Anthony Cheung

Contemporary Classical Composer and Pianist

USAmerican composer and pianist, born 1982. Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. Anthony Cheung has been commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cleveland Orchestra (as the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, AMOC, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, with additional performances by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW ensemble, Minnesota Orchestra, Linea, wild Up, and Dal Niente. He has also written works for the Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinist Jennifer Koh, flautist Claire Chase, oboist Ernest Rombout, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan. In addition to concert works, he has written music for film (null and void, after Guy Maddin), captioned sound sources (The Natural Word), and in collaboration with multiple poets (the echoing of tenses). His music has been programmed at festivals around the world, including Acht Brücken, Ultraschall, Cresc. Biennale, Présences, impuls, Wittener Tage, Ojai, Tanglewood, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Transit, Heidelberger Frühling, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki. His recordings include three portrait discs: Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). As a performer and advocate for new music, he was a co-founder of the Talea Ensemble, performing as a pianist and serving as artistic director. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, Anthony has also won awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). He received a BA from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He taught at University of Chicago from 2013-20, and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University.