From the Studio: Composer Wang Lu scores human history and connection through music and teaching

Lu joined the Brown University faculty in 2015, where her coursework includes composition, music theory, orchestration and graduate seminars. She embeds her commitment to storytelling into her role as a teacher, aiming to connect one-on-one with Brown students and understand what they are seeking to express.

Supporting students' academic journeys through the Open Curriculum and a liberal arts experience "fulfills something I didn't do when I was a kid," said Lu, whose secondary schooling and college education were entirely focused on music.

"The most rewarding experience has been to get to know the students," Lu said. "I really value the human-to-human interaction, because there's a wide range of backgrounds and cultures in our classrooms, so I really see that as a gift to get to know them."

Telling stories, exploring history through music

The bustling, lively city of 10 million people where Lu grew up hummed with construction noise and music spilling out of shops and restaurants - so much so that she was unaware of the difference between natural and manmade sounds until she moved to the U.S., she said.

Having moved away and lived in New York, Berlin, Rome, Beijing, Chicago and Providence, Lu became attuned to drastically changing sonic environments, as illustrated in her compositions.

"Urban construction noise, ocean waves, café ambient sounds, Catholic church bells, and different kinds of subway tracks' squeaking noise - all these sounds reflect human life and culture," Lu said. "I don't seek to avoid or exclude them from my writing - instead, I embrace them."

On her album "Urban Inventory," for example, she fused environmental sounds taken from public parks - like chirping birds, conversations and passing cars - with modernist instrumental timbres, distorted pop songs from the '90s into ethereal melodies, and transliterated Indigenous poetry into microtonal textures.