About Huang Ruo

Huang Ruo’s diverse compositional output includes works for orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, cross-genre compositions, sound installations, architectural installations, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “Dimensionalism.” He has been lauded by The New York Times for his “distinctive voice...melding Asian and Western elements with such confidence and elegance that you hardly notice the mingling."

His music has been premiered and performed by the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, National Polish Radio Orchestra, Santa Fe Opera, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, LA Opera, Seattle Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Royal Danish Opera, Asko/Schoenberg, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Marin Alsop, Andrew Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, and James Conlon.
 
Huang Ruo's opera, An American Soldier (with a libretto by David Henry Hwang) was premiered by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2018 and was named one of the best classical music events in 2018 by The New York Times. His installation opera Paradise Interrupted was premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2015 and was performed at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2016. Another opera, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 2014. His recent new opera M. Butterfly (with a libretto by David Henry Hwang) received its world premiere with the Santa Fe Opera in 2022. Future commissions include new operas for the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera, and an interactive global city project that integrates live orchestra, technology, movements of people, expanding the boundaries of orchestral music far beyond the walls of a venue and into the city. Huang Ruo served as the first composer-in-residence for Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam and was the visiting composer for the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in Brazil.  

Huang Ruo was born in Hainan Island, China in 1976 – the year the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. His father, also a composer, began teaching him composition and piano when he was six years old. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when China was opening its gates to the Western world, he received both traditional and Western education at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. As a result of the dramatic cultural and economic changes in China in the 80s and 90s, his education expanded from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski, to include the Beatles, rock and roll, heavy metal, and jazz. Huang Ruo was able to absorb all of these newly allowed Western influences equally. After winning the Henry Mancini Award at the 1995 International Film and Music Festival in Switzerland, he moved to the United States to further his education. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from The Juilliard School.

Huang Ruo is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music in New York and is the artistic director and conductor of Ensemble FIRE. He was selected as a Young Leader Fellow by the National Committee on United States–China Relations in 2006. Huang Ruo’s music is represented exclusively by European American Music Distributors Company (ASCAP) and the Schott Music Group of publishing companies worldwide.