Bio

Anthony Cheung (b. 1982) is a native of San Francisco. He graduated magna cum laude with highest honors in Music and History from Harvard University in 2004, and obtained his MA at Columbia University in 2006. He is currently in the doctoral composition program at Columbia, where he has taught in the Core Curriculum and the Music Department. His composition studies at Columbia and Harvard were with Tristan Murail, Sebastian Currier, and Bernard Rands. Additional studies have taken him to France, where he attended the Fontainebleau and Acanthes summer courses and worked with Marco Stroppa, André Bon, Michael Jarrell, and Jonathan Harvey. He has also been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he had the opportunity to work with Augusta Read Thomas, George Benjamin, Steve Mackey, Michael Gandolfi, Marc-André Dalbavie and Christopher Rouse.

Anthony’s compositions have been played by groups such as the Minnesota Orchestra (twice in reading sessions), the American Composers Orchestra (2004 Whitaker Reading), Ensemble InterContemporain (at Acanthes 2004), the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, eighth blackbird, Second Instrumental Unit, Dinosaur Annex, Janus Trio, the Auros Group for New Music, the Aurora String Quartet, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the orchestras of Haddonfield, Marin, and Berkeley, the New York Youth Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

In 2006, he received a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which also honored him with an Ives Scholarship in 2003. He has also received four ASCAP Morton Gould awards, the Green and Paine Fellowships from the Harvard Department of Music, and the Harvard Office for the Arts' Louis Sudler Prize. As a performer, he has appeared widely as a soloist and chamber musician in standard and contemporary repertoire. He plays piano for the Talea Ensemble in New York, a new ensemble specializing in contemporary music, and was pianist for the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra from 1996 to 2000. He has also been active as a jazz improviser, and enjoys making jazz transcriptions as well. His primary piano studies were with Robert Levin and Paul Hersh. As a member of WHRB, he hosted various radio programs devoted to new music.

6/07

"My music takes its inspiration from many sources, including literature, the visual arts, and nature. My musical language is very influenced by the lineage of Debussy and Ravel, extending through Messiaen, Dutilleux, Takemitsu, and more recent composers (especially the spectralists), with its emphasis on expansive harmonies and expressive timbres. Other influences include the lyricism of romantic-era composers, various traditional musics of the world, and the rhythmic and harmonic spontaneity and inventiveness of the great jazz artists. I dislike boundaries and will listen to anything.

I began writing music soon after beginning piano lessons at the age of six. The pieces started as imitations of the composers I was playing at the piano - Mozart, Beethoven, then Schumann and Brahms. At twelve I heard The Rite of Spring for the first time and was transfixed. From then on it was a huge dosage of early modernists like Bartók, Berg, and Schoenberg (I even wrote my own set of "Three Piano Pieces" in response to his Op. 11). There was something in the unresolved dissonances that was so uninhibited and fresh. Then, around the same time I heard my first Bill Evans recordings, I was learning Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales at the piano, and realized the harmonic similarities between them. The immense coloristic possibilities through harmonic motion became a crucial and obsessive part of how I perceive music. Color, not just in vertical blocks, but in contrapuntal situations as well, like with the heartwrenching chromatic suspensions and hanging dissonances of Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler or the pedal/pivot gravities of Debussy and Dutilleux, around which swirls of chords wax and wane in harmonic tension.

The love for different types of music accumulated over our years of learning, whether it is immediate or inculcated, doesn't ever really go away, though it may follow different paths. On the surface, the music may sound completely different, but what we have internalized cannot be divorced from our musical personality. I have an enormous admiration for all the music, past and present, that has made an impression on me, and I hope it comes through clearly in my own works."