MusicOn+ InterArts Festival Spotlight on Aspiring Young Composers, Concerts 3 and 4 in Review
The Blanc, New York, NY
October 4, 2026
Among the many events in this year’s very busy MusicOn+ InterArts Festival, there were two Composers Concerts, Nos. 3 and 4, on Sunday, October 4th at The Blanc. Concerts 1 and 2 had already taken place on Saturday and are reviewed elsewhere on the New York Concert Review website. The title of this group of concerts was listed in the promotional materials as “Spotlight on Aspiring Young Composers” – and while many of the composers we heard were indeed young, some could be said to have reached a point beyond mere aspiring, as many were recipients of some prestigious awards and commissions that would make veteran composers envious.
The Sunday concerts assigned to this reviewer included a total of twelve works for various instrumentations, with six pieces on the first (Composers Concert 3) and six on the second (Composers Concert 4). To name all the personnel for each work would be to blitz the reader, but suffice it to say that the crew of performers was so valiant throughout the two programs that they all deserve mention. They were Po Wei Ger, piano; Yeji Pyun and Sara Salomon, violins; Carlos Walker, viola; Clara Cho, cello; Jacob Freiman and Yu-Ting Chen, clarinet; Eva Ding, flute; Shirley Guo, harp; Yixin Wang, guzheng; and Tim Duncan Cho as conductor where needed. If there had been an MVP award, it would have gone to pianist Po Wei Ger who played in no fewer than six works, some quite demanding, including three solos.
The Composers Concert 3 was to include one piano solo, a piano quartet, a flute-harp duo, two works for mixed ensembles, and one work for the Chinese guzheng.
The program started off seemingly in medias res, with a piano quartet entitled Last Day in Vain by Sophia Kunxu Dou, one of the younger composers and an undergraduate student under Valerie Coleman at Juilliard. It drew the listener in with its rather jazzy “perpetual motion” opening. It was great to feel such focus and drive. Especially after the start time of the concert had been fifteen minutes late (as the events of MusicOn+ seem often to be), this focused energy was a reminder that these young composers “mean business” as they say.
Meditation on Song and Structure by Sami Seif was next. Here the viola, flute, and harp created a dreamy and atmospheric Middle Eastern soundscape. Mr. Seif is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was favorably reviewed on this site last year.
A piece called modular for piano solo by Maxwell Lu came next. It contained twelve-tone material and developed it in intriguing ways. The focus on the treble register with plenty of pedal gave it bell-like effects in parts. Mr. Lu is an undergraduate at Columbia under Andrew Norman, as part of the Juilliard Columbia exchange program. He has received several important awards and commissions. Pianist Po Wei Ger played it impressively.
Timbral variety increased with a piece called You are all so far away by Aidan Gold. It combined the components of a piano trio, plus clarinet, harp, and various additional sounds of “shushing” and rattling objects from the players as they moved performatively through the room. At one point I thought there had to be an electronic instrument somewhere, but no – the ensemble achieved an enormous range of sounds from just their instruments and voices. An eerie spell seemed to be cast as the ensemble sang a slow repeated C-sharp to D which gradually faded away. Mr. Gold has a DMA in Composition from the Juilliard School, along with other degrees, and his biography includes many high profile performances.
The next piece, by Sofia Jen Ouyang, was for guzheng, a zither-like Chinese instrument with a history going back several thousand years. To make matters still more exotic, the title of the piece was listed only as two Chinese characters, which upon a search were transliterated as “You Yin” and roughly translated as “secluded sound.” The piece started with the repetition of some lower plucked strings, one of which became central as the piece progressed. Yixin Wang, the performer, should be singled out for her expertise and ability to draw a wide range of evocative sounds from her instrument. The composer Ms. Ouyang is currently a DMA student at Columbia University with Marcos Balter and Friedrich Haas.
This concert closed with a work entitled Light Falling Into Blue, composed for piano, cello, clarinet, and harp, and by Huihui Cheng (BM, MM, Central Conservatory of Music). As the composer states it, “Through the interplay of harmony and timbre, alongside the recurring descending arpeggio motive, the work creates a continuous and fluid sense of falling, drawing the listener into a hazy blue space.” Though this listener was fairly confused by various sections of this piece, perhaps that was part of the intent. It was better ultimately to simply surrender to what Ms. Cheng described as “the melancholy and mystery” and “tranquility and dreamlike wonder” of the imagined color blue.
The second concert (Composer Concert 4) included another six works – two piano solos, three quartets (string and mixed) and a violin-clarinet duo to conclude.
The opening work was a piano solo called Transformation by Yikeshan Abudushalamu, Uyghur composer from Urumqi (Xinjiang, China). It was admirably played by Po Wei Ger. Mr. Abudushalamu studied in Shanghai and Geneva (as did Shenying Qian whose work was performed later). Mr. Abudushalamu describes the piece as from his early minimalist stage. He writes, “one evening in 2009, a chord unexpectedly flashed through my mind, and this chord subsequently became the structural core of the entire work.” What one heard was close to eighteen minutes of that chord with a repeated accompaniment, changing at a glacial pace at first and gradually building momentum before receding to its quiet origin. It seemed like music that would lend itself to an eerie film score.
Two string quartets followed. When the average concertgoer hears “string quartet” they may imagine something orderly in three or four movements (for example Haydn) with four distinct voices – so to be clear “string quartet” is referring merely to the instrumentation here. The first string quartet was by Yan Liang, entitled Nigredo V Black Sun Escape. Here we had a single movement of disparate fragments of varied textures, which the composer describes as “an exploration of shadow, decay, and transformation, while placing particular emphasis on escape as an existential process: not the rejection of darkness but the attempt to survive its center.” The music, accordingly, was scratching, searching, and nebulous.
The second string quartet was listed as Chu-li by Daniel Jingyangj Cui. The title Chu-li, according to the composer, references “Zhuang-zi’s parable of the useless tree, which tells the story of a tree that survives and finds total freedom simply because society deems it useless.” He then explains that the musical elements “clash and shift together to create the heavy, suffocating energy of a massive industrial machine.” There were certainly some evocations of nightmarish industrial sounds, but less of the tree that this listener was seeking. Mr. Cui is pursuing a doctorate at UCSD with Lei Liang.
Music of Yeung-ping Cheng followed – a mixed quartet of viola, cello, clarinet, and flute, entitled Quest of Poetry. Again we had music about a search for something elusive, questions without answers. It is difficult to review such a piece in meaningful terms, listening for ten minutes to musical meandering that defies description, except as an amalgam of interesting sounds, but then the composer himself has written in his notes, “There is a questioning through sound, a ritual about how poetry can be heard. The work offers no answers, only allowing language to return to the starting point of breath, rediscovering the presentation of poetry between speaking and singing, questioning and answering, echoing and silence.” Mr. Cheng (another composer who studied at UCSD) is Associate Professor of Music at South China Normal University.
The penultimate work was Sicut Susurus III: Duodecim Anti-studia for piano by Shenying Qian, who is Associate Professor at Shanghai Conservatory as well as an advisor of the Mayflower Art Center (which is behind these concerts). The piece is the third installment of a twelve-piece series for piano. In it, as the composer states, is “not merely a heartfelt homage to the Eastern classical tradition, but also a philosophical dialogue across time and space.” There are, we are told, references to famous Chinese music in it (which this listener confesses to not recognizing), but, more noticeably, substantial swaths of Ravel’s Une Barque sur l’Océan – both in quotations and transformed into extended textures. As the composer explains, “the designation ‘anti-etudes’ does not constitute a rejection of the traditional genre. Rather, it continues the artistic trajectory extending from Romanticism to Modernism subjecting the classical genre of the etude to a process of inversion, reflection, and contemporary deconstruction.” Some of this was evident in the music, some less impactfully. Po Wei Ger was again the remarkably versatile pianist.
The finale was Harmoniphobia for clarinet and violin by Suguru Wagatsuma (b. 1999), first prize winner of the 2025 Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Harmoniphobia is a coinage to signify “fear of harmony” – and is illustrated as the violin and clarinet “instinctively avoid and reject any form of harmony with one another. The composer mentions “moments when the two instruments inadvertently fall into a harmonious relationship with one another” promoting “an almost visceral, convulsive sense of rejection” – and indeed this non-tonal piece was full of jolts and paroxysms. This listener’s only problem was finding the purported harmonious triggers – as so much between two single lines could be construed as one wants them to be. Many “dissonant” intervals imply harmonies according to context, but a tonal context was naturally not established here. At any rate, it is a playful piece that was played with a certain humor. Incidentally, this work was performed also in a 2021 workshop in Suntory Hall, Japan.
