Anthony Cheung Featured in Miller Theatre Composer Portrait Concert on Nov 13; New Album Featuring Orchestral Piece Volta Out Nov 14
Photo by Jodi Hilton for Miller Theatre, available in high resolution upon request.
Anthony Cheung Featured in Miller Theatre Composer Portrait Concert at Columbia University
Performances by Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, JACK Quartet, and Anthony Cheung
Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 7:30pm
Miller Theatre at Columbia University
2960 Broadway (at 116th Street) | New York, NY
Tickets & Information
New Album on New Focus Recordings Features Cheung’s Volta
Recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Conducted by Gil Rose
Release Date: November 14, 2025
“intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing” – Gramophone
“[Anthony Cheung] is an alert, cool pianist, and played with focus and clarity” – The New York Times
Anthony Cheung’s Performance Schedule: www.acheungmusic.com/schedule
New York, NY – On Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 7:30pm, composer and pianist Anthony Cheung will be featured on a Composer Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre at Columbia University, with performances of his music by Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, JACK Quartet, and Cheung at the piano. The program includes an Improvised Intro on keyboards performed by Cheung, Twice Removed performed by JACK Quartet, Tactile Values performed by Yarn/Wire, and The Real Book of Fake Tunes performed by flutist Claire Chase and JACK Quartet.
Twice Removed, a piece the JACK Quartet commissioned and premiered in fall 2024 in celebration of its 20th anniversary, is a set of reflections on artworks that are themselves responses to other works. Each movement draws inspiration from a different artistic dialogue: “Stretto House” responds to Steven Holl's architecture inspired by Bartók's music; “830 Fireplace Road” engages with John Yau's poetic variations on Jackson Pollock’s words; “Meditation on Motion” reflects on Dean Rader’s poems about Cy Twombly's visual art; and “Journey to Mount Tamalpais” contemplates Etel Adnan's written and visual meditations on the iconic Marin Hills peak. A recording by JACK will follow in 2026.
Tactile Values for two pianos/keyboards and two percussionists is dedicated to the musicians of Yarn/Wire, and explores concepts of dimensionality and sensory translation, drawing inspiration from Bernard Berenson's writings on how painters construct third dimensions through “tactile values” and Carolee Schneemann's ideas about transforming bodily experiences into “painterly, tactile translation edited as a music of frames.” Watch a video from the 2023 TIME:SPANS Festival of Yarn/Wire’s performance of the work.
Cheung composed The Real Book of Fake Tunes for Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet in 2015. He writes that the title references, “the infamous Real Book that has served as a gateway anthology and/or gig enabler for so many aspiring jazz musicians since the 70s [but] belies a formal architecture of five movements with distinctive characteristics.” The piece was recorded by Chase and the Spektral Quartet for their 2020 Experiments in Living album, and Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker, described it as, “akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg,” while Jed Distler in Classics Today characterized it as, “a textural tour-de-force, where flutist Claire Chase’s amazing command of extended techniques assiduously integrate within the composer’s boundless gestural arsenal.”
Also this fall, Anthony Cheung’s recent orchestral piece Volta will be included on a new album featuring Brown University faculty, to be released on November 14, 2025 on the New Focus Recordings label, recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) conducted by Gil Rose. Cheung writes of Volta:
“I sketched this piece unprompted and uncommissioned over a two-week burst during the fall of 2022, turning away from other projects at hand and eschewing rationality and practicality. Over the next two summers, and following two nine-month stretches of inactivity, I finally completed the orchestration in July 2024. The first half of the piece is characterized by dramatic and volatile events, including melodies that are spun out of turbulence, dance-like passages, and dense columns of chords. While there is indeed a dramatic shift toward an interior, private world about halfway through the piece, the ending was left open until the last stage of writing. It took another turn, affected by personal and world events, an inexorable accumulation recalling the opening that threatens to come full circle, but swiftly swerves away once more.”
For more information, and to preview the recording, visit New Focus Recordings on Bandcamp.
Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, and multiple layers of textural meaning. Praised for “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), Cheung’s work reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. Critic Paul Griffiths writes that his music’s precision “is responsible for a wealth of sonic magic.” Cheung is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and First Prize at the Dutilleux Competition, among other awards and honors. He served as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra from 2015-17, and was a co-founder, pianist, and artistic director of New York’s Talea Ensemble.
Anthony Cheung’s 2025-2026 concert season features milestone performances and premieres by world-class musicians and leading venues including Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Elim Chan, New York’s Miller Theatre at Columbia University, Berkeley’s Cal Performances, American Modern Opera Company, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, flutist Claire Chase, pianist Gloria Cheng, tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and more.
Anthony Cheung’s music has been commissioned by leading groups such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ICE, Yarn/Wire, Atlas Ensemble, and American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), and performed by the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW, and more. His recent projects have included Well with New Chamber Ballet, the field remembers with the Parker Quartet and Fleur Barron, and premieres with JACK Quartet and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Cheung has also written for flutists Claire Chase and Denis Bouriakov, the Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Jennifer Koh, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, David Kaplan, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan.
Cheung’s recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on Warner Classics (performed by Bertrand Chamayou), Tzadik, and Mode.
Anthony Cheung received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from theory and composition to the jazz orchestra and Asian musical modernisms.
About Anthony Cheung: www.acheungmusic.com/about
Anthony Cheung’s Schedule of Performances: www.acheungmusic.com/schedule