Macao born composer Lam Bun Ching began studying piano at the age of seven and gave her first public solo recital at fifteen. In 1976, she received a Bachelor degree in piano performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She then accepted a scholarship from the University of California at San Diego, where she studied composition with Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and earned a Doctorate in 1981. In the same year, she was invited to join the music faculty of the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where she taught until 1986. Lam Bun Ching has won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1991 as well as first prizes at the Aspen Music Festival, the Northwest Composer’s Symposium, and the highest honour at the Shanghai Music Competition, which was the first international composers’ contest to take place in China. She has also been a recipient of numerous grants and fellowship, the most recent ones being a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Miss Lam’s compositions have been performed by orchestras all over the world and featured in numerous music festivals. She was a composer-in-residence at the American Dance Festival, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East, and the Music Alive! Composer-in-Residence with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra for the 2000-2001 season. In addition to being an excellent composer, Bun Ching Lam is a pianist and conductor, frequently travelling around the world to perform at music festivals. Amongst many others, she performed the piano solo of her commissioned work Saudades de Macau II at the 19th Macao International Music Festival in 2005, and has also conducted her own works in collaboration with the Cosmopolitan Orchestra of New York, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and Macao Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Lam has served as Visiting Professor in Composition at the School of Music of Yale University, and at Bennington College in Vermont, and was also Composer-in-Residence at Mills College in California. She now lives and works in New York and Paris. Her music has been recorded on CRI, Tzadik, Nimbus, Koch International Classics, Sound Aspect and Tellus.
