P.Q. Phan
Biography
P.Q. Phan (b. 1962, Vietnam) is a Vietnam-born American composer and educator.
Dr. Phan became interested in music while studying architecture in 1978 and taught himself to play the piano, compose, and orchestrate. In 1982, he immigrated to the United States and began his formal musical training. He earned his BM from University of Southern California and his DMA in Composition from University of Michigan, where he also earned a second master’s degree in ethnomusicology.
Phan's music has been performed throughout the world. He has received numerous commissions, including from the Kronos Quartet, the American Composers Orchestra, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and others. His works had been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Radio France, and others.
Phan has received a Rome Prize, the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Meet the Composers: Music Alive Residency Award with the American Composers Orchestra, ASCAP Standard Awards, Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships, Charles Ives Center for American Music, the Concordia Orchestra, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony. He was guest composer at several music festivals, including Asian Music Week 2000, the ’99 Asian New Music Festival in Tokyo, and the '92 Music Lives in Pittsburgh, etc.
His recorded works include Tragedy at the Opera, Nights of Memory for solo guitar and a CD titled Banana Trumpet Games.
He recently completed A Vietnamese Requiem, a 35-minute large-scale work for four vocal soloists, eight-part chorus and chamber orchestra, which employs Vietnamese Buddhist text. This work is dedicated to the approximate 10 million Vietnamese victims of wars in the 20th century. His most recent chamber opera What the Horse Eats on the Vietnam’s 1945 Great Famine was set to receive its premiere this August 2021.
A frequent guest composer and lecturer in Asia, P.Q. Phan is professor of music in composition at Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University. He had taught at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Cleveland State University.
Works for Winds
- Double Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Band (1992)
- Festivities (1990)
- Memories of a Late Afternoon (1988)
- Race of Gods (1993/2005)
- Rock Blood
Resources
- Heritage Encyclopedia of Band Music. "P.Q. Phan." Accessed 5 September 2021
- P.Q. Phan website Accessed 5 September 2021