Tianyu Liu, Russell Iceberg, violins
Aditi Prakash, viola
Claire Kim, cello
Stephen Joven-Lee, piano

i. network architecture [0:00]
ii. garden city [2:26]
iii. airport express [4:56]
iv. night skyline [7:11]
v. interchange station [10:30]

"Mass Transit" is inspired by Shanghai’s metro system— an elaborate network of lines, trains, tunnels / overpasses, and interchange stations. Each movement explores a facet of the subway network: the elegance of optimizing a system map, the variety of connections available in the city (gardens, airports, skyscrapers), and the complexities of multi-layered interchanges, where up to four lines converge. The piece as a whole is also envisioned as a musical “voyage;” the train stops briefly to take in the sights, before resuming its journey onward.

Mass Transit (2022): for piano quintet

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.