Derek Wang

27
Birthplace: Newton, United States
Studied in: New Haven and New York City, United States; Berlin, Germany
Resides in: New York City, United States

The piano was the largest piece of furniture in Derek Wang’s (Derek WAY-ng) childhood home in the suburbs of Boston. He recalls being drawn to its keyboard with “that infant urge to know by touching, at first with prods and pounds, then with awkward strikes…then little by little with the beginnings of the loving touch, confident yet exploratory.”

His parents, both Beijing-born immigrants to the United States, would put on a recording of Ludwig van Beethoven sonatas at bedtime, ostensibly to put him to sleep. “I was kept awake by the slow movement of the Appassionata,”Derek says. “I can almost trace my idea of tone to those earliest impressions of music heard in the dark and seeming to confide in you.”

Fast-forward some years, and Derek is a Creative Enterprise Fellow at The Juilliard School, where he curates and produces interdisciplinary shows. Most recently, he led a full day of free programming entitled A Place for Us to inaugurate Juilliard Station, a new street-facing performance space, with music from Leonard Bernstein to Julius Eastman to Thelonious Monk, dancers on the Broadway sidewalk, and a new work adapted from texts by urban theorist Jane Jacobs.

On his bucket list are two different pilgrimages: “To see all thirty Major League Baseball parks, and all of Marc Chagall’s works in stained glass! Those Chagalls remind me that piano-playing is also about the possibilities of negative space: as with panes of stained glass, all depends on the readiness of the notes for light to pass through.”