Sam Wu

Composer Sam Wu‘s music deals with the beauty in blurred boundaries. Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.

He was selected for the American Composers Orchestra’s EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School. Sam is also a winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and has received Harvard’s Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard’s Palmer Dixon Prize.

Sam’s collaborations span five continents, most notably with the orchestras of Minnesota, Sarasota, Melbourne, Tasmania, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, along with the New York City Ballet, The Kennedy Center, National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Parker, Argus, and ETHEL Quartets, Chorus Austin, sheng virtuoso Wu Wei, and pipa master Wu Man.

Sam has been featured on the National Geographic Channel, Business Insider, the Harvard Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Asahi Shimbun, People’s Daily, among other media.

Sam (b. 1995) is from Melbourne, Australia and holds degrees from Harvard University and The Juilliard School. He is currently pursuing his DMA in Composition from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. His teachers include Tan Dun, Robert Beaser, Anthony Brandt, Pierre Jalbert, Richard Beaudoin, and Chaya Czernowin.