Today we’d like to introduce you to Haihui Zhang.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I am a composer currently living and working in San Diego, where I am pursuing my PhD in composition at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Looking back, my musical path was never a predetermined trajectory, but a journey that gradually took shape through deviation, reflection, and continual re-understanding. Even so, music was never an extracurricular choice for me—it entered a highly professionalized context at an early stage.
I grew up in a musical family, with both of my parents working in the field of music. Music formed the foundation of my earliest experiences: I began studying piano at the age of four, alongside systematic training in ear training and music theory. From the beginning, music was not simply a skill to be practiced, but a language through which I learned to think and listen. Despite growing up in this environment, my parents never mapped out a predetermined path for me. Instead, they consistently encouraged me to explore, to experiment, and to gradually form my own judgment through different possibilities.
During my middle school years, this sense of openness came into conflict with a rigid, exam-oriented educational environment. That period was challenging, marked by a growing sense of dissonance and isolation. During that time, music shifted from something I studied to a space where I could momentarily step away from external pressures and process my emotions. Sitting at the piano, I did not need to explain myself or meet expectations—I only needed to listen. Looking back, that was the first moment I understood music not merely as a subject of study, but as an inner support. By the time I reached high school, choosing music as my future path felt instinctive.
When I entered high school, I was admitted to the Music Middle School affiliated to Shanghai Conservatory of Music through a dual focus in both piano and composition, formally entering an intensive professional training system. In fact, prior to entering the conservatory environment, years of piano performance training, along with systematic study in ear training and music theory, had already laid a solid foundation. This early preparation allowed me to maintain a high level of technical and aural sensitivity, and to develop a clear sense of musical structure at an early stage. With this foundation in place, my studies in high school were not merely about accumulating skills, but about navigating parallel paths of performance and composition.
It was through this process that I gradually realized that, while performance remained central to my musicianship, composition offered a more direct way to engage with the questions that were increasingly forming within me. This was not a sudden change of direction, but a gradual clarification made from within a professional context—one that ultimately led me to establish composition as my primary focus.
After completing my training at high school, I continued my studies within the professional conservatory system, entering the Manhattan School of Music to complete my undergraduate and master’s degrees. Through rigorous and systematic training, I continued to refine both my technical grounding and my compositional thinking, gradually developing a clearer artistic orientation.
During this period, I composed a number of orchestral and chamber works, many of which entered professional performance contexts at an early stage, including collaborations with orchestras and appearances at music festivals. Being immersed in a professional creative environment from a relatively young age meant that artistic standards, expectations, and pressure arrived simultaneously. While these experiences accelerated my development, they also quietly accumulated a sense of anxiety.
In my first year of graduate study, after completing an orchestral work that received its world premiere with a major orchestra in China, I encountered my first significant creative impasse. The attention, praise, and criticism surrounding that project led me to question whether my subsequent work could sustain—or surpass—the expectations that had formed around me. This pressure gradually became overwhelming, and for a long period of time, I found myself unable to compose. It was a moment of profound uncertainty about both my work and my artistic direction.
During this difficult period, my mentor Reiko Füting offered steady and generous support. Rather than urging me to produce new work, he encouraged me to listen, to explore unfamiliar musical worlds, and to remain patient with uncertainty. Through this process, I began to recognize that nearly a decade of professional conservatory training had given me a strong technical foundation, while also subtly narrowing my field of vision. I came to understand that composition depends not only on technique or talent, but on time, lived experience, and sustained engagement with the world beyond music.
Standing at the crossroads between my master’s degree and doctoral study, I chose to step outside the conservatory system I had long inhabited and move to a comprehensive research university—the University of California, San Diego. San Diego is a city shaped by cultural openness, and UCSD actively encourages dialogue across disciplines. Studying with Lei Liang introduced me to fundamentally different ways of thinking about sound: materials, natural environments, and scientific phenomena could all become integral to musical practice, and sound itself could function as a way of understanding the world.
This learning environment was entirely new to me. During my doctoral studies, I often stepped beyond the composition department, auditing courses in science, humanities, and environmental studies, and gradually integrating these perspectives into my creative work. As my field of vision expanded, I also found my way out of the creative stagnation I had previously experienced, rebuilding my relationship with music from a broader and more open foundation.
My compositional language is deeply influenced by Eastern aesthetics, particularly the sense of imagery, spatiality, and temporality found in Chinese poetry. This sensitivity to sound and structure did not emerge suddenly at any single moment, but was continuously tested and refined through early training and long-term professional practice. Rather than directly quoting traditional materials, I am interested in translating these aesthetic sensibilities into new sonic structures and timbral relationships.
As I continue to move beyond the boundaries of music itself and engage with a wider world, my compositional voice continues to take shape. This path remains open-ended, and San Diego—along with UCSD—has become an important point of departure in my ongoing process of re-understanding both music and myself.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Looking back, the road has not been entirely smooth. One of the most significant struggles I encountered was a prolonged creative block. Much of my earlier work was driven by intuition, technical proficiency, and close engagement with the styles of composers I admired. While this stage was essential for developing craft, it primarily addressed the question of how to compose, rather than why to compose.
When I encountered this creative impasse during my graduate studies, I gradually realized that the difficulty was not a lack of technique, but a lack of a clear compositional concept—and, more importantly, a lack of clarity regarding the conceptual motivation behind my work. Technical mastery and stylistic inheritance alone were no longer sufficient to sustain the act of composition. It was precisely the experience of being unable to write that exposed this conceptual absence.
Through this struggle, my understanding of composition shifted fundamentally. I began to understand composition not as the production of stylistic artifacts or the demonstration of technique, but as a mode of conceptual thinking—one grounded in how a composer understands the world and situates themselves within it. For me, a musical work now begins not with technique or style, but with a conceptual inquiry: a question, a position, or a form of engagement with lived experience. Only when sound is situated within such a conceptual framework does it acquire meaning.
In recent years, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, this realization has become increasingly urgent. Musical practices that rely primarily on repetition, stylistic imitation, or the extension of existing languages—without the introduction of new conceptual frameworks—can be replicated, and often optimized, by machines. What remains irreducible, however, is not technique itself, but the conceptual dimension of composition: the capacity to formulate questions, construct meaning, and situate sound within a broader intellectual and experiential context.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My creative work is primarily situated within the field of contemporary music, with a focus on orchestral and chamber music composition. I entered the professional music training system at an early stage, studying composition at the Music Middle School affiliated to Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and later completing my undergraduate and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. I am currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
In my compositional practice, Chinese culture serves as an important source of inspiration. I am particularly interested in poetic imagery, calligraphy, folk traditions, and traditional aesthetic conceptions of time, space, and imagery, and in translating these cultural experiences into contemporary musical structures, orchestration, and timbral language. According to coverage in Chinese mainstream and professional arts media, my work often begins with close observation of everyday life, using a “micro-to-macro” approach to integrate daily experience and cultural perception into coherent musical forms with a clear cultural orientation.
In recent years, I have composed a number of orchestral and chamber works that have been presented at major music festivals and performance platforms in China and abroad, including the Hangzhou Contemporary Music Festival, the “Autumn in Chengdu” International Music Season, the Chigiana International Music Festival in Italy, and the Hear Now Music Festival in the United States, as well as other international events in Europe and North America. My works have also been performed by professional orchestras and contemporary music ensembles such as the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, Sichuan Symphony Orchestra, the United Nation Orchestra, and internationally active chamber ensembles including Loadbang and Dal Niente. Chinese media reports have noted that I am among the youngest composers to collaborate with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra.
In terms of professional recognition, I have received multiple awards from domestic and international composition competitions, as well as support from various artistic funding programs. In addition to my work as a composer, I have also been recognized as a pianist, receiving awards in national-level music competitions. These experiences have enabled my works to be performed and discussed within professional contexts at different levels.
What I value most is that my works are able to be understood and presented across different cultural and performance environments, while maintaining a clear grounding in Chinese cultural perspectives and engaging in dialogue within the contemporary international music scene. Chinese media commentary has characterized my compositional approach as one that is rooted in Chinese cultural experience and that allows traditional aesthetics to find new expression in contemporary music through refined sonic treatment and rigorous structural design. This sustained and long-term artistic trajectory defines the core of my current work.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I’m always open to collaboration, especially with performers, ensembles, conductors, and organizations working with contemporary music and new pieces. I’m particularly drawn to projects where there’s real conversation during the creative process—whether that takes the form of a commission, a performance, a workshop, or a cross-disciplinary project.
For me, collaboration works best when ideas are given time to grow through rehearsal, exchange, and experimentation. I enjoy working with musicians who are genuinely curious and engaged, and who are willing to explore sound together rather than simply execute a finished score. I also value working with presenters and institutions that actively support the development of new music.
People can support my work in simple but meaningful ways: by coming to concerts, sharing performances and recordings, and spending time with the music. Many of my projects develop through ongoing relationships rather than one-off collaborations, and I value that sense of continuity.
The easiest way to connect is usually through concerts, festivals, or academic and artistic networks—spaces where shared interests can naturally turn into future collaborations. I also share updates about my work on my public composer Instagram page, which is another way to stay in touch.
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