Sam Wu’s music “abounds in delicate colours, wisps of sound and sylvan textures” (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.
Selected for the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and the New York Youth Symphony’s Jon Deak First Music Commission, Sam Wu also received Harvard’s Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard’s Palmer Dixon Prize.
Sam’s collaborations span five continents: the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Columbus, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, Cabrillo Festival, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, Romer, and icarus Quartets, conductors Marin Alsop, Osmo Vänskä, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dina Gilbert, and Benjamin Northey, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei.
From Melbourne, Australia, Sam holds degrees from Harvard, Juilliard, and Rice. He is currently on faculty at Whitman College, as their Visiting Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition. Sam’s mentors include Anthony Brandt, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Tan Dun.
