Yiu Kwong Chung Chung, Yiu Kwong

Born in Hong Kong in 1956, Yiu Kwong Chung studied at the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts and the City University of New York, majoring in percussion with Nicholas D’Amico and Morris Lang, and studied marimba with Leigh Howard Stevens and Keiko Abe. From 1980 to 1986 he was associate principal percussionist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Self-taught in composition from childhood, he won the Percussive Arts Society Composition Contest in 1986 with “Ballad of the Army Carts” (兵車行), after which he entered the graduate program at the City University of New York to pursue doctorates in percussion performance and composition, studying composition with Robert Starer and David Olan. In 1987 he received the Louisville Orchestra’s 50th Anniversary Award. In 1991 he received his doctorate in percussion performance; his dissertation, a theoretical and performance analysis of Henze’s Five Scenes from the Snow Country, won the City University of New York’s Barry S. Brook award for the year’s best dissertation. He received his doctorate in composition in 1995. He is currently a full-time professor in the Department of Music at National Taiwan University of Arts and Director of its Arts Center.

Since settling in Taiwan in 1991 he has been actively composing, and his works have been performed at major international festivals such as the Budapest Spring Festival, the Prague Spring, the ISCM World Music Days, the Shanghai International Arts Festival, the Asian Composers League conference and festival, and international wind festivals. In 1995 he devised his own compositional system, the “Zhouyi Method”, based on the images, forms and sequence of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, offering a creative direction that combines the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang with Western set theory and the theory of linear extension. Since 1997, numerous commissions from Taiwan and abroad, along with collaborations with distinguished international artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Wu Man, the French saxophonist Christian Wirth, the Greek guitarist Eva Fampas, the French Enfis Saxophone Quartet, the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Elsner String Quartet, show the growing international attention his work has received.