Phyllis Chen
American composer (born 1978)
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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.
- Composer
- sound artist
- pianist
Phyllis Chen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1978 (age 47–48) |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupations |
|
| 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 |
Biography
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]