Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh is a Taiwanese-Australian composer currently based in the United States. Her compositional interest focuses on immersive physical experiences and she often articulates sonic expressions in terms of choreography, phenomenology, and musical-social interactivity. Hsieh’s latest works delve into examinations of bodily presence, borders, and proximities through the lens of power dynamic, control, and gender politics. Her collaboration with flutist Kathryn Williams, Pixercise, for instance, is a work that addresses the cross sections between the female body, physical exercises, and the virtuosity in contemporary music performance.
Her music has been presented internationally at events including Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, Metropolis New Music Festival, WasteLAnd Music Series (LA), Eavesdropping Symposium London, SEAMUS, Tectonic Festival (Adelaide), ISCM World Music Days, International Rostrum of Composers, Opera Memphis Pittsburgh Festival of New Music, and Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. Some recent commissions include Symphony Services Australia, The Arts Centre Melbourne, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Wien Modern, Foundation Royaumont, Red Fish Blue Fish, Quince Ensemble and ELISION Ensemble, among others.
She has received support from the 2017 APRA Art Music Fund, The Dorian Le Gallienne Composition Award, New Music USA, Australian Cultural Fund, Australian Council of the Arts grants, the National Cultural and Arts Foundation (Taiwan), and was recently a finalist for the Belegura Emerging Composer Award as part of the Melbourne Prize 2019.
Annie completed her doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, and is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.
About the iLRN 2020 Artist/Curator "Studio" Visits Program
Traditionally artists share their work with curators and collectors by bringing them to the studio and showing them what they are working on. This has always been a challenge for the digital artist because often the best place to experience the work is not in person but through a digital interface. With the coronavirus pandemic this is still a challenge for digital artists but now it is also a challenge to every artist and every curator that is trying to either show what they are making or see what is being made by others. Thinking about the new interfaces through which we are now communicating, our idea was to leverage the video conference model and ask artists and curators to show what it looks like, from their digital point of view, when they are making their work or when they are scouring the web to discover emerging practices. By sharing their screens, and walking us through their work and process, we get a clearer sense of what our new normal looks like, but we also discover, in this age of isolation, a new form of intimacy in which we see as another sees, navigating their virtual habitat as they experience it.
Organized and curated by Justin Berry (Yale University) and Johannes DeYoung (Carnegie Mellon University)
