NYT Feature by Joshua Barone
“When the composer Du Yun was a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 2000s, she felt like a fish out of water.
‘Very much out of water,’ Du Yun, 44, said in a recent interview. ‘It was my first time not in a conservatory setting since I was 6.’
But Du Yun — now the Pulitzer Prize-winning conjurer of exhilaratingly elusive and often moving sound worlds — did have a rich community of artistic collaborators. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group of new-music specialists started in 2001 by the flutist Claire Chase, a fellow Oberlin conservatory graduate. And when the ensemble had an opportunity to create an original work of theater, Du Yun, who was resistant to opera, instead wanted to stage a set of songs.”