Byron Au Yong
San Francisco
Byron Au Yong (歐陽良仁) composes songs of dislocation prompted by a broken lineage. Born to Chinese immigrants in Pittsburgh and raised in the Pacific Northwest, his upbringing informs a creative process that examines the contradictions between the American Dream and sustainability. Variety calls one of Au Yong’s musicals “claustrophobic and expansive, intimate and existential, personal and political all at once.” The Seattle Weekly says that his “interdisciplinary works are as exquisite and imaginative as they are unclassifiable.” Dedicated to intercultural collaboration, Au Yong creates across disciplines with an attention to the ways people connect with the places they call home.
Current projects include 9 Lifeboats and Activist Songbook. Recent performances include (Be)longing, also known as Trigger, or The Ones, a participatory oratorio, with libretto by Aaron Jafferis, about coming of age in an age of guns performed at Virginia Tech Moss Arts Center, MDC Live Arts, and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. His Water Partitas, for multimedia solo strings, have been performed by The Afield at National Sawdust and HIFA (Harare International Arts Festival).
Au Yong has been composer-in-residence with the A/P/A Institute at NYU, Center for Migration and the Global City at Rutgers University, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Montalvo Arts Center, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Westminster Choir College, Weston Playhouse, Sundance Institute Theatre Labs, Virginia Tech Center for the Arts, and Yale Institute for Music Theatre.
Honors include a Creative Capital Award and Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. Internationally, Au Yong has received support from Aldeburgh Music in the UK, the Dragon Foundation in Hong Kong, the Darmstadt Institute in Germany, and Foundation Gaudeamus in Holland.
Recordings of his music are available on New World Records, Periplum and Present Sounds Recordings. His namesake comes from Lord Byron and Ouyang Xiu (歐陽脩), two poets who wrote about love. Au Yong holds degrees in musical theater writing, dance and music theory and composition from NYU, UCLA and the University of Washington. He teaches in Performing Arts & Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, located on Ohlone land.
Byron Au Yong (歐陽良仁)’s tracks
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