Vivian Fung has emerged as one of the foremost composers of her generation. Her music was recently described by the San José Mercury News as “enchanting . . . . [H]er music . . . summons images of dusk and reaches for hidden places and states of mind.” Fung’s Pizzicato has been part of the Ying Quartet’s repertoire for the past two seasons and has been described by the New York Times as “an evocative work . . . the most memorable part of the ensemble’s concert.”
Highlights of Fung’s recent performances include a standing-ovation premiere of her String Quartet No. 2 commissioned by the Shanghai Quartet for their 25th anniversary season; and a premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York of Chant performed by Margaret Leng Tan featuring Tan’s voice as well as her prepared piano performance.
Fung’s music has been commercially released on the Telarc, Çedille, and Signpost labels. She has built up an impressive body of compositions commissioned and performed by such ensembles as the Seattle Symphony, San José Chamber Orchestra, Vancouver New Music, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, New England Philharmonic, American String Quartet, Avalon String Quartet, Music From China, and American Opera Projects, to name a few. Fung has also been composer-in-residence of the Music in the Loft chamber music series in Chicago, the San José Chamber Orchestra, Music Teachers’ Association of California, the Billings Symphony, and most recently at the New York Summer Music Festival in upstate NY; she has also completed residencies at the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Banff arts colonies as well as two residences at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, one held in Florida and the other in Tuscany, Italy. She has received numerous awards from ASCAP, BMI, American Music Center, American Composers’ Forum, Meet the Composer, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Fung was born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1975 and began her composition studies with Canadian composer Violet Archer. Other early influences on Fung’s music included her mentors David Diamond, Narcis Bonet, and Robert Beaser, all of whom gave her a strong sense of craft and discipline. Since earning her doctorate from The Juilliard School in 2002, Fung has increasingly embraced non-Classical influences, including jazz and non-Western sources such as folksongs from the minority regions of China and Indonesian gamelan music. Fung traveled to Bali, Indonesia for two months in the summer of 2004 as part of the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange Program, sponsored by the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance. She traveled to Bali a second time this past July to participate in an intensive study of gamelan with the owned gamelan group Cudamani. Her music has also been showcased in Asia by the American String Quartet in Beijing during the summer of 2004.
Fung’s upcoming events include the premiere of a new piano concerto for the Metropolis Ensemble and pianist Jenny Lin, to be premiered at Le Poisson Rouge in New York this coming November 2009; a residency at Truman State University that culminates in the premiere of a newly commissioned work for clarinet choir entitled The Shaman Speaks; and a series of new choral works to be premiered by the Suwon Civic Chorale in Korea this coming spring 2010. Cedille Records will release a new CD with Fung’s Billy Collins Suite this coming fall.
She is on faculty at The Juilliard School and is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
