Recently awarded both the First Prize and the Audience Award from the prestigious Luxembourg International Composition Prize 2008, Huang Ruo is Hailed by the New Yorker as “one of the most intriguing of the new crop of Asian-American composers.” Huang Ruo’s music has been premiered and performed by, among others, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Asko Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Dutch Vocal Laboratory, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, under conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, James Conlon, Dennis Russell Davies, Ed Spanjaard, and Ilan Volkov. In 2003, Miller Theatre featured him on its Composer Portraits series. New York Times critic Allan Kozinn hailed the concert as the second on the list of his “Top Ten Classical Moments of 2003.” In February 2007, Naxos Records released his Chamber Concerto Cycle on its acclaimed American Classics series, and his orchestral lyric Leaving Sao was released on Albany Records in 2008. Planned CD releases include Divergence on Koch Records and The Three Tenses on Summit Records. His future commissions and premieres include chamber concerto MO for the Luxembourg Sinfonietta (Luxembourg), a chamber opera for the Dutch Vocal Laboratory (Netherlands), String quartet No.2 for the Carducci Quartet (Great Britain), and String Quartet No.3 for the Quartuor Diotima (France), chamber works for UMS ´N JIP (Switzerland), the Continuum Ensemble, Camerata Pacifica, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, and a documentary film sound tracks for the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Huang Ruo’s past film credits include sound tracks to the films Jian-Fu Garden as well as Stand Up. His works are published by the Huang Ruo Publishing and Recording Company, which he founded in 2000. Also noted as an author, he published Selection of Classic Chinese Folk Songs (Zhong Shan University Press). In 2006, the National Committee on United States–China Relations selected him as a Young Leader Fellow. Huang Ruo was born in Hainan Island, China, in 1976, the year the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. His father, who is a well-known composer in China, began teaching him composition and piano when he was six years old. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when China was steadily opening up its gates to the Western world, he received both traditional and Western education at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He was admitted into its composition program, studying with Deng Erbo when he turned twelve. As a result of the dramatic cultural and economic changes in China following the Cultural Revolution, his education expanded from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski to include the Beatles, rock and roll, heavy metal, and jazz. Huang Ruo was able to absorb all of these newly allowed Western influences without inhibiting factors. As a member of the new generation of Chinese composers, he clearly knows that his goal and task is not just to simply mix both Western and Eastern elements, but to go beyond that to create a seamless synthesis and a convincing organic unity, drawing influences from various genres and cultures. After winning the Henry Mancini Award at the 1995 International Film and Music Festival in Switzerland, he moved to the United States to further his education. Since then, he has earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the Juilliard School. His composition teachers have included Randolph Coleman and Samuel Adler. Huang Ruo is currently a member of the composition faculty at SUNY Purchase.
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