Visiting Abu Dhabi composer Du Yun wins Pulitzer for trafficking opera

Du Yun, who is in the capital for the inaugural Culture Summit, said she thought it was a prank when she heard she won the award.

Chinese composer Du Yun has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for music for Angel's Bone. Courtesy Giorgia Fanelli/Civitella Ranieri Foundation /Pulitzer Prizes via AP

The Chinese-born composer Du Yun, who is in Abu Dhabi this week for the Culture Summit, won the Pulitzer Prize for music on Monday for Angel's Bone, an experimental opera that explores the psychology behind human trafficking.

The one-act opera, which premièred last year at New York’s Prototype festival, takes place in a nondescript suburb in the United States and is filled with spiritual symbolism.

“Mr. and Mrs. X.E”, riven by marital strife and financial problems, enslave and victimise a pair of angels who stumble upon the property.

Du Yun said she thought it was a prank when she heard she won the award, whose previous recipients include the leading American composers Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, John Adams and Steve Reich as well as jazz great Wynton Marsalis.

“To win the award with this piece means so much for me,” she wrote on Facebook. “Let’s keep being part of the dialogue. Let art be that poetic space where we can initiate such conversations.”

The music of Angel's Bone reinforces the unsettling plot with a loud electronic beat set to a chamber orchestra and choir. At the premiere, one of the angels was played by Jennifer Charles, the singer of the New York dream rock band Elysian Fields.

Du Yun, who was born in China and came to the US legally, said that she wrote the opera partly out of frustration on the lack of understanding about immigration.

“People talk about the immigrants and have this idea that this is bad, we don’t want them in, ‘why don’t they just get legal,’ or build a wall,” she said ahead of the premiere, months before Donald Trump’s election on an anti-immigration platform.

She hoped her opera would show another side — that even native-born people can behave in ways they did not expect.

“If we are given the opportunity to make profit, then maybe we are not so different from each other,” she said. “I think the dark psychology of human beings is very interesting as an artist.”

Du Yun frequently works with video artists and has written another opera that touches metaphorically on immigration, Zolle, about a woman caught between death and afterlife.

Her works also include music for a 2009 theatrical take on the classic French film Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Angel's Bone features a libretto by Royce Vavrek, who has also worked on modern operas, including JFK on the Kennedy assassination and an adaptation of Lars von Trier's bleak movie Breaking the Waves.

Agence France Presse