Wang Lu

Born: 1982, Xi’An, China

Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Recherche, ensemble mosaik, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, The Phoenix Ensemble, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, The Crossing Choir, New York Virtuoso Singers, and soloists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, Claire Chase and pianist Jacob Greenberg, among others.

Wang Lu has received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020) and the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Barlow Foundation, New Music USA and the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University. 

Wang Lu’s music was programmed on festivals such as the 2023 Musical Nova in Finland, 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 and at the Yaddo, MacDowell and Hermitage artist retreats. Collaborations have included 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 included Aftertouch, a flute, electronics and video piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036.

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.

In the 2022–23 season, her projects included a new orchestra work, Surge, commissioned by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation for the New York Philharmonic (January 2023), with following performances by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Des Moines Symphony and Pensacola Symphony Orchestra; a large ensemble work, The Nothing Man and Other Tales, commissioned by the Barlow Foundation for the Seattle Modern Orchestra (June 2023); a large ensemble work commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts for Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente; a new string quartet, Motion, for the Parker Quartet; and a piano quintet, Wave Field, for the Danish Quartet and pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar. Other international ensembles performing Wang Lu’s compositions that season included Ensemble Sillages in France, Ensemble Phoenix in Basel, Switzerland, Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland and Jennifer Koh at the Phoenix Symphony’s new music festival REVERB. 

Wang Lu is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. She earned her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduated from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. 

From 2022 to 2023, Wang Lu was a mentor at Luna Composition Lab, which provides mentorship, education and resources for young female, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13–18. She taught at Yarn/Wire Institute and Music on the Point in the summer of 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."

Surge

• Composed: 2022, on commission from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation
  
• Premiere: January 20, 2023 with Dalia Stasevska conducting the New York Philharmonic
• CSO Notable Performances: These are the CSO’s first performances of this work. 
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, crash cymbals, flexatones, glockenspiel, marimba, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tom-tom, vibraphone, whip, wood block, harp, piano, strings
• Duration: approx. 6 minutes

While writing Surge, I remembered the exhilaration of hearing the New York Philharmonic for the very first time in the fall of 2005 as a newly arrived foreign student. I was staring at the stage and couldn’t believe where I was and what I was experiencing. I also thought of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic 1973 visit to Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, the power of “Music Diplomacy” that helped write a new history between two worlds. I connected the beautiful resonances and orchestral colors bouncing off the walls of what is now David Geffen Hall with the all-too-familiar phrases and orchestration that I used to listen to on cassette tapes, but many times more enhanced and poignant in person. There was also the memory of my conservatory's student orchestra sound, with its striving, joyful imperfections. The palette of the symphony orchestra is endlessly attractive and malleable because of each individual player’s unique contribution, and of coming together in the moment of performance, which is nothing short of magical. This is what draws me to contribute my own independent expression as a composer to this lineage.

—Wang Lu