Carolyn Chen

Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday to retune habits of our ears through sound, text, light, image, and movement. For over a decade her studies of the guqin, the Chinese 7-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, has informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recent projects include a scream essay and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil. The work has been presented in 25 countries and described by The New York Times as “the evening’s most consistently alluring … a quiet but lush meditation.” It has been supported and commissioned by Green Umbrella, impuls, MATA, Fulbright, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships, Stanford University Sudler Prize, ASCAP Foundation Fred Ho Award, Emory Planetarium, and Machine Project at the Hammer Museum. Recordings are available on Perishable, the wulf, and Quakebasket. She earned a PhD in music from UC San Diego, and an MA in Modern Thought and Literature and BA in music from Stanford University, with an honors thesis on free improvisation and radical politics. She lives in Los Angeles.