Jonathan Wang Hou

18-year-old pianist-composer Jonathan Wang Hou, nicknamed Soda, hails from the San Francisco Bay. Recently named a 2021 Aspen Music Festival and School fellow, he has played for such artists as Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Jon Nakamatsu in masterclass at summer festivals across the United States, where he has also had opportunity to work with Zhou Long and other master composers.

His works have been performed to acclaim at international competitions and symposiums, as in 2016, when Wang Hou premiered his Zwei Rhapsodien, op. 1, which received praise by award-winning composer Thomas Kotcheff as “thoroughly convincing” and “masterfully constructed,” a “Brahmsian … infusion of classical structure with late-romantic idiosyncrasies … and a contemporary color.” His Klavierstücke opp. 2 & 3 went on to win first prize in the 2018 international Vienna Golden Key piano composition competition, and finalized in the 2018 Tribeca New Music competition. The same year, Hermes, an animated film for which he composed the orchestral score in 2016, was selected as First Place Festival Favorite in the Embarras Valley Film Festival and shown at the FECEA and the Austin Film Festival, among others.

He studies piano with Joseph Kalichstein at the Juilliard School and Anna Semyanovsky in Mountain View, and will enter Columbia University in the fall of 2021, where he plans to study mathematics. In his spare time, Soda enjoys backpacking, reading, painting, and learning languages.