Sound and score: Music faculty member combines research interests with creative work
Hippocrates Cheng’s interests and experiences span the globe, from player pianos to throat-singing
Chart Hippocrates Cheng’s diverse interests on a map and you’ll create a globe-spanning tapestry with a thousand points: Player pianos. Throat singing. Archiving the personal effects of late composers. Musical notation in Braille.
A native of Hong Kong, Cheng is now an assistant professor of music theory and composition at ßŮßÇÂţ» who combines composition, research and performance in his work. Also affiliated with the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, he works mainly in East Asian music, contemporary classical music and jazz.
As a child, he learned to play the violin, piano and clarinet. These instruments are different from one another, which imparted a broad perspective on their possibilities and how they fit together in the context of classical music.
“I’m really interested in sound. To me, playing an instrument is like playing a video game,” he said.
Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been a cultural crossroads where East meets West; that thread led Cheng to explore Chinese musical traditions and other Asian music in college. He taught himself throat singing in his junior year and studied the guqin, a type of traditional zither favored by Chinese literati, a few years later. During his master’s program at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he began to write compositions that featured both Chinese and Western instruments.
“This shaped my aesthetics and my path as a composer,” he said.
He also had the opportunity to engage in multimedia collaborations as an artistic director and composer, working with dancers, dramatists, projection artists and more. But while performance and composition were rewarding, Cheng was also drawn to music research. In 2019, he came to Indiana University to pursue a doctorate of music (DM) in composition; while finishing that degree, he began a PhD in music theory, and pursued interests in ethnomusicology and jazz studies.
While in Indiana, he was commissioned to create the chamber opera S, based on true stories of Asians and Asian Americans dealing with anti-Asian hate. After graduating in 2024, he headed to ßŮßÇÂţ».
“There are gaps between the music disciplines. As scholars or musicians, we sometimes don’t communicate or interact enough,” he said. “ßŮßÇÂţ» is a place that allows that kind of collaboration.”
Summer fieldwork
During an average summer — to use that term loosely — Cheng typically heads to Asia for fieldwork on traditional music and instruments. These instruments include zithers known as dan bau and phin pia, after his fieldwork in Vietnam and Thailand in 2023.
“That means I get into the scene and work with scholars and musicians of traditional music — to learn about the instrument, the theory, history or any cultural context, and also learn to play it,” he explained. “But I’m inspired by the traditional idioms to be creative and write new music for these instruments.”
But this summer took him in a different direction. First, he collaborated with TechWorks! in downtown ßŮßÇÂţ» for a cataloging project on Harvey Roehl, the first American collector of mechanical instruments such as the player piano; Roehl’s collection is now part of TechWorks!, an initiative of the Center for Technology & Innovation. A Cornell-trained engineer and former associate dean at what is now SUNY Broome Community College, Roehl also founded the Vestal Press, a publishing house that put out books on mechanical music.
Also during the summer, Cheng spent two months in Vienna, conducting research at the Arnold Schoenberg Center; the Austrian and American composer is known for the development of the 12-tone method of musical composition.
Cheng’s research focused on Schoenberg’s handwritten notational style, comparing his compositions from sketches and complete drafts to published scores. During his time in Vienna, he was interested in analyzing Schoenberg’s orchestration table, which the composer used to brainstorm and record how he would combine various orchestral instruments to create a unique soundscape.
“He planned that structurally on each instrument and each section of instruments, and with each passage and number of voices, and all together. This is something that has not been studied deeply before,” Cheng said.
In addition to studying in Vienna, Cheng traveled around Europe, including Salzburg, where he presented at the annual conference of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres. His topic: When a contemporary composer dies, what should be done with their materials? It’s an area he has some experience with: After Hong Kong composer Doming Lam died in 2023 at the age of 96, Cheng visited his residence to organize and study the materials he left behind, including handwritten scores and notes.
After Salzburg, he traveled to Manchester, England, for an international music theory conference hosted by the Society for Music Analysis, where he presented a paper on the intertextuality and intermediality of the opera Alice in Wonderland by South Korean composer Unsuk Chin. From there, he attended the Popular Music Theory and Analysis Summer School at the University of Liverpool before heading to Berlin for rehearsals on one of his choral compositions, inspired by text from the renowned poet Esther Dischereit. And then it was off to Prague, for some research on Czech composers and museum trips before returning to Vienna and his project there.
As a researcher, Cheng strives to study and analyze musical culture in context; as a composer, he turns his artistic voice into sonic experiences, he said.
“When we think about something traditional, we also notice that, across years, the tradition is always changing,” he reflected.
Future plans
Looking ahead, Cheng has multiple projects on the horizon, both on the creative and research fronts.
He is currently working on a creative-research project titled East Asian Music in the Contemporary World (EAMCW) in collaboration with North America–based musicians specializing in East Asian instruments and scholars focusing on East Asian music and its contemporary expressions. The project aims to promote contemporary music for East Asian instruments and provides a platform where performers, scholars, students and community members can experience, reflect on and engage in dialogue about East Asian music in innovative contexts. As part of the project, on April 19, he will present a faculty recital featuring his compositions for Chinese, Korean and Japanese instruments with three groups of performers from around the country.
Besides Roehl, Cheng also researches J. Lawrence Cook, the most prolific player piano artist in American history. Cook recorded more than 200,000 rolls and was highly admired by jazz pianist Fats Waller. He’s also working on how to teach blind people music composition through Braille-based musical notation and is exploring the ethics of using artificial intelligence programs to create music tracks.
Other ideas that he’s working on include “Hong Kong-ness” in 20th-century American popular music, Schoenberg and jazz, and the first comprehensive study and analysis of Doming Lam’s compositions and musical life. He’s also teaching courses on music theory, composition, contemporary chamber music and East Asian music.
Cheng’s path has taken him to many places, but each one brought home a core lesson: Music is more than performances on the stage or idle entertainment. It has distinct social functions, from the tunes playing in the grocery store to 15-second advertising jingles, he said. Above all, it brings us together.
“I hope to be able to write good music but also write about music,” he said. “Through my work, I want people to come away with a deeper sense of how sound connects us and gives shape to our shared experience.”
Follow Hippocrates Cheng on , and for his music and upcoming projects.