Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, uses a wide palette of instrumental play and effect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. His recordings include five portrait discs, most recently All Roads (New Focus), and Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos). Other recent work includes a song cycle, “the echoing of tenses,” featuring texts by seven Asian-American poets, which premiered at the 2022 Ojai Festival.
His music has been commissioned and performed by leading groups such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra (as the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and many others. Honors include a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2012 Rome Prize.
Anthony was a co-founder, pianist, and artistic director of the Talea Ensemble. He studied at Harvard and Columbia and has taught at the University of Chicago and Brown University, where he is currently associate professor of music.
At MacDowell, Cheung completed work on "Parallel Play," a piece for large ensemble, commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, to be premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall in March 2023 with John Adams conducting/curating. He also continued work on a piece for large orchestra.
