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Dorothy Chang |
 Biography |
Described as "evocative and kaleidoscopic", the music of Dorothy Chang has been performed by ensembles including the Albany Symphony, Chicago Civic Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, Queens Symphony, Seattle Symphony and Aspen Concert Orchestra, the American Composers and New World Youth Orchestras’ chamber concerts, Collage New Music, eighth blackbird, North/South Consonance, Music from China, the Helikon Ensemble, Toca Loca, Kylix New Music Ensemble, TONK and the Feliano Trio. She has received commissions from the Canada Council, Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Festival Vancouver, and the Chicago Saxophone Quartet, among others. Her music has been featured at music festivals including Aspen, Banff, Bowdoin, Norfolk, Scotia, the Ernest Bloch Festival, and the Are You Brave, Too? New Music Festival.
Dorothy's music has been recognized through honours and prizes including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awards from the International Alliance for Women in Music, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Mu Phi Epsilon, the National Society of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer and the Jacob Druckman Orchestra Prize from the Aspen Music Festival. She has held residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Lancaster Music Festival. For the 2003-2004 season, Dorothy was selected to be the Music Alive composer-in-residence of the Albany Symphony Orchestra in Albany, New York. In 2005, she begins a three-year extended residency with the symphony.
Dorothy is composer and co-founder of the Riverbed Theatre Company, which specializes in collaborative, image-based theatre productions. Performances have included The Peacock Maiden, a children’s musical production in Santa Barbara, CA, rice/water which was featured on the First Annual Taiwanese Experimental Theatre Festival, Burnt Rice which was hailed as "one of the top 10 productions in 1998" by the Pobao Arts Weekly (Taipei), and additional collaborations produced in Boston and Chicago. Recently she collaborated on Tinquero, which was featured at the Eslite Art Space in Taipei as well as the Kaohsiung Arts Museum in Kaoshiung, Taiwan. As composer-in-residence of the Kylix New Music Ensemble from 1999-2001, Dorothy composed several new works for the group and participated in educational outreach concerts at the Contemporary Performer’s Workshop in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Born in 1970, Dorothy began her music studies on piano at age six and began composing at the age of fourteen. She received degrees in composition from the University of Michigan (B.M., M.M.) and the Indiana University School of Music (D.M). She has served on the music faculty at Indiana State University and is presently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
June 2005
