Anthony Cheung’s THE ECHOING OF TENSES Premieres at Lincoln Center as Run AMOC* Festival Finale

Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung brings his acclaimed large-scale song cycle, the echoing of tenses, to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 7:30pm, as the culminating performance of the Run AMOC Festival*, part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.

Setting texts by seven intergenerational Asian-American poets—Victoria Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Li-Young Lee, Arthur Sze, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn—the work explores identity, family, loss, and the traces of memory through a layered musical and literary lens.

Live Performers and Poets

The performance features:

• Paul Appleby, tenor

• Miranda Cuckson, violin

• Anthony Cheung, piano

• David Bird, sound design

Poets Victoria Chang, Arthur Sze, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn will read their texts live on stage, deepening the intimacy and immediacy of Cheung’s multi-movement work.

About the Work

Commissioned by AMOC and the Ojai Festival, the echoing of tenses has previously been presented at the 92nd Street Y. It begins with Arthur Sze’s The Network, reflecting on the erasure of Asian-American immigration history, and unfolds through poems that blur time, memory, and trauma. Poetic pairings, such as Ocean Vuong and Li-Young Lee’s poems titled The Gift, highlight shared motifs and generational resonance.

Cheung describes the work as a meditation on “the relationship the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before,” borrowing from the concept of postmemory.

Artist Highlights

Anthony Cheung is a Guggenheim Fellow, Rome Prize winner, and First Prize recipient at the Dutilleux Competition. His music has been commissioned and performed by major ensembles including Ensemble Modern, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, JACK Quartet, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.