BIO
Derrick Wang (b. 1984, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) began teaching himself to compose in the late '80s and has been at it ever since. As a child, he studied piano at the Peabody Institute and harmony with Bruno Amato. In high school, he wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musical Prom, which won a staged reading at the 2002 CENTERSTAGE Young Playwrights Festival.
He then attended Harvard University, where he studied composition with Julian Anderson, Joshua Fineberg, and Elliott Gyger, wrote music for two Hasty Pudding musicals, received the MacColl Prize and Green Fellowship in composition, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2006 with an AB magna cum laude in Music. His string quartet Playground, written in college, received a 2007 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.
He is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree in Composition at the Yale School of Music, where his teachers include Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, and Ingram Marshall. In addition to composing, he has arranged/orchestrated music for such groups as the Bernstein Festival Ensemble at Harvard, the Juilliard Choral Union (Judith Clurman, conductor) and the New York Pops.
