Artist-in-residence
Hsin-Jung Tsai
Hsin-Jung Tsai is a native of Taipei, Taiwan. She attended the Hua-Kang Art School in Taipei, where she majored in piano performance, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Music Theory and Composition from the Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan, where she studied with Nan-Chang Chien. Ms. Tsai studied at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College of City University of New York (CUNY), where she received her Master of Music Degree while studying with Bruce Saylor and went to PhD-DMA program in Music Composition at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is studying with Tania Leon and Bernadette Speech.
Through her involvement in programs such as the Taiwan-Japan Exchange Concert “Euterpe Spring”, conductors Sung Su Jeong, Chun-Fung Lee, and Lance Inouye as well as the Juilliard String Ensemble, the Contemporary Chamber Orchestra of Taipei have performed Ms. Tsai’s compositions in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. In May 2000 Ms. Tsai held a program of her chamber music at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall.
Among her recent works are two film collaborations, Poetry of A Painter, a clarinet solo piece composed for a short film on the life of the artist Fernando Gerassi; the score for Allatonceness, a multimedia performance where the composer also conducted; music design and improvisation for a documentary film Turning Japanese; music for Palace of Loneliness, a play by Dorothy Tan, produced by MultiStages, Inc. and HERE Theatre for the Performing Arts in New York; The Music Composition Award for Capturing The Spirit of the promotive film from Asian American/ Asian Research Institute in New York; and the score for a documentary film Ocean and People produced by Civilization Explorer Association (CEA). In 2006 Ms. Tsai was invited as a guest composer and held a solo composition recital at Tarrant County College South Campus, Fort Worth, Texas. In 2011, Ms. Tsai received grant from City University of New York Diversity Grant for her piano solo piece “Precipitation.”
Currently, Ms. Tsai is located to Houston, Texas, and has been actively contributing her music to local muscial and theatrical projects, such as The Lost Keys for broken pianos, Contemporary Music Festivals in campuses, The Relative Dissonance and so on, as well as performing as an improvisation artist. Ms. Tsai has collaborated with The Flamenco Poets Society for the poetry series for “Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz” Love Poems music compositions.
The society welcomes Hsin-Jung Tsai as the Artist-in-resident for the annual Café Cantante Series.