Anthony Cheung

Anthony Cheung is a composer and pianist. His music has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, and also performed by Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Linea, the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and the French National Orchestras of Lille and Lorraine, among others.

He has received 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 has also received commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations. From 2015-17, he is the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow of the Cleveland Orchestra.

His music has been programmed at international festivals such as Ultraschall, Cresc. Biennale, Présences, impuls, Wittener Tage, Aspekte Salzburg, Transit, Présences, Heidelberger Frühling, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki, Centre Acanthes, Musica, and Nuova Consonanza.

A first portrait CD, Roundabouts, was released with the Ensemble Modern in 2014, and his music and performances have also appeared on New Focus Recordings, Tzadik, and Mode. A new disc on Wergo in 2016 will feature performances by the Talea Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain.

As a performer and advocate for new music, he co-founded the Talea Ensemble in 2007, serving as Artistic Director and pianist; he is currently co-Artistic Director. With Talea, he has performed extensively in the US and abroad as a specialist of new music, and has helped to curate programs, conferences, and festivals.

As a writer and scholar, he has completed a dissertation on György Ligeti (on the Hamburg Concerto, 2010), as well as articles on contemporary music for both specialists and a general readership. Primary musical interests include notational aesthetics, jazz improvisation and transcription, microtonality and alternate tunings, rhythmic polyphony, and temporal perception, and his music also engages poetic imagery, syntax and rhetoric, natural phenomena, and the visual arts.

Anthony received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, where he taught and also served as assistant conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. For more information, please visit my website.