Bio
Composer, multimedia artist Anqi Liu (b. 1990) started her formal compositional studies at twenty-three although she began her piano training at age four. Despite this late beginning, her music has been performed across the U.S, Europe, and Asia at venues and concert halls like Le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Shapeshifter Lab (NYC), The Firehouse Space (NYC), Dusk Dawn Club (BJ), Beijing Mao Live House, INNER FIELD (NYC), Spectrum (NYC), Heluting Concert Hall ( Shanghai Conservatory), Suzhou Art Center, Central Conservatory Concert Hall, Palace of Fontainebleau and others. She has been commissioned by and has been closely working with a group of musicians, ensembles, and festivals including The Reiefestival 2023 (Belgium), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik 2022 (Austria), ANALYSIS CREATION and TEACHING of ORCHESTRATION (ACTOR, Montreal), Ensemble Palimpsest, Steven Schick, Kynan Johns, King Britt, Kyle Motl, Teresa Díaz de Cossio, Nina Vanhoenacker, Ilana Waniuk, Peter Ko, Meraki Chamber Players, New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, DECODA Music, Air Contemporary Music (Central Conservatory, Beijing), Vanguard Culture San Diego, Nouveau Classical Project, Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), and others. Her works have been selected and featured in academies and conferences such as Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2021, Ensemble Dal Niente Summer Residency 2021, International Society of Bassists Convention 2021, Oh My Ears Festival 2021, Ircam ManiFeste the Academy composition workshop 2020, ELECTRONIC MUSIC WEEKEND MISE-EN_PLACE Bushwick 2019, Kalv Music Academy (Sweden), California Electronic Music Exchange Concert 2018 (CEMEC Stanford), Ecoles d'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau (Paris), International Computer Music Conference 2017 (ICMC), Connecticut Summerfest Contemporary Music Festival, and others.
Pursuing her Ph.D. under the advice of Lei Liang at UC San Diego, Liu got her bachelor's degrees in Law and Music Performance at Xiamen University and an MA in Composition from Rutgers University. Distinct from conventional compositional training, her music degree included extensive travels throughout the Chinese hinterlands to seek and study the original folk music of Chinese minority groups. Experiences like these fostered unique perspectives of sounds in her. Deeply carving in the internal structure of sounds to maximally reveal unknown sonic potential, she experiments with diverse possibilities to expand space and the dimensions of sound. These experiments often lead to challenges that call into question conventional ways of playing or viewing the instruments. At UCSD, she studied electronic music with King Britt, Rand Steiger, Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe and Natasha Diels. She starts to perform modular synthesizers after studying with Tom Erbe. Her composition teachers include Marcos Balter, Anthony Davis, Roger Reynolds, Rand Steiger, Chinary Ung, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Paul Rudy, Robert Aldridge, Charles Fussell, and Gerald Chenoweth. In addition, she had composition lessons with Clara Iannotta, Allain Gaussin, François Paris, Isabel Mundry, Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, Pierluigi Billone and Per Mårtensson.
Being born as a Manchurian in Inner Mongolia, the autonomous province in Northern China, her identity has always felt complex. Her experience in both the western world and China has driven her to give a voice to the underrepresented culture she came from.