Award-Winning Composer Shuying Li to Join Gonzaga’s Music Faculty

SPOKANE, Wash. — Shuying Li, an award-winning composer with advanced degrees in musical composition, and a research faculty member at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, will join the Gonzaga University music faculty this fall as an assistant professor of composition and music theory.

Shuying said she was welcomed and impressed by Gonzaga’s students, faculty and staff during a campus visit in January.

“Gonzaga’s commitment to quality education, community well-being, and leadership cultivation is truly exceptional and inspiring, and it brings me so much pride and excitement that I will get to be a part of this vibrant community,” Shuying said.

As a sophomore at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in her native China, Shuying won a scholarship to continue her undergraduate studies at The Hartt School at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition (2013). She earned Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in music composition from the University of Michigan.

Shuying made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2017 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for the premiere of the commissioned work “Out Came the Sun.” The next season, Orpheus commissioned an arrangement of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 for a collaboration with Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii that was performed more than 20 times in America and Asia. Also, she was one of the three resident composers in the Composer Librettist Development Program with the American Lyric Theater in the 2017-18 season.

As part of a deep record of achievement, her 2015 orchestral work, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” was named a winning work to participate in the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s Edward T. Cone Composition Institute, where it was performed by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. In 2013, her orchestral work overture to “The Siege” was selected as the winning composition in both the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Libby Larsen Prize and the Seattle Symphony’s Celebrate Asia Composition Competition, and received a world premiere by the Seattle Symphony.

She has received many awards, including The American Prize, the International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition, the New Jersey Composers’ Guild Commission Competition, the International Huang Zi Composition Competition, the International J. Dorfman Composition Competition, among others.

Believing music has the power to connect people through universal passions and values, she founded the Four Corners Ensemble in 2017. As artistic director and conductor of the ensemble, her efforts have led to prestigious residencies and performances in the United States and abroad.

For more information, visit her website at www.shuyingli.com; to arrange an interview, please contact Peter Tormey at tormey@gonzaga.edu.