HU Jianbing
has earned wide recognition for his artistry as a sheng soloist and composer. He graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music, and joined in the Central National Traditional Orchestra of China. He’s member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.

HU’s father, Hu Zhiguo, was his first music teacher. He taught young Jianbing to play Chinese traditional instruments sheng, suona and guanzi. He is also a student of the domestically well-known Sheng players such as, Mu Shanping, Feng Haiyun and composition from Professors Li Bingyang and Guo Wenjing. In 1983, he won the Best Chinese Music Instruments Soloist Competition prize in Gansu Province. In 1990, his commissioned piece “Plum Festival” was premiered by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra. It was then recorded and broadcasted by the Chinese Central Broadcast Corporation. His composition piece “Fragrant as ever” received the Taiwan Original Music Awards in 1993. “Fragrant as ever”, along with two other he’s piece “Lisao” and “Qiu Sai Yin” played by Hu Zhihou and Wang Zhongshan were released by BMG Hong Kong. In 1997, the Central National Traditional Orchestra of China, organized “The Autumn Melody—- HU Jianbing’s music” at Beijing Music Hall.

HU is very active in cultural and academic exchange between China and United States. He has done many workshops and performances with Yo-Yo Ma on Silk Road Ensemble since 2001. In 2004, HU with Bao Jian went to Paris to perform in a concert organized by Pro Musicis. Their Premiere featured HU’s piece Dancing with Ghosts. In the same year HU performed with Bao Jian in the Guanzi and Sheng Contemporary Music Concert at Carnegie Hall; The year after at the same place he performed Jin Diao, one of his representative works, for the board of directors of Carnegie Hall. In 2007, invited by his alma mater he participated in the Beijing International Modern Music Festival, where he held the recital “Extension: Guan Zi and Sheng”. HU also cooperated with ACJW Ensemble for a performance at Carnegie Hall in 2008. In the same year he participated in Peabody Museum’s “Olympic Week” concert series and held a solo recital at the concert hall of Colgate University in New York. In 2009, Hu and his colleague Bao Jian were invited by the Museum of Modern Art to give a special concert for Sheng and Guan Zi at its concert hall. In 2010 Hu was invited by the Cambridge Salon of Harvard University and delivered a speech on composition and interpretation of Chinese music. In 2011, HU perform a Sheng and Orchestra piece with the Seattle Symphony.

The Boston Globe wrote of his recent performances, “he has an impressive command of the sheng and of a broad range of its classical, folk, and modern musical literatures.”

Douglas Knehans
Knehans’s music is about complex relationships that are dramatically established and drawn over large timeframes through a technique he calls deep line. The surface and expressive impact of his music though is about richness and color and critics see it that way too when they say his music “…is radiant and multicolored. This is music of tremendous imagination. Knehans scores with a masterly hand, his sound paintbrush unerringly hitting the mark.” (Fanfare Magazine)

Though first known through his collaboration with director Barrie Kosky in the Opera Australia production of his The Ascension of Robert Flau (1990), he is perhaps best known for his orchestral compositions. In this music the study of orchestral mass, expressive impact and sonic brilliance drive his musical language. Additional to Knehans’s eight large works for orchestra, his music has come to the attention of soloists and orchestras through his four symphonies and twelve concertos for instrument or voice and orchestra. Knehans’s orchestral and other compositions, including opera, have been performed worldwide at major music festivals and been included on a number of solo and compilation recordings. He is also well known for his vocal and choral music that has been performed, awarded and recorded around the world. In this music he is drawn to the expressive and timbral power of language and has set texts in Latin, English, French, German, ancient Aramaic, and Italian, sometimes—as in his evening length Shoah Requiem—drawing on the surface friction that can arise through lingual juxtaposition and interpolation.

Knehans’s creative work in both orchestral and vocal music as well as chamber music and electro-acoustic music draws on his three major sources of theoretical interest—the study of time and memory; the study of human emotion; and the study of the organic and natural world. These three seemingly disparate areas of research coalesce naturally through music. This is because music is based in time and memory; it uses emotion as a major pathway for laying down of musical memory, emotional response, and time comparisons of ideas as they progress through a work, while utilizing the organic and natural world as an evocative, correlative surface for music. These elements can—and again through the use of time, memory and emotion— easily be drawn into a deeper and more crypto-spiritual world of the psycho-emotional by utilizing organic and natural world metaphors for our deeper human existence and struggles.

The creation of sound worlds of great paradox is thus a huge fascination for Knehans. The outward representation of inner psycho-emotional dynamics is of particular interest to him. In seeking to allow fruitful pathways for the understanding and meaning of works, he is increasingly drawn to summative and simple natural or organic symbols and signifiers that allow for a certain ‘pre-coding’ of a work in the mind of the listener: one that relies on time and memory, emotional response and intellectual engagement with organic and natural world metaphors.

His voice is influenced by his Australian-American training which was focused primarily on European music in his Australian undergraduate study at the prestigious Australian National University, and then American music in his American study at Queens College with Thea Musgrave—again also underscoring the European roots of his voice— and then at Yale with Pulitzer prize winning composer Jacob Druckman.

After completing all of his study at ANU, Queens and Yale, Knehans held a professorship at the University of Alabama; was Director and Head of School at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music in Australia and then was appointed the Dean of the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at CCM.

He has received recognition, prizes, and awards for his compositions and recordings from the 2019 ISCM World Music Days; The Center for Contemporary Opera (New York); Opera Dagen Rotterdam 2019; Dark Mofo Festival (Australia); The American Prize; The Kennedy Center; Clouzine International Music Awards; Independent Music Awards; Global Music Awards; The Australia Council for the Arts; The Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts; Meet the Composer; New Music USA and many others.

He currently lives and work in Cincinnati Ohio with his wife Josephine and son Joshua as well as their small dog Honey. He is interested in cooking, wine, natural and organic food, and is a vegan and committed animal rights advocate who enjoys travel, art, architecture and music.