July 16 at Lincoln Center: Anthony Cheung's Powerful Song Cycle Reflecting on Identity, Family, and Legacy Sets Texts by Asian-American Poets

Photos available in high resolution here.

Anthony Cheung’s Large-Scale Song Cycle
the echoing of tenses

Powerful reflections on identity, family, loss, and legacy in a richly layered tapestry of sound, setting texts of seven
intergenerational Asian-American poets

Presented by the Run AMOC* Festival
Within Summer for the City at Lincoln Center

Performed by Paul Appleby, Tenor
Miranda Cuckson, Violin; Anthony Cheung, Piano
Readings by Victoria Chang, Arthur Sze, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn, Poets

Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 7:30pm
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center | 1941 Broadway | New York, NY
Tickets and More Information

“gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” – San Francisco Chronicle
“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: www.acheungmusic.com

New York, NY – On Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 7:30pm, composer and pianist Anthony Cheung’s multi-movement, large-scale song cycle the echoing of tenses will be performed at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center as the epic conclusion to the Run AMOC* Festival, a monthlong slate of opera, dance, and music curated and produced by AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) within Lincoln Center’s fourth annual Summer for the City festival.

In the echoing of tenses, Anthony Cheung sets the texts of seven prominent intergenerational Asian-American poets – Victoria Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Li-Young Lee, Arthur Sze, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn. The performance features musicians from AMOC including tenor Paul Appleby and violinist Miranda Cuckson – who conceived of the work for the company – with Cheung on piano/keyboards, sound design by David Bird, and live readings by four of the poets – Victoria Chang, Arthur Sze, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn. The poets will perform their words live within the production, sharing reflections on memory, cultural and personal identity, family, migration, and loss.

Anthony Cheung writes of the work:

“Memory here is made complicated by the circumstances and tensions of cultural and personal identity, family, migration, loss, and reflection. Opening with Arthur Sze’s “The Network,” which presents the image of a photograph lost to history – a kind of origin story of Asian-American immigration – the cycle begins by looking backwards. But in ensuing texts by Jenny Xie and Cathy Park Hong, past/present/future tenses elide and become confused in dreamlike states. Ocean Vuong’s “The Gift” converses with Li-Young Lee’s earlier poem of the same title, turning to striking childhood memories of each author’s mother and father, respectively. Monica Youn’s raw but dispassionate style contrasts strongly with the emotionally vulnerable explorations of intergenerational trauma in Victoria Chang’s “Obit” and the epistolary “Dear Memory.” Xie’s poems from “The Rupture Tense” share Chang’s exploration of postmemory, which Marianne Hirsch defines as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”

The echoing of tenses was commissioned by the Ojai Festival and AMOC in 2022 and presented in New York at the 92nd Street Y in 2023.

Watch an excerpt from the echoing of tenses, performed at the Ojai Festival:

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.

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. In addition, Cheung’s recent orchestral piece Volta will be included on a new album featuring Brown University faculty, to be released in fall 2025 on the New Focus Recordings label, recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) conducted by Gil Rose.

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