I am a composer-violinist exploring what happens when Eastern and Western instruments, traditions, and musical imaginations encounter one another, as well as painter and creator of a number of innovative apps, most notably the app now known as a Tollsmart -- a company where I now serve as a cofounder and a CTO (http://www.tollsmart.com). 

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I compose music as a meeting place between different sound worlds. My recent work explores the encounter between Eastern and Western instruments, musical traditions, and ways of imagining sound. I am interested not simply in combining their surface characteristics, but in discovering what can emerge when their distinct identities remain audible and begin to transform one another.

My practice is inseparable from my work as a violinist. Performing my own music allows composition to develop through physical gesture, instrumental resonance, and direct communication with other musicians. The violin often serves as a traveler between musical environments, carrying an idea from one instrumental language into another.

Works such as Poems and Dances from the East bring violin, clarinet, piano, erhu, pipa, and guzheng into a shared ensemble. Rather than asking the instruments to surrender their individual histories, I seek forms in which their differences create tension, dialogue, and unexpected beauty. Himalayan Suite, for violin and piano, approaches this interest through imagined landscapes. Its three movements evoke flowing mountain streams, sunlight transformed into fugato, and the monumental stillness of frozen peaks.

Another part of my work investigates “free microtonality,” my term for the use of flexible, independently conceived tuning relationships rather than a single established microtonal system. This allows pitch itself to become expressive and unstable, capable of suggesting distance, friction, resonance, or altered perspective.

Across these projects, I am drawn to music as an act of encounter. My aim is to create experiences that expand the listener’s sonic imagination and reveal beauty beyond familiar categories, while remaining emotionally direct, vivid, and grounded in the expressive presence of live performers.

 

A number of my compositions have been commissioned and performed in the USA and abroad. As a violinist, I regularly perform concerts featuring my compositions. ​

Two of my most recent endeavors is creating musical compositions which mix Eastern and Western instruments and experimenting with arbitrary microtonal tunings ("free microtonality").

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My artworks have won awards, most recently an honorable mention at Blue Space Gallery International Competition:

https://www.bluespacegallery.com/wild-and-free-exhibition

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Education

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PhD - 2011 - 2016, University of Iowa

Primary advisor: David Gompper

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Double Masters of Music - 2003-2005, Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University

Primary teachers: 

Violin: Keng-Yuen Tseng

Composition: Bruno Amato

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Double Bachelors of Music - 1999-2003, Boston University ​

Primary teachers:

Violin: Dana Mazurkevich

Composition: Samuel Headrick, Martin Amlin, Richard Cornell

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(photo courtesy of Sophie Xuefei Zhang)

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