Du Yun (born 1977)
Du Yun was born in Shanghai. She began studying piano at the age of four and attended the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. After moving to the United States, she attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Harvard University, where she earned a PhD in composition.
Du Yun has a background in western pop music as well as Chinese pop music and folk music, and she mixes musical genres, art, and video with ecstatic abandon. She has composed for varieties of instrumentation, including electronic music, and leads the art-pop band OK Miss. She enjoys challenging herself and prefers not being too comfortable when she creates music. She has compared her process of composition with free climbing. Her second opera Angel’s Bone — about a pair of angels who are forced into spiritual and sexual slavery — won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
This is a string quartet composed in 2018 entitled i am my own achilles’ heel:
About this work Du Yun has written:
I am always fascinated by a fantastical world that lies in a reality, a liminal state that lies at the edge of half fantastical, half hallucination. Years go by, I am told this could be a condition and there is a term for this condition: it is the world of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
According to the medical journal, although the cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is unknown, the condition typically accompanies episodes of migraines. Affected individuals report feeling that different parts of their body are disproportionate in size and proximity and that their overall surroundings are “warped.” Specifically, these patients perceive objects as larger or smaller than they really are, thereby earning the syndrome its characteristic name.
The Rest is Our World is a short 2020 composition for harp and voice:
The harpist satisfies Du Yun’s instructions to be “on the lawn / balcony / porch / hallway / woods / mountain / pond / or any public space.”
Du Yun’s 2010 composition A Cockroach’s Tarantella is for string quartet and narrator, who discusses her life as a cockroach and particularly the mating and procreation implications. This film by Julian Crouch provides what might be perhaps a little too much visualization for some viewers.
Du Yun herself is the narrator and images of her face appear in the video.