EAST / WEST

The Asian Diaspora in America

Saturday, May 22, 2027 - 4pm
Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral

19 S. 38th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19104

The 153rd season embraces America’s founding motto — E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one” — by centering and uplifting those artists who choose to live and create in America. In a time of growing animosity toward immigrants, we celebrate composers with roots across Asia who now live, teach, and make music in the United States, weaving together influences  from Seoul to Guangzhou, Mumbai to Manila, into a single afternoon of choral music.

At its center is a world premiere by Adrian Wong, a Hong Kong-born composer now based in Philadelphia and on faculty at the Curtis Institute, whose music bridges Chinese and Western traditions.a Hong Kong-born composer based in Philadelphia whose work lives at the intersection of Chinese and Western culture. An alumnus of the University of Michigan and the Curtis Institute of Music, Wong also serves at Curtis on the Musical Studies Faculty and as Coordinator of Community Partnerships. 

Wong is joined by composers who each move fluidly between musical worlds: Reena Esmail's Ta-Re-Ki-Ta fuses Hindustani and Western classical idioms with irrepressible energy; Chen Yi brings her signature blend of Chinese folk material and Western form to Know You How Many Petals Falling?; Saunder Choi's June Jasmine explores his Filipino-Chinese identity; Hyo-Won Woo arranges Arirang, Korea's beloved folk melody of longing and endurance; and Paul Chihara — who spent part of his childhood in a WWII internment camp — offers the haunting Lie Lightly, Gentle Earth. Works by Ily Matthew Maniano, Princess Te Rangi Pai, and Anuj Bhutani complete the program's global reach.

The concert comes home with Philadelphia's own Melissa Dunphy, an Australian-American composer of Greek and Chinese heritage who immigrated to the U.S. in 2003 and has since become one of choral music's most vital voices. Her Waves of Gallipoli, built from the epitaphs of Australian and New Zealand soldiers lost in WWI, sets grief gently to the sound of the sea — closing the season not just in remembrance, but in the quiet reminder that even loss, carried together, can become something beautiful.