Byron Au Yong’s music touched the Seattle Weekly in this way, “I’ve heard him conjure more beauty and expressiveness out of two stones clacked together than many composers can with a full orchestra.” Indeed Au Yong’s music often relies on minimal forces to achieve a maximal impact.

Recent performances include News for bamboo, paper, and drums created while he was composer-in-residence with Portland Taiko; Island: Theme and Migrations for two pianists performed at Meany Hall for the Performing Arts; and Ji Mo: The Stillness of Solitude for a quartet singing and playing xun (clay vessel flute), er-hu (fiddle), bamboo, water, rocks, and Chinese percussion.

Raised by immigrant parents on musical theatre, action flicks, and classical music, Au Yong was in crisis as a young composer. He initially hid his pop influences from teachers and peers creating abstract music inspired by avant-garde techniques and esoteric philosophies.

Au Yong called his work "physical music" where movement and sound co-existed inspired by Asian ceremonial music and Catholic masses. For eight years he refused to write in English, preferring to make-up languages in an attempt to find what communicated across aesthetic boundaries.

Examples included Salt Lips Touching, for Korean fiddle and gongs, premiered outside a Confucian temple at the Jeonju Sanjo Festival, Edge, for chamber ensemble, performed at the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater Hamburg, and Tzu Lho: Simmering Songs performed by the Stanford Chorale.

While studying with opera director Peter Sellars, Au Yong gained courage to merge his childhood influences. He received an MA in dance from UCLA in 2003 and an MFA in musical theatre writing from New York University in 2005.

Au Yong’s current focus is on creating musical theatre events that explore dislocation. Examples include Stuck Elevator: The Super-Heroic Stationary Journey of Ming Kuang Chen about the undocumented immigrant who was trapped in an elevator for three days and Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas about water and human migration.

Support for his projects comes from the American Composers Forum, Creative Capital Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund, Ford Foundation, 4Culture, Meet the Composer, and National Endowment for the Arts. In Europe, he has received support from the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme in England, the Darmstadt Institute in Germany and Foundation Gaudeamus in Holland.

He lives in Seattle and teaches at Cornish College of the Arts.