Sean Yung-Hsiang Wang is a native of Taiwan. American Record Guide has called him “a brilliant violinist” whose “quality [of] playing is exceedingly high.” He is Director of Academics at the Glenn Gould School and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Before that, he taught at the Longy School of Bard College (Director of Orchestra, Chair of Strings), University of Connecticut (viola), University of Houston (violin), and Vanderbilt University (violin and music history).
His solo and chamber music performances have taken him across North America, Europe, and Asia. An advocate of contemporary intercultural music, he is Co-Artistic Director of NYC-based INTERWOVEN, which promotes new works that combine Western and East Asian elements. In addition, he was associated with Musiqa in Houston and served as Violinist-in-Residence of the Guild of Composers, Inc. in NYC. On Baroque violin, he performed as a concertmaster with Grammy-nominated Ars Lyrica Houston, and his four-disc recording of Johann Jakob Walther's Hortulus Chelicus (1688) received excellent reviews.
He has given violin master classes at major universities in North America (e.g., Michigan, Notre Dame) and Asia (e.g., National Taiwan Normal University, Soochow), and has taught and performed at summer festivals in Italy, Denmark, Germany, France, and the USA.
On the podium, as the Longy School’s Director of Orchestra, he conducted symphonies, concertos, new compositions, and full opera productions (e.g., Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Menotti’s The Medium, Gluck’s Paride ed Elena, Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor). He has also led ensembles of the Juilliard School, Stanford University, and Cremona Academy in performance.
As a music scholar, he has presented on topics ranging from Asian-American interculturalism to 19th-century performance practice at conferences (e.g., College Music Society, American Musicological Society) and has written articles for Notes, the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association and San Francisco Classical Voice.
A full-scholarship student throughout his formative years, he studied at Curtis (B.M., Violin), Juilliard (M.M., Orchestral Conducting, as a Bruno Walter Memorial Scholarship recipient), and Stanford (Joint Ph.D., Musicology and Humanities). His principal teachers were Rafael Druian (violin), Otto-Werner Mueller (conducting), Jacques-Louis Monod (theory), and William Mahrt (musicology).