VocalEssence – Philip Brunelle, artistic director

Gao Hong, a Chinese musical prodigy and master of the pipa (a pear-shaped lute), began her career as a professional musician at age 12. She graduated with honors from China’s premier music school, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she studied with the great pipa master Lin Shicheng. In both China and the U.S. Gao has received numerous top awards and honors, including First Prize in the Hebei Professional Young Music Performers Competition and an International Art Cup in Beijing. In 2005 Gao Hong became the first traditional musician to be awarded a Bush Artist Fellowship and the first musician in any genre to win two McKnight Artist Fellowships for Performing Musicians. The Minnesota State Arts Board has awarded her with an Artist Assistance Fellowship, an Artist Initiative Grant, and a Cultural Community Partnership.

Since her arrival in U.S. in 1994, Gao Hong has presented hundreds of educational workshops for elementary through college-age students, and has been on the faculty of Metropolitan State University and MacPhail Center for the Arts. She in currently on the music faculty of Carleton College where she teaches Chinese instruments, and is a roster artist with the Minnesota State Arts Board and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s CONNECT Program.

Gao has performed throughout Europe, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, China, and the U.S. in solo concerts and with symphony orchestras, jazz musicians, and musicians from other cultures. As a composer, she has received commissions from the American Composers Forum, Walker Art Center, the Jerome Foundation, Zeitgeist, Ragamala Music and Dance Theater, Theater Mu, IFTPA, and Twin Cities Public Television for the six-part series Made in China. Meet the Composer Inc. in New York City has awarded her two Creative Connections grants and the MetLife Creative Connections grant.

In addition to Gao Hong’s solo performances of her compositions worldwide, her music has been performed internationally by many world-class musicians. In 2000, Song of the Pipa, a play based her life and the life of Chinese poet, Bai Juyi, received 20 performances by Theater Mu and featured live musical accompaniment and new compositions by Gao Hong. In 2007 her first choral composition, “The Coming of Spring” was one of five pieces selected out of 128 applicants nationwide for a reading session, Essentially Choral, sponsored by VocalEssence and American Composers Forum. It will be premiered by VocalEssence in concert at The Fitzgerald Theater on April 4, 2008.