Phyllis Chen | |
---|---|
Born | 1978 (age 46–47) |
Alma mater | |
Occupations |
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Employer | State University of New York at New Paltz |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (2022) |
Academic background | |
Thesis | Inventions on the Keyboard (2015) |
Doctoral advisor | André Watts |
Musical career | |
Genres | Contemporary classical |
Instrument | Toy piano |
Formerly of | International Contemporary Ensemble |
Phyllis Chen (born 1978) is an American composer, sound artist, and pianist. A member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she co-composed their 2016 album On The Nature Of Thingness and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. After suffering from tendinopathy, she began doing work on the toy piano, including an album and music festival both named UnCaged Toy Piano.
Chen, a native of Blacksburg, Virginia, [1] was born in 1978, [2] daughter of Dan and Jenny Chen. [3] She started learning piano as a young child. [4] After attending the Eastern Music Festival summer camp, [3] she graduated from Blacksburg High School in 1995, [1] one year earlier than her class. [3]
Despite receiving acceptance offers from other prestigious music schools, she ultimately chose Oberlin Conservatory of Music, [3] where she then obtained her BM. [5] She then got a MM at Northwestern University and DMA at Jacobs School of Music; [6] [5] her doctoral dissertation Inventions on the Keyboard was supervised by André Watts. [6]
In 2001, she joined the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) as one of their founding members. [4] In 2011, she played the piano for several pieces she composed for ICE at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. [7] In 2016, she and Nathan Davis composed the ICE's album On The Nature Of Thingness. [8] She eventually became Artist Emeritus at ICE. [9]
As she once recalled, she "never found [the piano] to be entirely fulfilling [and] always thought there was something missing". [4] After both of her arms became sore from tendinopathy, she started playing the smaller toy piano, which she had discovered during her studies at Indiana. [4] She started the UnCaged Toy Piano festival in 2007 to promote the instrument, [4] and she also composed a toy piano album of the same name. [10] She was the toy pianist for the 2009 musical Coraline at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. [11] She also performed the toy piano at the 2012 Ringling International Arts Festival, where Gayle Williams of Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that Chen "has enough imagination for all of us". [12] During a review of her April 2013 performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, Stephen Brookes of The Washington Post called Chen "a virtuoso of the toy piano". [13] Steve Smith of The New York Times called her a "leading proponent of the toy piano as a vehicle for serious music", [14] while Xenia Pestova Bennett called her one of the pioneers of the Schoenhut 372 and its open-lid counterpart 379. [15]
She originally composed with pseudonyms before a friend approached her about talking with a composer who was actually Chen herself. [4] Her Baryshnikov Arts Center commission Lighting the Dark premiered in December 2014; Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of The New York Times said that it "offered a slyly subversive take on issues relating to femininity, technology and power". [16] In 2015, she composed Curios for the Singapore International Festival of Arts, performed by Margaret Leng Tan; Marcus Cheng Chye Tan called it an "important work to evaluate Tan's theatrimusicality". [17] In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. [18] Her piece "Sumitones" was performed at the 2024 Schubert Club International Artist Series in Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. [19]
She has also worked at State University of New York at New Paltz as assistant professor of music composition. [18]
She lives in Astoria, Queens. [5]