biography
Ying-Chen Kao (b.1981) is currently a doctoral candidate at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University where she received her Masters Degree. She was awarded the composition assistantship from 2006-2008, and was the recipient of the Otto Ortman Award.
Ying-Chen has received various commissions: the Peabody Children’s Chorus commissioned by Doreen Falby entitled The Sonnets to Orpheus for children’s chorus and solo cello and Cloud Burst, premiered and commissioned by Michael Kannen in the Cage Concert series at the Peabody Institute and most recently The Blue of the End, commissioned and premiered by Donald Sutherland and Gary Thomas. She collaborated with the Peabody Preparatory Dace Department on a ballet / video piece, Collidescope, which was premièred in the event NEW WORK 2007. The project was overseen by the renowned American theatre artist / choreographer Martha Clarke. Ying-Chen is also interested in visual art and in August of 2006, her multimedia art work, “Constellation of Voice” was selected to be on the cover of Carnegie Hall’s October playbill.
Ying-Chen has been awarded several grants and scholarships such as the Austin Weeks Scholarship, the Maxwell R. Lepper Endowment Scholarship, and the Lawrence Friedman Music Scholarship. She also received an Encore Grant from the American Composers Forum, and a Peabody Development Grant, for her collaborative concert tour Living Music that performed in Baltimore and New York City. She was also the winner of the Peabody Camerarta Composer Contest in 2005. Her Toccata (for viola and piano) was premiered in the Emerging Young Composer Contest at the Festival Miami 2002. It was described as a “challenging and rich work” in the Coral Gables Gazette.
Ying-Chen started playing the piano at the age of 5, and began composing at the age of 15. She attended Kuang Jen High School, an elite music school in Taiwan for musically gifted students. She holds her Bachelor’s degree in Theory Composition from the University of Miami, where she performed extensively as an instrumental and vocal accompanist. Ying-Chen currently studies composition with Michael Hersch . She has studied composition with Christopher Theofanidis, John Van der Slice, Robert Gower, Paul Wilson and Lu Wen-Tze, and piano with J.B Floyd. She has participated in master classes with Chen Yi and Libby Larsen.
