Berlin Fellowship 2022 — Music
Vita
Haotian Yu is a Chinese-Canadian composer. Questions of composition as ethnography, postcolony, and creolization form the foundation of his artistic practice. He is artistic director of the Beijing-based AIR contemporary music collective and studied composition at the Eastman School of Music (Lois S. Rogers full-tuition merit scholarship) and the HfMDK Frankfurt (DAAD postgraduate scholarship). Collaborators for recent and upcoming projects include members of IEMA, the Vacuum String Quartet, and Freesound. He is the recipient of five SOCAN Foundation awards.
Residency
During my residency I will revise and finalize a concert-length piece for Ensemble Fons, which, through musique concrète instrumentale, live electronics, and spoken texts, (de)contextualizes an ethnomusicological found object. I will also begin work on a collaboration with percussionist Michael Murphy, which, through Foley transcriptions of soundscape recordings and the juxtaposition of environmental sounds with cultural found objects, destabilizes the nature/culture divide. Finally, I will continue work on an book-length, media-rich guide on writing for Chinese instruments, with extended genealogies of instrumental construction and performance practice aesthetics, experimentally-oriented discussion of notation practices, etc.