Huang Ruo

Huang Ruo draws equal inspiration from ancient Chinese music, Chinese folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz. He integrates these disparate musical styles in a seamless, organic manner using a compositional technique that Huang Ruo calls “dimensionalism,” which melds space, time, sound, and integrate multi-cultural inspirations. 

Huang Ruo’s diverse range of cross-genre compositions encompasses works for orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, dance, sound installation, multi-media, conceptional public art, and film. His oeuvre includes the staged oratorio Angel Island, addressing the suffering of Chinese detainees at the California immigration center in the early 1900s; and City of Floating Sounds, which incorporates a phone app to bring people into the concert hall, à la the Pied Piper. He has composed nine operas, among them for M Butterfly, a groundbreaking adaptation of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, featuring a libretto by David Henry Hwang, The Book of Mountains and Seas, drawn from a compilation of classic Chinese mythology, and An American Soldier, based on the true story of Chinese-American Army Pvt. Danny Chen, found dead in a guard tower at his base in Afghanistan. 

Huang Ruo’s music has been premiered and performed by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, National Polish Radio Orchestra, Kiel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, ensembles and quartets such as Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Remix Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, and Ethel Quartet, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Michael Tilson Thomas, James Conlon, Marin Alsop, Dennis Russell Davies, Ed Spanjaard, Peter Rundel, Alexander Liebreich, Xian Zhang, and Ilan Volkov. 

Huang Ruo’s opera Dr. Sun Yat-Sen had its American premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2014. His opera Paradise Interrupted received its world premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2015 and was performed at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2016, before going on tour to Asia and Europe. In addition, his works have been presented at Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, and Opera Hong Kong. 

Huang Ruo was the first composer-in-residence of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He is also in residence at the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan. He received the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2024, given to risk-taking artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. 

Huang Ruo was born in Hainan Island, China in 1976 – the year the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. His father, who is also a composer, began teaching him composition and piano when he was six years old. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when China was opening its gate to the Western world, he received both traditional and Western education at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. As a result of the dramatic cultural and economic changes in China following the Cultural Revolution, his education expanded from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski, to include the Beatles, rock and roll, heavy metal, and jazz. Huang Ruo was able to absorb all of these newly allowed Western influences equally. 

After winning the Henry Mancini Award at the 1995 International Film and Music Festival in Switzerland, Huang Ruo moved to the United States to further his education. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the Juilliard School.
Huang Ruo is currently on the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music at the New School in New York City. He is the artistic director and conductor of Ensemble FIRE (Future In REverse). His music is published by Schott Music.  

Huang Ruo joins a prestigious group of composers who have previously served as Composer in Residence at LACO, including Derek Bermel, Juan Pablo Contreras, Uri Caine, Kenneth Frazelle, Pierre Jalbert, Andrew Norman, Derrick Skye, and Ellen Reid, among others.