Vivan Fung
Blaze
A professional composer since the age of nineteen, Vivian Fung is a native of Edmonton, Canada, where she studied composition with Violet Archer. Later teachers included David Diamond, Narcis Bonet, and Robert Beaser. Fung earned her Ph.D. from the Juilliard School in 2002, and is now on the faculty of that institution, teaching music theory and organizing the World Music series there. Her compositional influences include classical forms, jazz, Chinese folk songs, and Indonesian gamelan music.
Her music has been performed by groups such as the Seattle Symphony, the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the New England Philharmonic, the New York Chamber Symphony, Vancouver New Music, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and the San José Chamber Orchestra. Fung was composer-in-residence in 2004 - 2005 for the latter group, which is directed by this evening's guest conductor, Barbara Day Turner. The chamber orchestra premiered Fung's piece,
Butterfly Variations, at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose in June, 2005.
The work featured on this evening's program, Blaze, was written in 1998 and premiered May 4, 1998 by the Seattle Symphony, with George Cleve conducting. Maestra Turner first heard of this piece and of its young composer through Cleve, Music Director of San Francisco's Midsummer Mozart Festival and a long-time conductor of the San Jose Symphony (forerunner of Symphony Silicon Valley). Turner describes Fung's music as "big, ballsy, and very colorful. All of her music has a real energy to it."
Fung's music embraces both her Asian heritage (her parents are originally from Saigon) and her Western upbringing. She learned to play the Chinese pipa and stringed erhu and has written works for those instruments
(Night Impressions, 2005, and Silhouettes, 1997), as well as for clarinet and string quartet
(Miniatures, 2005, featured on an October 2007 CD by Cedille, "Composers in the Loft"), percussion, piano, and brass. She has also written several choral works. Blaze was her first full orchestral work, and features percussion, harp, piano, and strings.
"I have this Western training and this Western upbringing," Fung said in a 2005 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. "But there is this Asian identity that I'm discovering more and more every day. That's who I am. This idea of Asia and identity is blossoming right now for me and probably will continue to blossom for the next 10 years until I become a mature composer."
February 9, 2008
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