Previous Page (Articles/News)Lucia Hwong's music contains an outstanding amount of energy, somewhat tinged with minimalist Western influences, in a perfect fusion with her peculiar homage to her ancestral Chinese roots.
Composer Lucia Hwong makes a kind of music which in a way can be said to belong to the school created by Kitaro. Born in Hawaii, although settled in Los Angeles, she is an intimist composer who has also been an actress and dancer. The daughter of internationally famous actress Lisa Lu, and the granddaughter of a great diva of the Chinese opera, Lucia would be raised in a remarkably artistic environment from an early age. Brought up in the ancestral Chinese music, theatre and dance, Lucia was to continue with the family tradition in the arts, taught by the best professors, like for instance Henry Miller, a good family friend, who helps her develop her creativity in such a way that it pours out in her live performances. Lucia learns to trust her imagination, going to the outermost limits, no matter where this will lead her to.
The artist specializes in Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), and then moves to New York to pursue postgraduate studies in ethnomusicology at the Columbia University. Hwong doctorates in music, having chosen as her doctorate topic the operas by Philip Glass, which allows her to contact this well known minimalist composer. With him she also learns the art of making business in the musical arena.
Lucia Hwong's music contains an outstanding amount of energy, somewhat tinged with minimalist Western influences that remind the listener of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and maybe Philip Glass himself, in a perfect fusion with her peculiar homage to her ancestral Chinese roots. Her music does not lack, in the opinion of some experts, a certain dose of female eroticism, which might be reflected in her multiple textures which alternate with soft images of an almost pastoral character, and that in actual fact shape her personal dual nature. No wonder Philip Glass himself has commented, with respect to her album "House of Sleeping Beauties", released by the label Private Music, that Lucia Hwong is a young representative of the dual tradition that does not limit herself to borrowing from one culture or to integrating the sounds of the other, but rather, she succeeds in achieving a melting of the Eastern and Western cultures which turns out to be truly refreshing and innovative, charming and evoking as well.