Bio
Sam Wu's music "abounds in delicate colours, wisps of sound and sylvan textures" (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.
Selected for the American Composers Orchestra's EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and First Prize at the Washington International Competition, Sam Wu also received Harvard's Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard's Palmer Dixon Prize.
Sam’s collaborations span five continents, notably with the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, and icarus Quartets, conductors Osmo Vänskä, Marin Alsop, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dina Gilbert, and Benjamin Northey, violinist Johan Dalene, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei.
Sam has been featured on the National Geographic Channel, Business Insider, Harvard Crimson, Sydney Morning Herald, Asahi Shimbun, People's Daily, CCTV, among others.
From Melbourne, Australia, Sam holds an AB in Music and East Asian Studies from Harvard University, a MM in Composition from The Juilliard School, and a DMA in Composition from Rice University's Shepherd School of Music. He is currently on faculty at Whitman College, as their Visiting Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition. Sam’s teachers include Tan Dun, Anthony Brandt, Pierre Jalbert, Chaya Czernowin, and Richard Beaudoin.
Artist Statement
The interconnectedness of our world is a major theme in my music. In an age where a night’s sleep is all it takes to travel halfway around the world, and where Bach and Mongolian throat singing can occupy adjacent YouTube tabs, I explore and seek inspiration in non-Western musical traditions, even as I write and perform works within the classical lineage. I am interested in bridging apparent differences between cultures and musicians, and in doing so, seeking the subcutaneous common ground that we share as human beings.
The globalization of culture makes it impossible for artists to exist in a vacuum. My recent pieces feature dialogues between instruments, and in extension, musical traditions, both foreign and familiar to me. In addition to orchestras, choruses, and chamber ensembles, I work with didgeridoo, shakuhachi, sho, pipa, erhu, yangqin / Chinese dulcimer virtuosi, as well as Mongolian throat singers. In doing so, I first highlight the differences among these instruments, before considering how I may interact with their cultural contexts.
Ultimately, I try to transcend the assumed identities of the instruments I write for, be it a cello, soprano singer, or morin khuur (Mongolian horse-head fiddle). By drawing on their rich pasts and distinct identities, I hope to synthesize a contemporary understanding of how we relate to one another in the ways we experience art. In geopolitics, borders appear absolute; in music, the blurring, or even the abolishment, of boundaries can be the most beautiful.