Composer Wang Lu introduces her work “Surge,” which opened the CSO program on Oct. 26. photo credits: JP Leong

Tebar opened the evening with Wang Lu’s “Surge,” a work commissioned by the League of American Orchestras, and premiered in 2023 by the New York Philharmonic. Born in 1982 in Xi’An, China, the award-winning composer is now associate professor of music at Brown University. She told the audience that she took her inspiration from great symphonic repertoire, including Cincinnati Symphony albums, as well as snippets of music emanating from conservatory practice rooms. She also imagined the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 performances in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution.

That was a lot of inspiration to fit into a six-minute work, but Wang Lu’s work engaged the ear at every turn. The piece began with a flourish that was slightly jazzy – with slapping pizzicatos in the basses. Harmonies soon became more dissonant as they moved in parallel motion. A section of atmospheric sonorities was colored by glissandos in strings and harp. Staccato figures ricocheted across the orchestra in an appealing tapestry. It was a bright, bold piece, and Tebar led its varied moments vividly.

Composer Wang Lu at work. Photo by Deirdre Confar.

“She isn’t intimidated to compose new music that will rub elbows with time-tested classics. She’s written music inspired by the birth of her first child, layoffs at a textile factory in her hometown and even the frantic buzz of online dating.” Surge was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation."

“I’ve always been interested in storytelling,” says composer and pianist Wang Lu. “We all crave stories.”
Wang’s latest composition, “The Nothing Man and Other Tales,” taps into this human hunger by recounting a series of stories she discovered in a children’s book that her daughter has been enjoying. Her musical treatment transforms these tales into adventures for adult ears.
Seattle Modern Orchestra will give the world premiere of Wang’s new piece at Town Hall on June 3 as part of its final concert of the season. Commissioned for SMO by the Barlow Foundation, “Nothing Man” marks the second collaboration between Wang and the Seattle-based chamber orchestra, which co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley founded in 2010 to perform music from the 20th and 21st centuries. SMO balances works by local and out-of-town composers.

“Wang Lu’s ‘Surge,’ given its world premiere at the top of the” New York Philharmonic’s Friday concert, “is the product of an initiative by the League of American Orchestras to commission new works from six composers — all women — that will be guaranteed performances from ensembles across the country,” writes Joshua Barone in Sunday’s (1/22) New York Times. “Too often, premieres have short rehearsal periods; then, unless future performances are lined up, or unless soloists champion concertos written for them, the music can easily disappear. The League’s project at least gives contemporary work a fighting chance at longevity…. Wang’s piece has the elements of an enormous score skillfully accordioned into the shape of a much smaller one. From the flourish of its first measure, ‘Surge’ is a restless succession of swinging gestures, martial flashes and exercises in disparate, assertive voices coming in and out of focus, then occasionally finding common ground in a tutti mass … At the podium was Dalia Stasevska, in her second appearance with the Philharmonic…. Stasevska led the Wang with verve, commitment and, above all, clarity.” Also on the program were Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with soloist Lisa Batiashvili and Sibelius’s Second Symphony.

“In December 2021, The Kitchen welcomed back Claire Chase to perform a new program of flute works, Density 2036, part viii. Celebrating its eighth year, Density 2036 is Chase’s ongoing project to commission modern flute compositions annually until the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. Motivated by Varèse’s work, Chase commissioned composers Ann Cleare, Matana Roberts, and Wang Lu to help her break new ground in this year’s program. Ahead of the premiere performance on December 9, I spoke with each artist over email to discuss their artistic visions and guiding principles in their creative processes, along with how this program embarks on a new horizon of musical flute performance.”

NOVA Chamber Music Series ‘Songs of Perseverance’ concert to feature Utah premiere of Wang Lu’s Rates of Extinction
“Heartbeats, pulses and rhythms, indeed, encompass Wang’s life as a musician, composer, colleague and mother. As her own program note for the piece suggests, Wang writes, “Every day, industrial expansion and the modernization of societies push the limit of earth’s natural capacity to accommodate and sustain us. Many animal species quietly suffer and become extinct due to the harsh conditions imposed by human advancement.””

"...The Kitchen concert included three new scores, an excerpt from “Sex Magic,” and a reprise of “Density 21.5.” The first première, “Aftertouch,” was by Wang Lu, who has won notice for exuberantly overloaded music that mimics the delirium of digital life. Her piece begins with field recordings of city noise, punchy electronic beats, and jittery flurries of activity on the flute. A sequence of repeating units—times three, times four, times six—suggests machines or humans caught in a loop. But a section marked “Aeolian Sound,” for bass flute, shifts into melancholy introspection, with hints of folklike motifs emerging. Accompanying the music was a mesmerizing video by Polly Applebaum, showing ceramic bowls spinning on a podium..."

Claire Chase playing Wang Lu’s “Aftertouch,” one of three premieres in the eighth installment of “Density 2036,” at the Kitchen. Photo credit: Walter Wlodarczyk

“...The reason was clear the moment Chase began to play Wang Lu’s “Aftertouch,” which complements three types of flute with street noise, a club-worthy beat and videos, by Polly Apfelbaum, of spinning singing bowls.”

"...Wu’s November Airs—commissioned for Talea Ensemble by the Fromm Foundation—opened with projected video of a large, ivory-colored bowl, viewed vertically, slowly rotating as if still on the potter’s wheel. At intervals as the piece progressed, a hand was seen gently placing a small bowl inside the larger one, then replacing it with a series of similar bowls in different colors."

The album opens with Wang Lu's beautiful Rates of Extindion (2016), which compellingly draws one in a sound world depicting the heart rates of different animals recently lost due to the negative effects of our modern world, yet also provides a counterbalance through the celebration of "an imagined eternal freedom through the blossoming of pianistic virtuosity."

Last year, Wang, 39, released one of my favorite albums of the weird, weird year: “An Atlas of Time,” a collection of pieces composed between 2008 and 2017 (and the follow-up to 2018’s “Urban Inventory”). A single title from the collection — “Unbreathable Colors” — may indeed tell you more than any blurb could about Wang’s approach to time and sound, unbound by language or expectation, and here and there so fragile it’s as if your attention alone is holding it together. In June, she’ll premiere a work for Philadelphia-based choir the Crossing. wanglucomposer.com.

New York, February 22, 2021—The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the 18 recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $225,000. The winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Chen Yi (chair), Robert Beaser, Martin Bresnick, Stephen Hartke, George Lewis, Shulamit Ran, and Julia Wolfe. The awards will be presented virtually at the Academy’s Ceremonial on May 19, 2021. Candidates for music awards are nominated by the 300 members of the Academy.

Wang Lu is a composer whose work has explored ideas of the distances of time, memory, and place—often evoking, recreating, altering, manifesting places and times from her own distant memories. The titular work on her recently-released album, An Atlas of Time, maps and remembers sound and space from her own past: the opening melody of a children’s television broadcast is reincarnated in the strangeness of the present; fragments of the ambitiously trans-historical "Internationale" struggle among instruments responding to its insistent reemergence. In this sense, Wang’s pre-COVID music was already exploring ideas of “social distance”: a kind of musical sociality between people that connects them through time and space. 

The works of Chinese-American composer Wang Lu unfold like pop-up books. Each brief movement releases a whirligig of hues and textures — far more activity than seems physically possible to pack in. Yet for all its charming eccentricity and sense of play, her music isn’t merely a cardboard magic-trick to entertain. Highly evocative sonic images conceal secret compartments with deep personal significance.

Wang Lu: An Atlas of Time (New Focus Recordings)
Two years have passed since the release of Wang Lu’s debut album Urban Inventory, making the release of her second album, An Atlas of Time (New Focus Recordings), a compelling expansion of her artistic range.

Wang Lu: An Atlas of Time (New Focus Recordings)
On this bracing new collection of pieces written between 2008 and 2017, Chinese-American composer Wang Lu powerfully translates disparate perceptions of time within a very diverse program.

Wang Lu’s Rates of Extinction (2016) is a multi-movement work that presents five relatively short unnamed movements, each with its own unique character, unified aesthetically through various multi-layered minimalist polyrhythms interjected with motivic fragments in perpetual orbit.

Composer Wang Lu

Chicago Opera Theater’s (COT) Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer Program is a two-year development program that places an emphasis on building skills and connections for emerging opera composers in Chicago and the Midwest. This program offers a competitive living monthly stipend.

The Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer Residency aims to bridge the gap between general compositional skills taught in university music programs and the real-world observation and experience that help inform an operatic composer’s work. Launched in 2018, the program identifies skilled composers who have not yet had sufficient opportunities for writing opera and provides them with a stipend and a two-year comprehensive course of study.

Composer Wang Lu (left) and MusicNOW curator Missy Mazzoli speak to the audience about the world premiere of Wang Lu's "Code Switch" at the Harris Theater on Monday evening. (Camille Fine / Chicago Tribune)

The evening opened with the world premiere of Chicago composer Wang Lu’s fanfare “Code Switch” (2019), a MusicNOW commission. But this was not a fanfare by any conventional definition. For if we think of that idiom as clarion horns crisply articulating rousing phrases, “Code Switch” went in quite another direction. Scored for horn, two trumpets, trombone and percussion, the work was predicated on overlapping lines, bent pitches, blurred ensemble textures and an unmistakable sense of rhythmic freedom. This was a fanfare of joy and exuberance, and it was performed accordingly.

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. A starry array of ensembles, including the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, bring the music to rambunctious life. The flow of events is so rapid and so variegated that nothing settles into the groove of the familiar.

On Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, members of Yarn/Wire and the International Contemporary Ensemble gathered for a Composer Portraits concert devoted to works by Wang Lu. The program began with the title work from her recent album, “Urban Inventory.” That suite incorporates some prerecorded street scenes, captured by the composer while visiting Xi’an, the city in China where she was born.

The playing at Miller was sharp, particularly in the 2008 chamber work “Siren Song,” which includes passages of acidic squall, as well as pools of melodic reverie. Yet in other works, the players’ acute emphasis on more striated textures occasionally seemed to lose sight of a fine balance between rupture and reflection that can be heard in this composer’s music — as in the final movement of “Urban Inventory,” during which traces of a recording by the pop singer Yang Yuying can be heard.

“I find Wang Lu’s music delightfully eclectic and highly original,” says composer Mazzoli in an email. “Each piece feels like a collage-like dream with its own unique logic. … I wanted to open the 19/20 MusicNOW season with a fanfare by Wang Lu because I was curious as to what she would write for these particular instruments, and I wanted the CSO to celebrate the work of this very important artist.”

Illustration by Paige Vickers

“Urban Inventory,” an album released to wide acclaim last year by the feisty Brooklyn label New Focus Records, offers listeners a dizzying but delectable introduction to Wang Lu, a Chinese-born composer and pianist presently serving on the faculty of Brown University. The album features a fistful of admirable ensembles performing modernist works that incorporate both ancient folkloric evocations and thoroughly contemporary field recordings, fashioned with wide-open ears and penetrating wit. Those qualities will also be evident in a Composer Portrait concert at Miller Theatre on Feb. 21, in which two vital New York groups—International Contemporary Ensemble and Yarn/Wire—present a mix of new and recent pieces by Wang Lu, including a world première inspired by a visit to a textile factory near her birthplace.

Wang Lu, photo by Matt Zugale

Miller Theatre commissioned writer Lara Pellegrinelli to create this season’s Composer Portraits program notes, as well as a series of Q&As with Executive Director Melissa Smey. Here is the fourth installment, centering around our upcoming evening of music from composer Wang Lu.

The US-China Forum 2020: The Matter of Art is going to be hosted by the University of Chicago on February 6, 2020. The event will focus on the intersection, overlapping, and interaction of the US and China on the base of arts. The event is convened by the UChicago Global and UChicago Arts. The Smart Museum of Art is providing collaboration in this year’s forum.

Classical Music: Portrait of a Playful Composer
Feb 21; millertheatre.com.
In the composer Wang Lu’s 2015 chamber work “Urban Inventory,”chromatic smears of instrumental color accrue into a playful depiction of an afternoon in a Chinese city park. Her scores use interwoven gestures that simultaneously evoke tradition and modernity — one piece depicts the frenetic pace of Tinder while quoting Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” — and recall the tonal language of her native China, creating a rich polyphony of musical conversations.

“Urban Inventory,” recorded deftly on a 2018 album, is one highlight of a portrait concert that Columbia University’s Miller Theater is devoting to her music on Thursday, Feb. 21. Lu is herself a recent Columbia graduate, and the Miller concert will feature performances by the International Contemporary Ensemble and Yarn/Wire and the premiere of a new work titled."

Wang Lu, “Urban Inventory” and other works
Third Sound Ensemble, Holland Symfonia, Alarm Will Sound, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain (New Focus)”

"almost modern-jazz-like… very imaginative"

“eclectic”

“Wang Lu and her electronics grace "Her Latitude." What sounds like Tibetan Buddhist chant sets up the opening backdrop along with air-raid sirens and it goes from there as a kind of musical equivalent to a Koh biography. Ms. Lu responds at times improvisationally to Jennifer's violin. The entire piece has an aural, concrete and holistic logic that is beyond words, always vivid, while the elctronics combine "spiritual calm and catastrophic unrest," according to the liners. You can hear that, quite effectively so...”

"...This album reveals [Wang Lu's] strong personality and vivacious spirit, supported by very solid technique. It also reflects the young pianist and composer’s various sources of inspiration.

The disc opens with urban ambiances: Urban Inventory (2015), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, consists of five snapshots in which street recordings (pop songs, words, laughter, a most likely patriotic female chorus) are intermingled with airy, clear and colorful instrumental writing, energetically rendered by New York’s Third Sound Ensemble. The third piece, Gifts of Gab, divulges Wang Lu’s particular interest in the tonalities of the spoken voice, confirmed in Cross-Around (2010) and especially in Past Beyond (2012), in which a phoneme-free arc encounters the rawness of a brass- and cymbal-rich orchestration, clearly yet peripherally evoking Tibetan rituals. The astringency of this episode is well-suited to the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

The cries in Wailing (2009) echo childhood memories—a Chinese village in which young peasants alternately weep and, at weddings and funerals, play poorly tuned brass and folk instruments and percussion. Here, the melodic contour of an a priori non-musical sound is key, but also leans on the improvised jazz sounds of clarinet glissandi.

The subject of Cloud Intimacy (2016)—a virtual existence on social networks, an oversaturation of images and messages—could have yielded an anecdotal piece. Instead, Wang Lu pitches the International Contemporary Ensemble an ideal scenario in which to exercise its responsiveness. Frenzy, permanent switches, jingles and the invasion of notification tones build up an extremely coherent and controlled narrative. This is a particularly exhilarating anthology of scores and collaborative ensembles."

“It is a dizzying and mind manifesting experience”

Wang Lu’s After some remarks by CW on his work is pleasantly striking in its exploration of opposites. Earthy clarinet multiphonics open the piece accompanied by the ethereal texture of low clusters and resonant harmonics in the harp. The exploration of glissando returns in this track, and Wang Lu’s use of detuning perfectly balances familiarity and variety with goosebump-inducing effectiveness.

“reflective gem”

“After Some Remarks by Wang Lu, for bass clarinet and harp, draws inspiration from Christian Wolff’s approach to controlled and structured improvisation. Like other compositions on the album, Lu takes a deep dive into exploring and utilizing extended techniques of the two instruments, opening with throbbing multiphonics in the bass clarinet with resonant harmonics, plucks and glissandi from the harp interspersed. As the piece unfolds the clarinet begins playing short sustained tones while the harp continues to present material in less conventional playing techniques, all of which expands the overall timbral and color palette.”

“Wang Lu’s After some remarks by CW on his work (2018) for harp and clarinet blends ample open spaces, multiphonics from Katie Schoepflin’s clarinet, and harp harmonics in a sequence of sound-islands of uncanny, composite timbres.”

Still in her early 30s, Wang Lu is evolving a musical language which is underpinned by her Chinese roots and background, but seems more concerned with taking its cue from what she sees around her. It has been said of her that she sees music as integral to the fabric of life itself, where the past and present coexist, and where cultures, ages, and languages freely intermingle in a kind of cosmopolitan goldfish bowl. Her music is clearly a reflection of a society where ethnic and sociological differences are consciously blurred in an endeavour to create cultural integration...

The title composition with which Wang Lu's debut full length recording begins is in many respects representative of the sixty-seven-minute release. Teeming with life, the five-part evocation of an afternoon in a Chinese city park blends sounds of real-world elements, including pre-recorded conversations, with the playing of an instrumental ensemble. Much like the experience one would have in the park, the music is often turbulent, even at times chaotic and cacophonous, though an occasional moment of calm also arises to ease the impression of vertigo, and dizzying degrees of activity likewise permeate the other five settings on the composer's arresting collection. If Lu's music is anything, it's kaleidoscopic... Regardless of the differences from one piece to another, the six settings testify to the boldness of Lu's vision and serve as a collective argument on behalf of her vitality as a compositional voice.

whimsical, freewheeling… it was one of the finest works of new music I’ve heard in a while, and the highlight of a successful sophomore festival from Bard Music West.

...Finally, I’ve included albums by two young Chinese-born, American-based composers: Du Yun and Wang Lu. While some of their works include references to the musical traditions of their homeland, Sino-Western hybridization isn’t as much of an aesthetic concern for them as it was for an older generation of Chinese émigré composers like Tan Dun, Chen Yi, or Bright Sheng. Rather, Du and Wang engage with a contemporary, globalized culture, constructing digital-age collages that draw heavily on pop and electronica. Wang’s ensemble work Cloud Intimacy explores a far less abusive form of intimacy, though one marked by the cold impersonality of technology. Passionate themes from Tristan are rendered droopy and lethargic in Wang’s bastardized quotations—Wagner’s musical representations of unbridled love are constantly interrupted by samples of cell-phone text-message tones, as well as clever acoustic imitations of these cellular pings and chimes from members of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Composer and pianist Wang Lu grew up in China in a musical family with strong Chinese opera and folk music traditions. She teaches at Brown University and composes for Western and Chinese ensembles. ‘Urban Inventory’ offers five of her compositions, all composed between 2008 and 2016. It is her first full-length release. The album opens with the title piece, a work played by the Third Sound Ensemble. Ensembles like Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, perform other compositions. These are top ensembles that give lively and virtuosic interpretations of Lu’s compositions. These have a lot to offer. Lu has a playful and creative mind. She mixes influences of Chinese traditional and modern music with Western avant-garde. Makes good use and combinations of pre-recorded sounds with orchestra. For sure a strong voice. There is an attractive lightness in her complex compositions. And the arrangements are very colourful. Sparkling music!

This portrait recording features six of Lu's compositions performed by a starry array of ensembles including Third Sound, ICE, Alarm Will Sound and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Their involvement is a tribute to Lu's dazzling music, which shows a complete mastery of orchestration and dynamics as well as a polyglot style based on a broad field of influences. Listening is like being in the hands of a great storyteller as each piece pulls you through its narrative in a series of musical page turners. The vignettes of the title piece may be based on Lu's formative experiences in Beijing but her sonic translations are universal enough that any city dweller will feel a burst of recognition. Urban Inventory announces the arrival of an incredible talent whose gifts will likely only continue to grow.

Photo by Rob Davidson

"A-PPA-Aratus, the world premiere that concluded the evening, ditched the childhood memories, and with them the humor. According to the program note, the work is inspired by a massive textile factory and a collection of poetry written by workers, an ancient Greek poet, and teacher planning periods... The spare, solemn introduction was captivating enough, and early on the vibes led an almost-tonal passage of blithe serenity that wafted through, blissful and beautiful, on a passing cloud."

“evoke the delicate colors and harmonies of Chinese folk music. As the piece progressed, I especially liked the way melodic lines were played in block chords of thick, fuzzy, wonderfully diffuse sonorities.”