Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised traditions through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.
Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Mosaik, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW, Boston Lyric Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Yarn/Wire, and The Crossing Choir, among many others.
She is the recent Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre (2020-22). Her residency concluded with a full-length chamber opera The Beekeeper presented by the Chicago Opera Theatre in March 2022. Her portrait albums Urban Inventory (2018), and An Atlas of Time (2020) were released to critical acclaim. She has also received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition, Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award in Music from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fromm Commission from Harvard University, Koussevitzky Foundation commission at the Library of Congress, and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.
At MacDowell, she completed her orchestra piece "Surge" for the New York Philharmonic, commissioned by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. She composed a new string quartet for the Parker Quartet and started a new piece for soprano and large ensemble for the Seattle Modern Orchestra, commissioned by the Barlow Foundation to be premiered in 2023 in Seattle.
