Xiaoyong Chen, born in 1955, is a composer who studied composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing from 1980 to 1985 and then worked with György Ligeti in Hamburg from 1985 to 1989. His work includes both orchestral and chamber music, often incorporating Chinese instruments. Chen’s music is regularly performed at prestigious festivals and concert series across nearly all continents. He composes on commission and collaborates worldwide with orchestras, festivals, and universities.

Festivals he collaborates with include the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Holland Festival, the Présences Festival in Paris, the World Music Days, the MaerzMusik Festival, the Huddersfield Festival, the Warsaw Autumn, the Cologne Biennale, the Soundstreams Festival in Toronto, and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Orchestras he works with include the Gulbenkian Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the China National Symphony, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the KBS Orchestra, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum, the Arditti Quartet, the Auryn Quartet, and the Kairos Quartet.

Since 1994, Chen has maintained an intensive collaboration with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, which provides him with generous musical and artistic support. A highlight of his career was a four-hour portrait concert with the NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg in 2008.

Chen was a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg until 2023. Since 2023 he has held a chair in composition at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in China. Guest professorships have regularly taken him to China and other parts of East Asia. He is a member of the Free Academy of Arts Hamburg, and his entire body of work is exclusively published by Boosey & Hawkes-Sikorski.

Chen is fascinated by the emergence and development of individual tones. Many of his works begin with seemingly simple sound events that have not yet been shaped by compositional elaboration. For Chen, composing is a form of communication with sound and the discovery of its hidden possibilities. Therefore, his works exhibit an openness that gives the impression that even the composer does not know in advance where the music will lead him.