Composition graduate students Pascal Le Boeuf and Yihan Chen are two of twelve composers selected to receive this year’s coveted Copland House Residency Awards. These all-expenses-paid, short-term stays at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley provide composers with the opportunity to focus undisturbed on their creative work. Copland called this inspiring, rustic place, which he enjoyed for the last 30 years of his life, “my hideaway, my solitude.” Copland House Residents also become eligible for various post-residency awards, commissions, and performance and recording opportunities.
This year’s Residents were selected out of over 140 applicants from 25 states, the District of Columbia, and three countries. They were chosen by a composer jury that included Pierre Jalbert, Laura Kaminsky, and James Primosch.
Aiming for a convergence of different points in time and space, much of CHEN YIHAN’s work connects the past to the future, and brings together different corners of the world in an abstract, poetic, and emotional way that transcends culture and epoch. His music is often a play of lines, space, and intensity in a calligraphic way, reflecting his cultural roots in the Chinese arts. His compositions have been performed by the China National Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of the National Opera House of China, and The Juilliard Orchestra, among others. Recipient of two ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, he graduated from Juilliard and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. As a pianist, he won the Grand Prize at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition.
The works of Grammy-nominated composer, jazz pianist, and electronic artist PASCAL LE BOEUF range from modern improvised music to cross-breeding classical with production-based technology. He is widely recognized for his polyrhythmic approach to chamber music and hybridization of disparate idioms. His recent projects include commercial recordings and videos with JACK Quartet, Nick Photinos (of Eighth Blackbird), Hub New Music, the Shattered Glass String Orchestra, Bec Plexus, Barbora Kolářová, Jessica Meyer, Dave Eggar, Sarah Goldfeather, Robby Bowen, and Ian Chang. As a keyboardist, he has played for D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah” tour and Clean Bandit’s “Rather Be” tour, and with Australian pop artist Meg Mac. He actively tours with Le Boeuf Brothers (his twin brother Remy was a 2018 Copland House Resident), jazz vocalist Allan Harris, Friction Quartet, and his piano trio Pascal’s Triangle, featuring bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Justin Brown. He is a doctoral candidate and Naumburg Fellow at Princeton University.
Congratulations to Pascal and Yihan!
