement with the traditional Chinese kungqu operatic style. The U.S. National Public Radio network selected her among 100 composers under 40 deserving attention, and in 2017, the year she turned forty, she received the Pulitzer Prize for the opera Angel's Bone, a work that examined human trafficking through the story of angels subjected to sexual slavery and incorporated electronics together with video.
Born in Shanghai on June 18, 1977, she received her initial training at the Shanghai Conservatory during the period when Western-oriented musical institutions were being reestablished in China after the Cultural Revolution, studying composition and piano from childhood onward. Additional formative experiences arrived in the 1990s once Western popular culture gained access to the country; together with Kenyan exchange students she organized a reggae band in Shanghai, while also absorbing alternative rock and indie pop that reached listeners through unofficial bootleg cassettes rather than sanctioned distribution.
After relocating to the United States and entering the composition program at the Oberlin Conservatory, she cultivated an approach that proved not merely eclectic but, as TimeOut New York observed, marked by a "boundless, almost childlike sense of curiosity about the world around her -- she reinvents herself daily, and so does her music." She later completed a PhD in composition at Harvard University and joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Purchase in 2006.
Her catalog has encompassed conventional instrumental forms and opera alongside popular song, electronics, performance art, collaborations with visual artists, and additional territories. Commissions from prominent performers such as Matt Haimovitz, who recorded two of her pieces on the album Figment, and Hilary Hahn, for whom she wrote When a Tiger Meets a Rosa Rugosa, included on the collection In 27 Pieces, elevated her visibility. One of her ambitious projects, the orchestral work Mantichora, received its premiere from the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in 2011. Although she steered clear of overt Chinese references for much of her early career, she has indicated that her practice embodies an Asian sensibility favoring reconciliation among opposing forces; by the 2010s she had also begun sustained engagement with the traditional Chinese kungqu operatic style. The U.S. National Public Radio network selected her among 100 composers under 40 deserving attention, and in 2017, the year she turned forty, she received the Pulitzer Prize for the opera Angel's Bone, a work that examined human trafficking through the story of angels subjected to sexual slavery and incorporated electronics together with video.
Albums
