Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Angel Lam ’10ArtA

By the staff | 12:22pm October 16 2009

She started composing when she was nine years old. Now, at 31, Angel Lam ’10ArtA is traveling the Silk Road. An artist diploma candidate at the Yale School of Music—where she’s working with Martin Bresnick and Aaron Jay Kernis—Lam wrote a piece on the new album by the Silk Road Ensemble, the worldwide musicians’ collective founded by Yo-Yo Ma. Lam’s composition, “Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain,” was inspired by childhood memories of her grandmother’s death. Raised in Hong Kong and California, Lam says her music expresses “East Asian femininity. There are very few East Asian female composers writing feminine music. I go to school at Yale right now and a lot of my colleagues, mostly male, don’t write music like this.” Even for such an accomplished artist, this is a big week. Off the Map, the Silk Road ensemble’s first album without Ma, was digitally released October 13. On October 15, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra premiered another Lam composition, Awakening from a Disappearing Garden—a cello concerto commissioned by Carnegie Hall and showcasing none other than Ma himself.

Filed under Music, school of music, alumnae
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