Celebrating AAPI Heritage & History: Wang Jie (Composition '09)

“Wang Jie is a unique and complex voice, combining a fierce intelligence with a vulnerable beauty in orchestral music that virtually shimmers with color.” —JoAnn Falletta, GRAMMY-winning conductor

Born in Shanghai, China, internationally acclaimed composer, pianist, and teacher Wang Jie (’09) began her musical training from age four, studying piano and composition for 14 years in the private studio of Yang Liquing, then the head of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music’s composition department. In 2000, a scholarship from the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) brought her to the United States where she studied with Richard Danielpour and Nils Vigeland, then chair of MSM’s composition department, receiving her master of music in 2007. She studied composition at Curtis from 2007–09, and holds a Ph.D. in music theory and composition from New York University, analyzing creativity through the lenses of symbolic philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Ms. Wang’s career began its ascent when at age 29, she made her Carnegie Hall debut, astonishing the American Composers Orchestra by composing a miniature, multimedia chamber opera From the Other Sky for the concert stage, embodying a character in shifting between various keyboard instruments and donning a variety of costumes—a work praised as “vibrant” by the New York Times and “whimsical” by the New Criterion.

While still a student at MSM, Ms. Wang’s tragic opera Nannan, based on her own short story about a barren wife in a noble household, who was replaced by a concubine on the eve of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1948, was chosen for the New York City Opera’s VOX Contemporary Opera Lab showcase. She has since written eight operas in total, a ballet, and numerous works for orchestra, vocalists, and ensembles of various sizes. Noted for her stylistic versatility, Ms. Wang continues to push the boundaries of classical music. Throughout the pandemic, her Symphony No. 1 was the most-broadcast symphony on public radio, reaching 1.5 million listeners worldwide each time it aired, and her 2016 Symphonic Overture: America, the Beautiful continues to be performed by orchestras across the U.S. each year.

During the early part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she voiced her support and flew to the country to have two of her symphonies played in a live-streamed performance by the Lviv National Philharmonic. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, premiered and live-streamed her Symphony No. 2 across the globe, and she has received prestigious commissions from the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center and Music@Menlo. Ms. Wang was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received honors and awards from ASCAP, the BMI Foundation, the American Music Center, OPERA America, the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the McKnight Foundation, the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, to name a few.

Co-founder of Emerging Composers Intensive, she mentors emerging composers every summer to advocate high-reward collaboration between professional musicians and living composers. Ever-expanding her artistic and creative palette, Ms. Wang is a devoted student of Indian classical dance and the percussion instrument mridangam. A longtime Curtis mentor, she lives in New York City with her husband and host of the radio show Performance Today, Fred Child.

To learn more about Wang Jie, visit her official website HERE.

“The mature works in classical music reminds us that we are not alone in our unutterable feelings, these clusters of inner stuff without names, and that we are valued for having them and loved for feeling this way. Classical music matters even more today because it’s more accessible than ever.” —Wang Jie

Please visit the Curtis Institute of Music Open Archives and Recitals (CIMOAR). Learn more about Curtis’s library and archives HERE.

Photo Credits: 1, 2, 5 & 7.) Portraits of Wang Jie by Kevin Hsu. 3.) Image conductor JoAnn Falletta and Wang Jie, holding her score for The Winter That United Us at the New Festival of Emerging Artists, courtesy of artist’s official Facebook page. 4.) Photo of Ms. Wang with fellow Curtis students and the late Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, courtesy of the Curtis Archives. 6.) 2009 graduation photo at the Curtis Institute of Music. Wang Jie is on the first row, sixth from the left; Curtis Archives.