Jen Wang - The Other Voice (2019)

The Other Voice began with an experiment, where volunteers sent in their responses to a few short questions about their voices, and how they feel about them. When I began, I had expected that perhaps people might speak to that gap between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us—that shock of unfamiliarity, even repulsion, that we feel when we hear our own voices recorded or see ourselves in a video. The responses I received touched on this, but were also unexpected in delightful and moving ways. Throughout this piece, snippets of these recordings play while supported by live instruments and ambient fixed media. The fixed media is a distorted version of the instruments’ music—a funhouse mirror reflection, as voices often are for their owners. — Jen Wang

Jen Wang (b. 1980) is a Los Angeles-based composer. Her past commissions include works for Wild Rumpus, Spektral Quartet, Talea, Rootstock, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Firesong, the Iktus Percussion Quartet, the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, Coro D’Amici, NeXT Ens, flutist Janet McKay, and carillonist Tiffany Ng; she has also been performed by Gloria Cheng, Lucy Shelton, the California EAR Unit, Del Sol String Quartet, SoundGEAR, Onix Ensamble, the Eco Ensemble, the New Spectrum Ensemble, and the percussion ensembles of Mannes College, SUNY Purchase, and the University of California, Davis. Her first installation work, Black Cloud (for streaming data and electronics), premiered as part of Panorama, an evening-length multi-media performance featuring choreography by Merce Cunningham and Lisa Wymore.

In 2012, Jen received a Staubach Honorarium from the Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt to compose Valence for large ensemble, premiered by Talea at the Internationales Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. She has also attended and had works featured at the UC Davis Composition Workshop, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Bang On A Can Summer Institute, the Other Minds Festival’s Composer Fellowship Program, the International Computer Music Conference, the California EAR Unit Residency at Arcosanti, and the MusicX Festival. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Jen is the founder and former executive director (2011-2016) of Wild Rumpus, a San Francisco-based chamber ensemble dedicated to new music. Founded in 2011, the ensemble has commissioned dozens of new works and has been supported by Chamber Music America, the American Composers Forum, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Columbia Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music. She has also served as a curator for the Center for New Music, San Francisco’s contemporary music community center. Currently, she is an associate director of People Inside Electronics, a Los Angeles-based concert series dedicated to electroacoustic music.

A graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (M.M.) and Carleton College (B.A.), Jen is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has been awarded the Eisner Award in Music, the Nicola de Lorenzo Prize, and the William V. Power Graduate Award. In her spare time, she sings with the Pasadena Master Chorale, and sometimes attempts to play clawhammer banjo, hammered dulcimer, and viola da gamba.