words and video projection by Carrie Marie Schneider
Jillian Krempasky, mezzo-soprano
Mary Grace Johnson, Nanki Chugh, violins
Molly Wise, viola
Chris Ellis, cello

"I love the water
The rainwater has turned red. 
Red water red water rain.
Be submitted by its lightning storms. 
Float in its floodwaters.
I need you breeze, open sky.
All that is beyond me 
out there in space
The birthing and burning out of stars."

While her followers believe that she has the power to control the winds and rain, the Weather Shaman knows otherwise. She is merely a conduit for forces beyond her comprehension––forces that both nurture and endanger her community; an endless oscillation between divine kindness and cruelty.

developed through Musiqa's Emerging Composer Fellowship

Weather Model (2023): for mezzo-soprano and string quartet

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.