Polish of Vietnamese descent composer and pianist, Ania Vu (née Vũ Đặng Minh Anh) writes music that explores the interplay between the sound properties of the words and their meanings, musical energy related to form, and varied notions of time. She also enjoys crafting her own text—often in Polish—that serves as a sonic, formal, and expressive guiding reference in her musical writing process.
As the winner of the Boston New Music Initiative's 9th Annual Commissioning Competition (2021) and prize recipient of the Megalopolis Saxophone Orchestra's Call for Scores (2020), Ania has worked with leading new music ensembles and musicians, including the Grossman Ensemble, Daedalus and Mivos string quartets, Sō Percussion, the TAK, International Contemporary and Kamratōn Ensembles, the Iridium Saxophone Quartet, pianist Eunmi Ko, percussionist Robert McCormick, and sopranos Rose Hegele and Paulina Swierczek. She has received recognition and fellowships from ASCAP, the American Opera Project, Tanglewood, the I-Park Foundation, and her music has been featured at festivals and conferences, including the Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), the Research on Contemporary Composition Conference, ISCM's Virtual Collaboration Series, Tage Neuer Musik in Regensburg (Germany), Society of Composers, College Music Society Regional Conferences, International New Music Festival at the University of South Florida, Red Note New Music Festival, Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, Valencia International Performance Academy (Spain), and soundSCAPE (Italy).
Ania is the 2022-23 Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago's Center for Contemporary Composition. She recently completed her fellowship with the Composers & the Voice, a two-year training program that provides experience writing for the voice and opera stage. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with Anna Weesner, James Primosch, Marcos Balter, and Amy Williams. In 2017, she received her B.M. in composition and theory from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Robert Morris, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Oliver Schneller, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and David Liptak. Her first composition teacher was her mother, Đặng Hồng Anh.
Together with pianist Eunmi Ko, they started an initiative called The Music She Writes, a series of four virtual concerts featuring 25 works by Asian female composers. This project aims to highlight the diversity and significance of music by a very large, yet underrepresented community.
Ania is also an actively performing pianist and a passionate music educator. For more information about her piano background, performances and teaching, please scroll down to Piano.
Outside of music, Ania has a deep interest in languages, and speaks fluent English, Polish, French, and Vietnamese, in addition to having studied Latin and German; currently, she is learning modern Greek. She also enjoys traveling - having visited 30 countries so far -, wandering in all kinds of museums, and ballroom dancing.
