“At first glance, the one predictable thing about Du Yun, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and multimedia artist, is her unpredictability. Dig deeper, though, and you can sense the conjoined strands of curiosity and compassion that run through everything she makes.”
— Steve Smith, The New Yorker
Du Yun
…relentless originality and unflinching social conscience
The New Yorker
Du Yun’s eclectic, flexible approach to composing, her drive to seek the personal and profound in her work, as well as her masterful prowess as a storyteller have made her one of the most compelling composers of our generation
Lauren Alfano, I care if you listen
Du Yun’s works…are elaborately theatrical, full of collaborations with visual and performance artists and bursting with virtuosic extended techniques. It makes sense that a musician so keen on multimedia approaches would identify a broad range of cultural influences on her style
Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
a high priestess of musical eclecticism…she displays formidable skill for making her influences cohere as visceral, gratifying narratives
Jennifer Gersten, National Sawdust Log
indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge
Allan Kozinn, New York Times
…the music is seamlessly woven around Du Yun’s speaking voice, which is a mesmerizing instrument in itself
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
On Selected Works
Opera
Sweet Land
“SWEET LAND made such a huge impression that it has haunted me ever since. I can’t think of anything more zeitgeisty than this immersive environmental work with enraptured scores by Du Yun and Raven Chacon, a phenomenal staging and sensation-inducing performance that allows us to look at our past, the land on which we stand, who we are and what we must mean to one another anew.”
Mark Swed, LA Times
“The encroaching pandemic hung over “Sweet Land,” an opera performed in a Los Angeles park, but its tales of cultural violence would have been a gut punch under any circumstances.”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
“A bewildering and ghostly new opera. SWEET LAND is a parable of, and fantasia on, Manifest Destiny, performed outdoors at a richly suggestive site. The ending is a miniature masterpiece.”
Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
“A feat of collaboration and logistics. It’s fashionable today for writers of new operas to tackle contemporary issues, hoping to demonstrate the art form’s relevance and value. SWEET LAND takes the idea many steps further: it gives its subject a complexity and an impact that could be experienced in no other way.”
Heidi Waleson, Wall Street Journal
“An astonishing presentation that unfolds like a chillingly beautiful fever dream across several unusual settings spread out in Chinatown’s L.A. State Historic Park. SWEET LAND lingers in the memory with its utterly entrancing music.”
Falling James, LA Weekly
Angel’s Bone
“audacious and searing… an appallingly good work…Ms. Du’s music obeys only her own omnivorous tastes and assured dramatic instincts… Courageous and memorable performances from all” …”
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times
“Enthralling and always absorbing…. When so much contemporary opera consists of anodyne treatments of established literary texts, it’s bracing to encounter a work as adventurous and thoroughly original as Angel’s Bone.”
Fred Cohen, Opera America
Voted the No.1 Best International Show in Hong Kong in 2018
South China Post
“Devastating… Disturbing, powerful and original”
Anne Midgette, The Washington Post
“A powerful score in a top-notch presentation”
Daniel Stephen Johnson, Musical America
Most Online Searched at the 2019 Beijing Music Festival
Digital statistics, Beijing Music Festival
Orchestral
Where We Lost Our Shadows
Describing all the elements risks ending up like a table of world flags. The experience was quite different: unifying and powerfully resonant
Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian
…these raga-inspired passages were sung by Mr. Sethi on Thursday with both rawness and plaintive delicacy…
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times
…Shayna Dunkelman, a dynamic percussionist, drove episodes of the piece with pummeling drum bursts one moment, tingling effects the next. The vocalist Helga Davis brought radiance to Ms. Du’s tender, high-pitched setting of the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan’s “Pillow.”
With its highly emotional, deep and truthful subject matter, the work welcomes its viewer-listeners to confront for themselves the contemporary experience of refugees.
Stephanie Ann Boyd, I care if you listen
Mantichora
Du Yun’s riveting Mantichora, a 17-minute essay for large string orchestra, heralded a significant voice.
Allan Ulrich, Financial Times
Slow Portraits
In her alluring “Slow Portraits,” Du Yun wrote music to accompany David Michalek’s striking videos of theater performers, slowed down to convey facial expressions in dramatic, exaggerated detail. Ms. Du’s dense, richly textured score provided a soundtrack for these stylized, ultra-expressive movements; ominous music reflected the startled, wide-eyed stare of a woman whose long, diaphanous sleeves billowed delicately across the screen.
Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times
…unleashes intense orchestral growling, slithering, shaking and sliding while David Michalek’s equally intense super-slo-mo video portraits unfold on a screen above the stage, showing actors going through assorted movements, gestures and reactions
Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun
Albums
A Cockroach’s Tarantella
While the subjects of alienation and feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin are evergreen, this is an album that will help us locate what it meant to human in 2020.
Jeremy Shatan, An Earful
Du Yun’s music spans a vast stylistic spectrum, from ancient-sounding, hymnal strains to scratching, scraping string timbres. The transitions from one extreme to another occur with organic ease, and the music is seamlessly woven around Du Yun’s speaking voice, which is a mesmerizing instrument in itself.
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
Dinosaur Scar
Ten Notable Recordings of 2018
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
Du Yun’s writing is explosive and complex, combining a disparate palette of timbres in compelling and innovative ways
Amanda Cook, I care if you listen
…blazingly brilliant collection. Best decade album
Jeremy Shatan, AnEarful
“Air Glow”, here adapted for four trumpets, flugelhorn, and electric guitar/bass is irrefutably majestic, like some demented ritual music; “by, of … Lethean” is also stunning, presenting a confounding-ly woven tapestry, perhaps of forgetfulness
Kevin Coultas, In on the corner
Wild stuff that calls on you to be up for the task
Chris Spector, Midwest Record
Angel’s Bone
Ten Notable Recordings of 2017
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
It’s an important and provocative statement that should be heard — as well as a good introduction to Du’s work
Allan Kozinn, San Francisco Classical Voice
Shark in You
Du Yun is anything but shy or inhibited—she lets it all out in one way or another on every track, in such a way that by the end the listener feels as though s/he has been granted a temporary stay inside the artist’s brain.
New Music Box
VAN Magazine
“A Catalyst: An Interview with Du Yun”
by Rebecca Lentjes
November 2, 2017New York Times
“5 Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st Century Music”
August 5, 2020Southern People Weekly
音乐人丨杜韵 种子重要还是土壤重要
“She Found the Seeds and Turned the Soil: An Interview with Du Yun”
by Yang Nan
October 30, 2019