Composer and multidimensional faculty artist Du Yun was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences this week alongside 250 members of the 2024 class. The artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the new class are “recognized for their excellence and invited to uphold the Academy’s mission of engaging across disciplines and divides.”
“I’m very honored to receive this incredible recognition,” says Du Yun, whose Angel’s Bone received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. That opera, a potent exploration of sex trafficking and economic strife told through the harrowing experience of two fallen angels, brought to wider acclaim Du Yun’s visionary storytelling and emotional intensity, elements she’s honed in her creative output since: the opera Sweet Land (named Best New 2021 Opera by Music Critics Association of North America), chamber works (Air Glow, nominated for a Best Classical Contemporary Composition Grammy Award, 2019), orchestral works (such as the multimedia piece Where We Lost Our Shadows, performed and recorded by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra last year).
She’s picked up other prizes and awards along the way: a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the Berlin Prize (2021), a Creative Capital Award (2022), the Vilcek Prize in Music (2023), and the Harvard Centennial Medal (2023), to name a few. “How weird and odd to be a grownup! Enfant Terrible aside, I’m moved by the Academy’s commitment to honoring individuals from diverse fields of life, all dedicated to shaping our society,” Du Yun says. “So many fellows have been my role models and I wish I, too, could be one of the inspirations to our future generations. For now, I will still keep my own aspirations.”
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences was created in 1780 and, as stated in its charter, recognizes that the arts and sciences are “necessary to the wealth, peace, independence, and happiness of a people.” More than 14,500 members have been elected since, and the 2024 cohort includes distinguished scholars, researchers, and thinkers, as well as artists and writers exploring the diversity of life to which Du Yun refers, such as Dawoud Bey, Samuel R. Delany, Vijay Gupta, Janif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Walter E. Mosely.
Recently, Du Yun’s Ears of the Book, a pipa concerto co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra, was premiered in New York and Detroit and slated to be performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra next season. Her new The Gates are (nearly) open, an open-air opera with a libretto by the late Beat poet ruth weiss[CQ], debuts at the Munich Biennale in June and the Austrian chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien performs Where We Lost Our Shadows at the Vienna Festival the same month. Before that, Du Yun and her avant-pop outfit OK Miss play the Bang on a Can Long Play 2024 festival over the May 3 through 5 weekend throughout Brooklyn, NY.
She also travels this summer as part of her FutureTradition initiative that brings together a team of artists, scholars with regional oral traditional artists, and practitioners to create new works. “I’m looking forward to working with first-generation school children in the Yunnan region in China, working with the Yunnan Rainforest Conservation Foundation. We will bring together revitalizations of oral traditions in a sustainable environment.
“Last but not the least, I’m very looking forward to two recording releases with our Peabody orchestra, under Marin Alsop and Joseph Young.”