Title: Columba
Commission: 2012
Completed: 2015
Instrumentation: solo piano and shadow box
Premiere Location: SUNY New Paltz
Premiere Ensemble: Alex Peh
Notes:

Described by the New York Times as “spellbinding” and “delightfully quirky matched with interpretive sensitivity,” Phyllis is a composer and sound artist whose music draws from her tactile exploration of object and sound. She has performed her music at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Abrons Arts Center, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Los Angeles County Museum, Baryshnikov Arts Center and numerous other places.

Phyllis started playing the piano at the age of five and came across the toy piano as an adult. As a pianist, she immediately fell in love with the instrument’s possibilities. Being bound to no history, the toy piano became her grounds to develop her personal voice, one that defies genre and reflects her third culture kid experience. The unrefined and raw tone of the instrument inspired Phyllis to create very personal miniature theatre works (The Memoirist, The Slumber Thief and Down The Rabbit-Hole) in collaboration with her partner and video artist, Rob Dietz. One of her interdisciplinary solo works, Lighting The Dark, was described by the New York Times as “by turns poignant, humorous and virtuosic, Chen’s performance offered a slyly subversive take on issues relating to femininity, technology and power . . . the looping, spellbinding music . . . became a fitting tribute to the modest, repetitive, yet quietly heroic work of women.”

Phyllis was named a 2019 Cage-Cunningham Fellow by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, an annual fellowship curated by the legendary ballet dancer  Mikhail Baryshnikov. Phyllis has received commissions by ensembles and organizations such as the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE ensemble), A Far Cry, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Claire Chase Density Project, Opera Cabal Opera SHOP, Singapore International Festival of the Arts, the Roulette-Jerome, Look & Listen Festival, Jacob Greenberg, and others. She has received grants from New Music USA, Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, NYSCA (via Concert Artists Guild and Look & Listen Festival), Fromm Foundation and the Pew Heritage Trust via Christ Church of Philadelphia. She is currently working on a new carillon work commissioned by the Guild of Carilloners and a prepared music box work for the visual-art duo LigoranoReese supported by the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.