This piece is commissioned by Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra, presented by National Arts Council Singapore "Arts in Your Neighbourhood March 2021".

The piece is inspired by 李寧強老師's text and pictures taken in Pasir Ris, Singapore.

Orchestra - Stand at the Corner 站在・角落

FIRST PRIZE at The First „Isidora Žebeljan“ International Competition for Young Composers

I. Network Architecture 
II. Garden City 
III. Airport express 
IV. Night Skyline 
V. Interchange Station 

Musicians: 
Mirjana Nešković, violin I 
Jelena Dimitrijević, violin II 
Ivana Uzelac, viola 
Christoph Jahn, cello 
Vuk Božilović, piano

Sam Wu - Mass Transit, for piano quintet

Thomas Feng, piano
recorded live, April 27, 2023
Barnes Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Aria is a re-imagination of a Baroque adagio movement. I aim to capture a sense of suspended / eternal time that is at once past, present, and future – time (or its lack thereof) can be another “place” listeners are transported to through music. – Sam Wu (@sam-wu-5)

Sam Wu – Aria (LIVE; premiere)

Sam Wu Hydrosphere

Commissioned by the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, in celebration of their 60th anniversary

Yangqin Solo: Reylon Yount
Cellos: Audrey Chen, Sophie Applbaum, John Lee, Ryan Song, Brian Zhao

I. Prelude (0:00)
II. Aria (4:26)
III. Rondo (7:51)

The yangqin, or Chinese dulcimer, has a fascinating history. The Chinese name translates as "foreign instrument;" indeed the yangqin is traced back to Persia (modern day Iran), from where it spread both Westward, to Hungary, and Eastward, via the Indian Ocean and over the Silk Road, to China. The yangqin's rich past inspires me to explore the sights, sounds, and smells of travel, layered within the dulcimer's timbre. I am particularly interested in the confluence of pitch choice and tone color; different combinations of the former create substantially different sound worlds within the same instrument.

Intent on focusing on the yangqin, I support it with a cello ensemble, and then present the materials in a traditional three-movement concerto form. While a combination of Chinese and Western musical traditions inspire the musical raw material, the piece is less "about" either than a space where multitudes and contradictions can coexist.

Concerto (2016): for yangqin and cello ensemble

3rd Place Winner in the 2nd International Competition of Harbin
Finalist in the 2019 Zemlinsky Prize
Finalist in the 2019 Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra Call for Scores
Honorable Mention in the 2019-2020 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute

Particulate matter is defined by the EPA as a potentially hazardous mixture of solid and liquid particles in the air. Growing up in an increasingly polluted metropolitan center, I found myself drawn to this image of a million airborne atomies whirling past each other, unseen yet harmful. They seemed a perfect metaphor for the chaotic soup of thoughts, reminders, distractions, and non sequiturs that flitted through my mind day in and day out. This perpetual state of mental white noise gradually became the norm as I began to learn how to focus on the tasks appointed me.

Mind Over (Particulate) Matter is about this search for focus in a world of mental particulate matter. The piece opens by bit by bit introducing the notes that make up the primary theme, scattered in near pointillistic fashion across the orchestra. Occasionally, brief moments of clarity pierce through the texture, receding into grand washes of seemingly uncoordinated harmonies. Once the theme receives its first full statement, the music takes off, struggling to recapture the theme in its complete glory. Just as it seems to find focus, the orchestra overreaches and collapses into a hazy purgatory of white noise and harmonics. Slowly, the earlier uncoordinated harmonies begin to appear, growing in intent and intensity as the music gradually builds to a massive return of the primary theme. Exploding in a statement of orgiastic grandiosity, the theme sinuously spins through several different keys and finally rushes to a dramatic close, victorious. A final epilogue recalls the pointillistic opening, this time more rhythmically coordinated, slowly subtracting notes from the main theme until the spare, Shostakovichian ending.

Random Stuff

Mind Over (Particulate) Matter, for symphony orchestra

Composed by Tiffany Cuaresma at the 2018 Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Composition Program.

Reading by the BUTI Young Artists Orchestra.

Voyage to Proxima Centauri

Voyage To Proxima Centauri (Full Symphony Orchestra)

Gabe Young, oboe
Commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival and School
marcoadrianramos.com

Chillón o Tragicomedia (2019)

Performed by China National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra, conducted by Lü Jia on October 6, 2019 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing.

Heaven and Earth revive,
and falls the rain upon all.
Breathing the spirit of this world,
grateful.
​
天地复苏
雨落咸安
呼吸万物的气息
感恩

Spiritus 气息 (orchestra)

Completed 2020

Escaping Continuum shares its title with a painting by my friend and collaborator, Linda Cichan, who created her work in the aftermath of a personal tragedy. The painting’s vivid brushstrokes, luscious contrasts, and sincerity of expression were deeply moving to me. I saw in the work a mercurial struggle characterized by darkly obsessive cycles and impassioned, explosive gestures - a piece as likely to lose itself in relentless spirals as it was to lash violently outward. I also saw, however, a palpable hope in her painting. Amidst its gradation from murkiness to light, the piece’s primary gesture appeared to be an act of hurling away a mass of tortile darkness.

I sought to pit two kinds of music against one another in my piece: the first darkly romantic and melodic, the second machinelike and repetitive. The two ideas attack one another throughout, cannibalizing each other from the inside out - yet in doing so, they find unlikely ways to coexist. Despite being cast in a broad arch form, the piece seeks to move from a place of turbulent anger and
inwardness toward an ultimately cathartic place of resolution.

Escaping Continuum, for symphony 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.

Concerto (2016): for yangqin and cello ensemble

Sam Wu

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