Silk Road Ensemble Composers and Arrangers

Angel Lam
composer (b. 1978, Hong Kong)

Angel Lam is a young composer who expresses detailed and refined emotions and attention to the beauty of soundscape and instrumentation in her music. Through musical poetry she conveys the memories and imageries that inspired her works. Her music has been praised as "beautiful, even ravishing at moments" as well as a "kaleidoscopic outpouring." She blends the subtle and evocative expressiveness of an ancient of East Asian aesthetic with the power and perpetual energy of her Western musical training. Her music ranges from the delicate depiction of a drop of water for an unconventional instrumentation--guitar, harp, vibraphone, crotales and double bass--to the tale of a forgotten hero from ancient China written for large orchestra and narration. She writes her own stories, which are an important part of her music. In her works, she continually seeks to reveal the beauty she finds in everyday life.

Miss Lam grew up in Hong Kong/Los Angeles, and began composing at the age of nine. Since her undergraduate days, she has been an active participant in music festivals worldwide, and her compositions have been performed throughout the United States and in many major cities around the world. Most recently, Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble toured with her composition Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain in the United States, China and Japan; they also performed the piece at Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival. The work was released by Sony/BMG as a featured bonus CD with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble's latest album New Impossibilities.

Miss Lam is also a two-time winner of the Carnegie Hall emerging composer commission, where she worked with Grammy Award-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov and eminent vocalist Dawn Upshaw in 2006-07, and with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble in 2005-06, through professional training workshops in collaboration with Young Concert Artists of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. The collaborations culminated to two Carnegie Hall premieres of her new works in September 2006 and April 2007.

Miss Lam is a doctoral candidate at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and an artist diploma candidate at Yale University with full scholarship. Her composition teachers are Christopher Theofanidis and Ezra Laderman. Her recent collaborations include commissions and performances by Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Australia's Grainger Quartet, Greenwich Village Orchestra in New York, Houston Chamber Choir in the American Masterworks Festival 2008, Orange County Women's Chorus in Los Angeles, Symphony of Oak Park and River Forest in Chicago, Peabody Dance and a new theater composition created under the guidance of renowned theater artist Martha Clarke.

She received two Master degrees, in composition and music theory, at the Peabody Conservatory. She taught music theory to the Peabody undergraduates and designed three courses: "Classical Music Today: An analysis and Appreciation of Contemporary Classical Music," "The Romantic Composer" and "World Music, World Culture" for the Johns Hopkins University undergraduates during the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Intersession terms. Miss Lam began studying composition in high school at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts and later entered the Academy to begin her undergraduate studies in composition, studying with Law Wing Fai, Clarence Mak (electronic music) and Lo Hau-Man. At the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, she researched ancient Chinese aesthetics and Asian aesthetics in contemporary Western music. She received numerous awards and scholarships during her undergraduate studies to attend music festivals internationally. She also received a scholarship from the Liberal Arts Department, led by Prof. Betty Wei, to tour Europe studying the fine arts and architectures of European cities. To pursue her graduate studies, she received the honored Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund Scholarship, Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong Composition Scholarship for Overseas Studies, and Peabody Conservatory's Graduate Assistantship Full Tuition Award.

Learn more about Angel Lam at www.angellam.com.