MELISSA HUI (b. 1966) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received degrees from the University of British Columbia, the California Institute of the Arts and Yale University. Her teachers include Jacob Druckman, Mel Powell, and Earl Kim.

She has received numerous awards, including first prizes from the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra Canadian Composers Competition and the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne International Forum; grand prize at the 1996 CBC Young Composers Competition; finalist at International Gaudeamus Music Week in 1996; grants from the Canada Council, Meet the Composer, and The ASCAP Foundation; and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.

Her commissioned works include Aljira for the Oregon Symphony, Inner Voices for the the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Saskatoon Symphony, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, As I Lie Still for the Hammerhead Consort (Edmonton), From Dusk to Dawn for New Music Concerts (Toronto), Woman: Songs on poems by Sandra Cisneros for NUMUS (Waterloo, Ontario), Lacrymosa for Jeunesses Musicales du Canada (Ottawa), Rush for the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, Common Ground for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Bop! for the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Changes for the Vancouver New Music Society, Speaking in Tongues for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Montréal), Always for the Peninsula Symphony with Stanford Taiko and Symphonic Chorus, Between you for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, In the Breath of the Night for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Dog Days for the Dogs of Desire amplified ensemble (Albany), Foreign Affairs for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and Sunrise over Tiananmen Square, a soundtrack for the Oscar-nominated documentary from the National Film Board of Canada.

Her works have been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, the California EAR Unit, the Esprit Orchestra in Toronto, at Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, the Focus Festival and MoMA Summergarden in New York City, among others.

Current projects include commissioned works for the Kronos Quartet, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, oboist Lawrence Cherney with the Elmer Isler Singers (Toronto), the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec (Montréal), and New Millenium Ensemble (NYC) as the annual collaborative venture with the Common Sense Composers Collective. Upcoming events include performances by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall and at the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series. Her works, San Rocco and Speaking in Tongues, have been released on Centredisc and UMMUS labels, respectively. As a member of the Common Sense Composers Collective, her chamber work, Solstice, was released on CRI's Emergency Series in 1997.

She has been an Assistant Professor of composition and theory at Stanford University in California since 1994.

Melissa Hui Website

Common Sense Composers Collective

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