Concert 2: Sunday, May 9, 2026 | 7:00 pm

Thelma Schnitzer Hall

Program Notes

For Tashi (2021)

Jiayue Cecilia Wu

For Tashi is a synesthetic audiovisual work by two female artists (the composer and the visual artist) that traces the physical and emotional journey of miscarriage—an experience that remains deeply personal, often unspoken, and widely overlooked. Created in loving memory of the composer’s miscarried baby, Tashi, the piece transforms private grief into a shared, communal encounter.

Through a fusion of electronic sound, Tibetan soundscapes, human voice, and the ancient Asian instrument Konghou (箜篌), the work unfolds as an evolving sonic narrative of loss, rupture, and gradual acceptance. Using Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and audio spectrum analysis, the piece dynamically visualizes sound in real time: shapes and movements respond directly to frequency, timbre, and energy, creating a synesthetic interplay between hearing and sight.

Globally, 10–20% of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, often accompanied by grief comparable in intensity to other major losses, and sometimes leading to anxiety, depression, or PTSD. Yet this experience is frequently silenced, leaving many women to grieve in isolation. For Tashi seeks to break this silence by offering a space for recognition, resonance, and collective witnessing.

Balancing technological precision with emotional depth, the work invites audiences into a multisensory field of vulnerability, memory, and healing. It honors the enduring presence of loss while opening pathways toward connection, empathy, and embodied understanding.

Jiayue Cecilia Wu

Originally from Beijing, Dr. Jiayue Cecilia Wu (武小慈) is a scholar, educator, composer, vocalist, engineer, and meditation facilitator whose work explores the intersection of music technology, healing, and social impact. She holds a B.Sc. in Design and Engineering and spent over a decade in the music industry as a producer and consultant with EMI Records, Universal Music Group, and Apple. She later pursued academic research, earning an M.A. in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Wu’s work has been presented internationally across Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Her contributions include 27 peer-reviewed journal articles, three book chapters, two books, and over 100 multimedia compositions, exhibitions, and installations. She has received numerous honors, including an Audio Engineering Society Research Fellowship, a California State Assembly award for cultural contribution, Stanford’s Young Alumni Arts Grant, the inaugural Eileen M. Hayes Award, and the NAMM Foundation NextGen Award. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions such as the National Museum of China and the Denver Art Museum, which holds Virtual Mandala in its permanent collection. A U.S. National Academy of Sciences Sackler Fellow, Dr. Wu is a tenured Professor and Graduate Program Director at the University of Colorado Denver. She also serves as President of ATMI and holds leadership roles with AES and ICMA. Through her Embodied Sonic Meditation practice, she leads workshops worldwide, integrating sound, mindfulness, and embodied awareness.

The Archival Memory in Skin (2025)

Joan Tan Jing Wen

I am a conflux of cultures—shaped by environments and circumstances I do not fully understand. A living juxtaposition of beliefs, a contradiction of behaviors. An oxymoron. I’m learning to hold all of these parts together.

The piece is built from sound fragments that remind me of childhood: Hokkien soap operas and theatre shows my grandma watched, the voices of children at the playground where I once used to play, the creaking of old treadle sewing machines, the static of ageing radios, the ticking of analogue clocks, the English news on TV at 8pm. These unlikely combinations of sounds flitter between one another, at times dissonant, jarring even, but always coexisting.

When the physical world inevitably fades, I hope their voices will still remain.

I dedicate this piece to my grandma, whom I affectionately call Ahma.

Joan Tan Jing Wen

Joan Tan Jing Wen is a Singaporean composer currently based in Cologne, Germany. She graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and is currently doing a Masters in Instrumental Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln.

Coming from a world where much sensory input is tuned out for the sake of everyday functioning, Joan seeks to create sonic experiences that encourage focused listening, guiding listeners through crafted, auditory experiences that are reflections and responses to one’s environments. She is fascinated by how attention constructs and distorts one’s perceptions and shapes one’s experiences. She believes that every sound triggers a response, engages one’s imagination and evokes emotions through associations. Recognizable sound sources are often distorted in her works, leaving behind crafted gestures and faint memories of what they once were. The fallibility of memories is an important aspect in her compositions. Incessant repetition of materials is a form of encoding, while the shifting of attention hides and reveals different perspectives that shape the musical journey.

Joan hopes to travel widely, to experience what life could be beyond her society.

A Little Past 7 o’clock on September 2nd (2021)

AJ Layague, Yumiko Morita, Kalean Ung

A Little Past 7 o’clock on September 2nd is an animated sound collage opera centered on the first-hand reports from the survivors of the 1885 massacre of Chinese immigrant miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Based on five melodic themes by Yumiko Morita, the erhu, the piano, the percussion, and the voices—sung and spoken—outline, tell, and re-tell a history wrenched in terror, a harrowing, brutal, and unpunished episode which should haunt the archives of Americana.

Using a libretto by AJ Layague of words extracted and distilled and forged from firsthand accounts of survivors, and a score composed by Ung and Layague, and improvised vocals and spoken word by Kalean Ung, the work confronts and redresses an ahistoric legacy, re-imagining and re-centering the narratives and poetics of Asian American immigrant voices.

***

1885. On the evening of September 1st bells rang to signal a meeting. It was decided. On the morning of September 2nd, just after 7 o’clock, 10 white men ran into Coal Pit No. 6. Lor Sun Kit was the first person shot. He fell to the ground. Still the Chinese workers did not flee, did not comprehend the terror upon them. Perpetrated by their white neighbors. Neighbors and coworkers and teachers. Familiar and—until that day—thought of as friendly, ordinary presences.

The survivors provided an almost hour-by-hour accounting of the massacre: short bursts and streams at first, then abating. Then escalating…

AJ Layague

AJ Layague (she/he) is an award-winning Filipino American playwright, composer, and poet with degrees in music composition from Stanford University (BA), CalArts (MFA), and UC San Diego (PhD). She was a 2024 MAP Fund grantee for her work, A Good Boy, focused on prison reform and restorative justice. The work also was given a Critical Issues Award from the Humanities for the Public Good and was a two-time semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference. She was a 2023 Puffin Foundation Artist and premiered new work (in rhyming verse) at the 2025 Red Bull Theater Short New Play Festival and the 2023 PanAsian NuWorks Festival in NYC.

She has received awards from Synecdoche Works, Digital Development Project, Larking House Theatre Intensive, Midnight Sun Theatre Serial Bowl, and finalist status for the Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting. Her work has been developed by The Skeleton Rep (NY), Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA and Circle X Theatre (Los Angeles), and the Wayward Artist.

Her monologues and plays have been published by Sordelet Ink (Red Bull Anthology, upcoming), Smith & Kraus (Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2024), and Dramallama, and her sijo (traditional Korean poetry) and tanaga (indigenous Filipino poetry) have received multiple awards from the Sejong Cultural Society and Writers Digest.

Her single-author musical Lucy Larcom’s Queer New England Girlhood (an O’Neill semifinalist) won the 2024 Parlando New Musical Project and had a staged reading in Boulder in August 2024. Additionally, she has composed for the concert hall, film and video games.

Yumiko Morita

Yumiko Morita (she/her) was born in Tokyo, Japan, where she received early education as a pianist. She earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition and a Graduate Diploma from Toho Gakuen School of Music, Tokyo. She moved to the U.S. in 1995 and earned a Master of Music degree in composition, with academic honors and distinction in performance, from New England Conservatory, Boston, and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego.

She has composed, performed, and taught at the Boston Symphony’s Project STEP, the Peabody Community School, the American Composers Forum, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego. She has been teaching at Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music Chapman University in Orange, California since 2006.

Her composition style reflects syncretism of Asian and Western cultures. She wrote pieces for intersections of Japanese traditional instruments and Wester instruments. Resonance for Koto and Piano, and Tsure Zure for 13 Strings Koto Solo, have been performed repeatedly in Japan, Thailand, and Germany.

Morita has won many international awards, including a bronze medal from the Global Music Awards (USA), finalist recognition from the ALEA III International Competition (Boston), the PatsyLu Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (New York), a CAP Award from New Music USA, the Round Top Festival (Texas), the Sonus Imaginorem Composition Contest (San Francisco), the Piano Duo Competition (Japan), and the Tom Nee Commission from the La Jolla Symphony (San Diego). Her works are widely performed in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Kalean Ung

Kalean Ung (she/her) is an award-winning, multidisciplinary theater artist whose work spans Shakespeare, experimental performance, contemporary opera, and playwriting. She has performed at venues including the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Disney Hall, REDCAT, The Getty Villa, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Boston Court Pasadena, and The Hammer Museum, collaborating with companies such as Critical Mass Performance Group, The Industry, LA Philharmonic, Rogue Artists Ensemble, Independent Shakespeare Company, and Four Larks Theatre (Ovation Award winner).

A company member of Independent Shakespeare Co., she regularly performs in the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival and has received two Stage Raw Acting Awards for Lady Macbeth and Mephistopheles. As a vocalist, she premiered work in KHMERASPORA with the Long Beach Symphony and debuted her original piece The Rebirth of Apsara in San Francisco. She is currently commissioned by Merrimack Repertory Theatre to write a new full-length play.

Her voice acting includes the lead in the English-language version of Funan, as well as appearances in Cinema Toast (Showtime) and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. She also narrated When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him.

Her solo play Letters From Home received its East Coast premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre and was nominated for four Elliot Norton Awards, including Outstanding Solo Play. The work has toured widely and received support from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, CalArts, and the MAP Fund. Kalean is a California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow and teaches at California Institute of the Arts.

Bubble Universe (2026)

Shannon Chen

This is an Auditory Hallucination-style Electronic Music piece, primarily constructed from two sound elements: the “opening of a bottle cap” and the “pouring of water” from sparkling water. At the moment the bottle opens, a universe is born. The fizz of the bubbles is amplified infinitely—each bursting bubble becomes a newborn star, and the flowing water transforms into swirling nebulae. Within this miniature cosmos built from sound, every pop is an act of creation, and every ripple is a galaxy.

Shannon Chen

I am a sophomore at the Wuhan Conservatory of Music in China, majoring in Music Recording and Sound Directing. I am passionate about my field, and I am honored that my works can be heard by others. I hope that the works of everyone who creates with heart can be heard by the world.

The High Priestess (2021)

Leanna Keith

The High Priestess is a collaborative work between musician/composer Leanna Keith and visual artist Jenne Hsien Patrick. Diving into the tarot deck as a source of inspiration for improvised music, the card was drawn and then spontaneously composed into sound via flutes, voice, and electronic processing. As Chinese-American artists, Jenne and Leanna discussed what a contemporary priestess of the Mid-Autumn Festival would look like, and how moon worship is centered so much in their culture both historically and in quotidian life, which became the basis of the stop-motion film.

Leanna Keith

A freelance flutist, artist, improviser, and composer from Seattle, Leanna Keith (she/they) delights in creating sound experiences that make audiences laugh, cry, and say: “I didn’t know the flute could do that!” Their works focus on timbre-shifting, the mixed-race experience, queer theory, and the breaking of genre boundaries. Leanna is obsessed with conduction, butoh, taiko drumming, circus arts, and the limitless capacity of humanism in sound creation. She is dedicated to playing music by living composers, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. Leanna is currently pursuing their doctorate in contemporary flute performance at the University of California San Diego.

I Saw a Butterfly Nestled in a Bell (2023)

Yifeng Yvonne Yuan

I Saw a Butterfly Nestled in A Bell is a stereo acousmatic work inspired by an experience of ringing a giant bell at a Buddhist temple. The foundation of the work is guided by the question: “Could there be creatures residing inside the bell, and did I just wake them up by ringing the bell?” The majority of the sound materials are recorded sounds that have been chopped up, granulated, reshaped, and transformed into a kaleidoscopic imaginary soundscape.

Yifeng Yvonne Yuan

Yifeng Yvonne Yuan is a composer, sound artist, and performer whose interdisciplinary research operates at the intersection of sound, text, and performance studies. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition and a master’s student in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her work frequently explores the fragility of human emotions and visceral, pre-linguistic expressions. Yuan’s creative process often translates mundane or natural phenomena into musical structures: she converts the frequency of losing her socks into pitch frequencies and weighs raindrops to determine the physical weight of her noteheads. Drawing inspiration from the ritualistic practices of early humans and the organic textures of the natural world, she composes for orchestra, chamber ensembles, plants, people, and space.

So far, yet so close (2025)

Mengmeng Wang

There is a presence that cannot be seen or touched, yet it is always there, being surrounding us. It can be a sound, or a thought, an emotion, a memory—perhaps even ourselves.

When we are no longer bound by the body and identity, when we exist only as a conscious being, what are we? When we believe we have disappeared, could it be that we have already become someone else’s dream, the wind outside their window, or a fragment of another’s memory? If I become a part of your dream, am I still myself? We exist in the world, but perhaps we can never truly be heard. In a fleeting moment, our eyes meet, our souls resonate on the same frequency, and we understand each other; but the next moment, we drift apart, lost in time and daily life, at the tip of it all. So perhaps what we call “understanding” is merely us hearing ourselves in a fold of space, coming to peace with who we are.

Our emotions, thoughts, love, and loneliness may be known to no one, yet they are always vibrating. So, if something is unspoken or unheard, does that mean it never existed? What we call “silence” or “absence” may simply be the limitation of our perception.

Mengmeng Wang

Mengmeng Wang, DMA, is a composer whose works have had her pieces performed all around the world at events including ACO Earshot Reading, the MATA festival, the SEAMUS 2021 Digital Conference, the concert of Chicago Composer’s Consortium: Experimental Sound Studio, June in Buffalo, the Atlantic Center of the Arts, Ithaca NY, Glasgow UK, and the Beijing Modern Music Festival. She was chosen as a residency composer by MacDowell, Ragdale Foundation and Atlantic Center of the Arts. Her music was awarded the 2022 Petrichor International Music Competition the Third Prize and an Honor Award at the 1st eARTS Digital Audio Competition etc. She has had the privilege of working with a number of ensembles and performers, including Naples Philharmonic, Shanghai Opera Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble.

Mangluo Fantasia—
A Requiem for the Dulong Poet Li Lingao (2025)

Zilu (Shiro) Chen

Part I of the two-part suite Dulong Fantasia, Mangluo Fantasia is developed from the long-term documentary project Dulong as Metaphor (Directed by Lu Dai), which explores the cultural and spiritual landscape of the Dulong people in the Dulong River valley on the border of China and Myanmar. This piece is conceived as a requiem for Li Lingao, a Dulong poet whose life and death have become a focal point for reflections on identity, memory, and cultural transformation.

The sound world of Mangluo Fantasia is constructed entirely from three mangluo gongs, one of the few instruments still actively played in contemporary Dulong life, and their electronic transformations. Using spectral processing, FM synthesis, and environmental recordings, the mangluo gongs’ sounds are expanded into a continuous, evolving sonic body that moves between the physical and the imagined realms.

The structure of Mangluo Fantasia loosely reflects the poet’s belief in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition regarding the journey of the soul after death: the moment of death, the emergence of visions, and the unstable process of becoming. The mangluo’s resonance serves as a sonic metaphor for impermanence, with its sound continuously shifting yet inevitably fading.

The work unfolds in a continuous 350-second arc, reaching its conclusion at the threshold of rebirth without a resolution. By ending in this suspended state, Mangluo Fantasia remains between disappearance and continuation, leaving the question of what emerges next to its counterpart, Part II: The Creation.

Zilu (Shiro) Chen

Zilu (Shiro) Chen is a Chinese composer and sound artist working across electroacoustic music, film, and interactive media. Her practice explores how technology can extend and transform culturally grounded sound materials, with a focus on memory, perception, and sonic identity.

She holds a Master of Music in Composition for Film and Multimedia from New York University and previously worked as an Audio Programmer at NetEase Games, where she developed technical approaches to sound within large-scale production environments. She is also the founder of Shiro Sound Lab, an independent studio exploring new forms at the intersection of music, technology, and game design.

Chen is currently the composer and sound engineer of the feature-length documentary Dulong as Metaphor, directed by Lu Dai. Based on long-term fieldwork in the Dulong River valley on the China–Myanmar border, her recent work integrates field recordings, spectral processes, and electronic systems to reimagine traditional sound practices. Mangluo Fantasia, presented here, emerges from this ongoing project.

Vice City (2023)

Danni Zhao

Rooted in a cyberpunk aesthetic, Vice City constructs a sonic landscape where futuristic technology collides with human civilization. Inspired by the “high-tech, low-life” ethos, the work imagines a transformative space in which post-apocalyptic ruins coexist with digital rebirth, balancing cold machinery with organic warmth.

The piece uses Bulgarian vocal choir as a metaphor for ancestral memory, deconstructing and reconstructing the voice through AI-assisted processing. Through formant shifting, intelligent separation, modular synthesis, glitch rhythms, and AI-evolved industrial textures, the human voice retains its primal physicality while acquiring a mechanized “digital breath.” This cyborgized vocal presence becomes both fragile and forceful, moving between heritage, mutation, and technological embodiment.

In its spatial and timbral design, the work seeks an acoustic tension between apocalypse and rebirth. By combining technological precision with emotional resonance, Vice City reflects on the transformation of the female voice within contemporary electroacoustic music.

Danni Zhao

Danni Zhao is a composer and electronic music artist, currently a first-year graduate student at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, China, under the tutelage of Professor Li Xiaobing. She was admitted to the CCOM Electronic Music Composition program in 2021 with the highest professional ranking and completed her undergraduate studies under the guidance of Professor Guan Peng, Professor Qian Qi, and Teacher Dai Bo. In 2024, she received the National Scholarship and was granted Postgraduate Recommendation due to her academic standing. Her works have been featured or selected by platforms including the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Boston and Hamburg, the CCF China Conference on Computational Art, and the Hangzhou International Electronic Music Festival. Her awards include the Absolute First Prize at the 34th International Music Competition “Città di Barletta,” First Prize at the 10th Jean Sibelius International Composition Competition, First Prize at the 15th Chinese Universities Computer Design Competition, Second Prize at IEMC 2022, Third Prize at the 2025 Hangzhou International Electronic Music Composition Competition, and the Excellence Award at SOMI 2023.

Fluorescence (2026)

Akiko USHIJIMA

Fluorescence refers to the phenomenon of fluorescence.

This phenomenon was first observed in the mineral fluorite.

The texture of the mineral and the way the light shifts while emitting a variety of colors resonate with the texture of the sound in this piece and its own shifting nature.

Akiko USHIJIMA

Though trained as a composer, Akiko’s artistic interest is in expanding the boundaries of music: her recent works are experiments in integrating visual and performative elements with music. After obtaining her first master’s degree from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, she has completed the master’s program in composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She has studied composition under Peter Adriaansz, Yannis Kyriakides, Gilius van Bergeijk and Guus Janssen. Her pieces have been performed in many music festival such as November Music festival (the Netherlands), ArsMusica festival (Belgium), Recorder festival (U.K.),Bang on a Can marathon concert (USA), Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art (USA), the Born creative Festival (Tokyo, Japan) and Germany, Austria, Russia by such artists as Gerard Bouwhuis , Susanna Borsch, Bang on a Can ensemble and Asko Schoenberg ensemble. Her work Instan’s Stillation for recorder and electronics has been featured on Dutch radio, and a CD containing the work (Susie, tell me a Story!) is available on the Dutch label Karnatic Lab Records. The work will also be featured on the UK radio programme Resonance Extra in 2020. Distorted Melody was broadcasted on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s radio show RADIO SAKAMOTO in July 2020. Her works have won distinctions at, among other places, the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) 2013, The JFC (Japan Federation of Composers) Composers Awards 2011, and the Internal Music Prize for Excellence in Composition 2011.

Ascension (2026)

Wenting Wang

The track Ascension is grounded in diverse electronic timbres. It builds its emotional framework with steadily ascending and progressive melodies, forging a highly groovy and immersive rhythm through layered arrangements of electronic synthesizers. Challenging the stereotype that “only soothing music can heal,” this piece interprets an energizing form of healing power via fervent and dynamic electronic dance music.

Wenting Wang

I am Wenting Wang from China. As an electronic music creator, I specialize in constructing musical emotions with ascending and progressive melodies and shaping immersive grooves through layered synthesizer designs. I persist in breaking conventional creative thinking, interpreting powerful auditory experiences with high-energy and vibrant musical expressions.

ATMAN (2024)

Moyao DENG

Atman is a boundary-pushing audio-visual composition that blurs the line between sound and sight. Powered by “sound visualization” technology, its Dolby Atmos mix and real-time Touch Designer visuals create an immersive, synesthetic experience.

Named for the Sanskrit concept of the eternal, transcendent soul, the piece traces a journey of inner liberation. The opening layers sampled Sanskrit chants, wooden fish, the sound of rubbing walnuts and breath into a vast, empty soundscape, embodying Buddhist “anātman” (non-self). This gives way to turbulent rhythms and abstract textures, mirroring the restlessness of the material world, before resolving into a state of serene transcendence.

A luminous digital Buddhist statue anchors the visuals, its form shifting in response to sound—an echo of the soul’s journey from chaos to awakening.

Moyao DENG

A cross-disciplinary artist blending music and visual arts, holding a PhD in Electronic Music Composition from the Central Conservatory of Music’s Music AI Department. Her works have won top honors, including the Creative Media Award at the Danny International Electronic Music Competition and prizes at the Hangzhou International Electronic Music Festival.

With rich production experience, she served as music editor for the CCTV Children’s Day Gala and composed for Huawei commercials and films. Rooted in cutting-edge tech, her creations merge electronic innovation with artistic intuition, offering audiences a unique multisensory journey at this festival.