Haotian Yu, composition

Haotian Yu (born 1998 in Shanghai, China; lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt) is a Canadian composer. His music constructs formal systems from speculative analyses of Chinese musical traditions and related social practices.

Haotian Yu studied at the HfMDK Frankfurt (with support from the DAAD Postgraduate Scholarship) and the Eastman School of Music (with support from the Lois S. Rogers Full Scholarship), with Orm Finnendahl, Michael Reudenbach, Oliver Schneller, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, among others. Additional studies include important exchanges with Mark Andre, Annesley Black, Stefano Gervasoni, George Lewis, Liza Lim, Sarah Nemtsov, Stefan Prins, and Rolf Wallin, among others, and formative early private studies with Brian Cherney and Steven Gellman.

Collaborators for recent projects include ensemble mosaik, Freesound (Toronto), AIR contemporary music collective (Beijing), Jaume Darbra Fa, and Michael Murphy. He was an artist in residence at the Akademie der Künste Berlin from 2022-2023 as a recipient of the Berlin Fellowship, and is the recipient of eight SOCAN Foundation (Canada) Young Composer Awards (including the 2023 Grand Prize), and has been twice included in the Canadian Section submission to the ISCM World Music Days.

Also active in new music administration and curation, he is an artistic director for the Beijing-based AIR contemporary music collective (since 2018). His scholarly writings – addressing the intersections of new music with accelerationism, phenomenology, and social systems theory – have been broadcast by Südwestrundfunk and published in Perspectives of New Music.