Byron Au Yong

BIOGRAPHY
Collaborative composer Byron Au Yong (歐陽良仁) combines classical music, Chinese folk music, and American musical theatre with a penchant for the avant-garde. His interdisciplinary projects, scored for voices with Asian, European, and handmade instruments have been performed in concert halls, festivals, museums, and site-specific locations around the world.

Examples include Tzu Lho: Simmering Songs performed by the Stanford Chorale, Surrender: A T’ai Qi Cantata, for 24 moving voices commissioned by The Esoterics, YIJU: Songs of Dislocation an audio/video installation developed at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, and Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas performed in 64 waterways throughout the Pacific Northwest.

International projects include Salt Lips Touching premiered outside a Confucian Temple at the Jeonju Sanjo Festival in South Korea, Edge performed at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg in Germany, and Forbidden Circles performed at the Fukuoka Gendai Hogaku Festival and International House of Japan.

In addition, Au Yong has composed music for film and television including The Moment of Falling for Azbri Productions and Precious Children for PBS.

Au Yong has worked with the top taiko ensembles in North America including On Ensemble, Portland Taiko, and TAIKOPROJECT. In addition, he curated the exhibition A Bridge Home: Music in the Lives of Asian Pacific Americans for the Wing Luke Asian Museum, where he serves on a Community Advisory Committee.

Honors include an American Composers Forum Grant, Creative Capital Award, Ford Foundation Fellowship, 4Culture Award for Innovation, and Meet the Composer Commission. In Europe, he has received support from Aldeburgh Music in the UK, the Darmstadt Institute in Germany, and Foundation Gaudeamus in Holland. Au Yong is the 2009-2010 A/P/A Institute Artist-in-Residence at New York University.

Recordings of Au Yong's music are available on CRI/New World Records, Periplum, and other independent labels. He teaches at Cornish College of the Arts and lives in Seattle in an internet-free vegetable-patch home with two writing tables, 11 Chinese drums, and three chickens. His namesake comes from Lord Byron and Ouyang Xiu, two poets who wrote about love.