Wu Fei

Wu Fei is a classically trained composer, singer and renowned master of the guzheng — the 21-string Chinese zither. She has taken her music around the world, appearing at such venues as the Forbidden City in Beijing, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery, MoMA (New York), the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. She has performed at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, Vossa Jazz in Norway, the Europalia Festival in Belgium, and Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.

Wu plays in the guzheng’s vernacular — a musical language at least 2,500 years old – mixing Western classical and Chinese traditions with a contemporary, idiosyncratic sound. She composes for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan, and orchestra.  

The Philadelphia Orchestra has performed her composition for chamber orchestra, Hello Gold Mountain. The work was inspired by the real stories of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai from Europe in World War II and built new lives in China, and features Wu Fei herself on guzheng and vocals and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz (of the Silk Road Ensemble) on oud. Hello Gold Mountain has also been performed by the Winnipeg Symphony, Bellingham Symphony, at the National Gallery of Art with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, and by Chatterbird Ensemble at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Wu has appeared in concerts and workshops at numerous universities and institutions around the world, including Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Chautauqua Institution, UNC Chapel Hill, UC Irvine, Butler University, Vanderbilt University, the China Conservatory of Music, the Norwegian Academy of Music and the University of Los Andes of Colombia.

Wu’s work in television has included compositions for AMC’s Hell on Wheels and PBS’ web series The History of White People in America.

Her many commissions have ranged from a composition for Percussions Claviers de Lyon, which premiered in the Forbidden City, to live performances in Paris and Tokyo for luxury brand Hermès.  

Wu has collaborated with artists from many different disciplines and genres, ranging from Emmy-winning directors Pierce Freelon and Jon Halperin to Grammy-winning musicians Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn and percussionist Billy Martin (Medeski-Martin-Wood) to avant-garde composers John Zorn and Fred Frith. In 2024, she launched House of Wu Fei in Ghent, Belgium with Dijf Sanders, Simon Segers and Louise van den Heuvel.

In solo programs, Wu Fei presents a rich combination of contemporary guzheng compositions and music from the traditional guzheng repertory from the ancient schools of Shandong, Henan, Chaozhou and others. As a singer, she also presents Kunqu opera, Peking opera and Chinese folk music. As a composer, Wu Fei plays her original guzheng solo works inspired by traveling the world while missing her old traditions. As an improviser, she draws on her classical training, the riches of global music of the last decades, and American folk music. Her solo concerts are pure magic, spellbinding the public with her sensitivity, charisma, and virtuosity.

Wu has released two solo recordings and two collaborative albums — one with classical guitarist Gyan Riley, and the other with singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn, released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and listed among the “Best Albums of 2020” by The Times’ culture section. Each of Wu’s recordings exhibits her unique solo improvisational vocabulary, her knowledge of Chinese traditional and folk music, and the craft of her compositions for Western classical chamber orchestras.

She received her early musical education at the China Conservatory of Music and earned a master’s in composition at Mills College in California before immersing herself in New York’s downtown improvisation scene at venues including The Stone, where she has frequently performed and curated. A native of Beijing, Wu currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.