BlackBox Ensemble performs the US premiere of PIPA BOY: Three Scenes from the Post-Diaspora by Baldwin Giang (2024 Fellow), a multimedia work for ensemble and pipa player exploring global identity and the conditions of belonging and nonbelonging. The video part features collaborations with three international filmmakers. The program also includes work by Anthony Cheung (2013 Fellow), Misato Mochizuki, and Giang’s song cycle butterfly, posthumously.

To receive a special 15 percent discount on tickets, use the code FIFTEENOFF.

This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice [at] nationalsawdust.org (boxoffice[at]nationalsawdust[dot]org).

This program is generously supported by American Academy in Rome.

Biographies

Baldwin Giang is a Seattle-based composer and multi-instrumentalist, and winner of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. He was composer-in-residence with the Louisville Orchestra from 2024-2025. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum in DC. International festivals that have presented his work include IRCAM’s Manifeste (FR), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL), Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi (IT), Ostrava Days (CZ), and Aspen Music Festival. Commissioners and collaborators have included New Jersey Symphony, Albany Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, New York Youth Symphony, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Riot Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Tanglewood Music Festival. Baldwin is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan. He won a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Prix Ravel, ASCAP’s Morton Gould and Leo Kaplan Awards, Fulbright fellowship to Taiwan, Gaudeamus Prize nomination, and Yale’s Beekman Cannon Friends and Abraham Beekman Cox Prizes. He resides in Seattle and serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at Pacific Lutheran University.

BlackBox Ensemble is a New York-based collective of contemporary performers reshaping the boundaries of new music. We treat sound as a living, porous medium shaped by genre-defiance, interdisciplinary dialogue, and the urgency of the present moment. We believe that music, as a cultural medium, fills the role of the “black box,” enacting an ambiguous but vital relationship between artistic expression and social life. In doing so, we strive to follow the inspiration of the theatrical definition—to cultivate connection among artists and audiences, and to foster innovation as a creative laboratory for adaptable experimentation. Founded in 2018, our wide-ranging projects have brought us from major concert halls to museum galleries, the mountainous landscape of the Berkshires, the woods of Michigan, the Hudson River waterfront, and an underground karaoke bar in midtown Manhattan. Our 2024-2025 season has consisted of concerts in New York and around the country, including the season-opening performance of the Southern Exposure Series at the University of South Carolina, a residency at the University of Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition, performances Julius Eastman’s Femenine with the Kyle Marshall Choreography Company at PS 21 in Chatham, NY, and performances on Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival and the Whitney Museum’s Decade Downtown celebration. Past projects include a site-responsive, outdoor music and dance performance at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the staged premiere of Borrowed Landscape, a radio play by German playwright duo tauchgold with music by Dai Fujikura, at the Noguchi Museum and Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art, and our inaugural BlackBox Festival, in celebration of our 5th anniversary, which featured multiple world and NYC premieres and included our debut at NYC’s historic Roulette Intermedium.