Darren Xu

Chinese Canadian composer Darren Xu is currently completing a PhD at the Royal College of Music, where he was recently awarded an Artist Diploma. Darren enjoys writing music for acoustic instruments, electronics, films, dance, and other cross-disciplinary collaborations. Darren has had the opportunity to work with various collaborators, including Standing Wave, the Wallace Collection, the English National Ballet School, Barcelona Modern Ensemble, Roadrunner Trio, TorQ Percussion Quartet, Piano-Erhu Project (PEP), Trio Immersio, Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra, and members of Divertimento Ensemble and Prague Modern.

Recent collaborations include solo performances by Riccardo Acciarino, Aleksander Gabrys, Malin Sieberns, and Anna Stavelova at Divertimento Ensemble Rondò 2024 (Italy), Novalis Festival (Croatia), Festival Mixtur (Spain), and Echofluxx 24 (Czechia), respectively. His first orchestral composition, To Liberate, was premiered by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra at the Winnipeg New Music Festival in January 2023, and was subsequently read by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. His piano trio, with love, I will get to you, was premiered by Trio Immersio at the Iceberg Institute in Vienna, and later performed at the Sonic Boom Festival in Vancouver. The subsequent edition of the festival saw the premiere of Darren’s saxophone quartet, Whirlwind, by Saxophilia, and it was later performed again at the St. Petersburg International New Music Festival by SeVer Saxophone Quartet. Recently he was a Sandbox Composer at the Three Choirs Festival's New Voices Academy. His film score, Stargazer, was awarded Best Score by New York Film Awards in November 2018.

Darren’s research project examines the speech qualities of languages, especially Cantonese, and how they can inform orchestration and composition. Phonetic properties such as intonation, inflection, consonants, and timbral (vowel) shifts will be examined, and their characteristics will inspire compositions that mimic and distort the voice. These compositions will primarily be for acoustic instruments and/or electronics. Darren received a BCom, BMus, and a MMus from UBC.

Faculties / departments: Research

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