Premiered by Jeffrey Milarsky conducting the Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall, April 3rd 2017.


In this moment, all is a flower.

Look at the wide sky on the sea. In that blue, we cannot see the far-off flame. See the blossoms drifting under the sunrise in rain. In that red, waves take them to the unknown.

In this moment, all is a flower.

DUST 塵埃 (orchestra)

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 shēng 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 Wu holds degrees from Harvard University, The Juilliard School, and 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.

Composer and Arranger.
From the Great Boot State (Louisiana).

Composer Yun LI’s work combines her years of research on traditional music within a highly expressionistic and inventive musical language. Elements from experimental music and earlier sources are woven together and transformed through her own personal experiences to create impactful listening spaces.

Yun’s works include pieces for various settings and instrumentations, with recent commissions from and performances by artistic groups such as Ensemble Con Tempo Beijing, Tianjin Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Academia China, Guangxi Symphony Orchestra, China National Traditional Orchestra, Cincinnati Soundbox, China-ASEAN Contemporary Ensemble, suona virtuoso Yazhi Guo, etc. LI was previously Composer-in-Residence of China-ASEAN Contemporary Ensemble, and  has been selected as an active participant in various workshops, including the Beijing Science Foundation Project “Research on Contemporary Chinese Opera” (2018), the Shanghai International Composition Workshop (2019), and the Seal Bay Music Festival in Maine (2023). She was an orchestral prizewinner of the 27th Autumn in Chengdu International Music Season (2021), and the prize winner in the instrumental music category of the Fourth Annual Gansu Yellow Bell Music Prize (2023). Several of her musical pieces, arrangements and academic essays have been published in core journals in the field, as well as included in college textbooks across China.

Yun LI graduated with her Bachelor of Music from the China Conservatory of Music in 2018, and was directly accepted to pursue her Master's degree on full scholarship there in the same year, continuing her studies with composer Gao Weijie. She is a current DMA candidate in composition at the University of Missouri Kansas City, where she is advised by Chen Yi and Zhou Long.

DUST 塵埃 (orchestra)

chen yıhan 陳逸涵