Congratulations to Dongke Tu, conductor and musicologist, and a current PhD student in Critical Music Studies at our department, will be conducting and directing the world premiere of a rising Chinese-American composer, Austin X. Huang at the world-renowned Benaroya Hall, which is home to Seattle Symphony (official link of the concert: Reborn: The Audible US-China | Seattle Symphony). The Benaroya Hall has officially pinned Dongke’s concert to the “Featured Event” section on its website’s main page. This concert has been recognized as one of Seattle’s most expected music events in the year of 2023.
The premiere features Austin Huang’s four recent orchestral works: Symphonic Poem “Qinqiang Crossing Time”, Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 2. The Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 2 will be performed under the baton of Dongke Tu. Besides Dongke, there will be a number of other Stony Brook musicians joining the orchestra as well – Keenan Zach (contrabass), Fangyi Zheng (trumpet), Amber Dong (flute), Yifan Shao (solo pianist). The concert will also feature Yuan Fang, one of the most renowned Chinese violinists, and who was the founder of the orchestral department of the China Conservatory of Music.
Below is the introductory note for the concert (from Benaroya Hall’s website):
“The four orchestral works by Austin Huang act as a guide to introducing a new voice to contemporary Chinese-American symphonic fusion. They resonate with the global shifting of essential boundaries of the US-China lifescapes that emerged at the time of shared trauma during the three-year Covid pandemic. These boundaries, both tangible and intangible, shift in a way that challenges and restructures divisions – between the West and the East, life and nonlife, culture and nature, land and sound, discord and concord, actual and virtual, topology and ecology. The composer’s experimental path attunes to this labyrinth from a historical and philosophical perspective in which the Three Chinese Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) harmonize as one, and from the traces of his own intercontinental life. From Seattle Grunge, Qinqiang Opera (秦腔) to the Tibetan Tongqin (西藏铜钦), the composer extends the post-structural mind that reunites the cosmic, the sonic, and the humanistic, unpacking the various threads of audible humanity as they stretch from the prosaic to the extraordinary.”