About MAARC

Mission: The Music of Asian America Research Center (MAARC), founded 2017, strives to empower our communities through collecting, promoting, and teaching music created by Asian Americans.

Vision: We seek to advance knowledge about and social justice for Asian Americans through music.

We are working with you to:

  • Create a comprehensive information center about music made by Asian Americans
  • Build a digital archive (oral histories, artifacts, and sound/video clips)
  • Develop education programs for K-12 teachers, college professors, and lifelong learners
  • Collaborate with musicians, artists, archivists, researchers, presenters and others to organize community events

MAARC Personnel

Eric Hung, Executive Director and Co-Founder
Eric Hung is a musicologist with extensive experience in non-profit management, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His academic research focuses on Asian American music and public musicology. Current projects include a book on trauma and cultural trauma in Asian American music and an edited volume on public musicology.  His pedagogical project, “Incorporating Local Musics in the Undergraduate Music History Curriculum,” won the Teaching Award from the American Musicological Society.

Hung is also an active pianist and conductor who has performed in Germany, Austria, Hong Kong, and Australia and throughout North America. Prior to joining the nonprofit world full-time, he was a tenured professor at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. He has also served as executive director and interim president of New York–based Gamelan Dharma Swara and co-director of the Westminster Chinese Music Ensemble.

Nancy Yunhwa Rao, President
Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Professor of Music Theory, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. A specialist in American music, her work is multifaceted, bridging musicology, music theory and scholarship on Chinese opera with gender and ethnic studies.  Her work highlights the much-neglected musical history of Chinese in the United States, Canada, and Cuba.  Her research has led to writings on transnational issues in the production and opera performance in these Chinatown theaters.  She has mined immigration files for this research. Publications in this area can be found in Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of 19th Century Music Review, as well as in several collections of essays.  Her book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America  (University Illinois Press, 2017) includes analysis of playbills, performing networks, opera arias, stage spectacles, and more. The book has recently received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society, and the Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC).

As a music theorist, Rao has explored intersections between China and the West, in particular global perspectives in contemporary Chinese music. She has published on the use of music gestures, vocal style, and percussion patterns of Beijing opera in contemporary music by composers of Chinese origin.  Her study on the American composer, Ruth Crawford, won her a national award of best article in American music published in 2007 from the Society for American Music.  Her interview on “Crawford’s imprint on contemporary music” is published in Women in Art Music. She has continued in the direction of sketch studies, for which her publication can be found in Music Theory Spectrum, as well as Carter Studies Online.

Jennifer Jones Wilson, Treasurer
Jennifer C. H. J. Wilson, Ph.D is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Westminster Choir College. In her scholarly work, she has presented papers at national and international conferences on French Opera in New York, Jacques Offenbach’s opéras bouffes, Meyerbeer’s New York reception, blackface minstrelsy in the American South, Amy Beach’s piano music, dancer Katherine Dunham’s Choros, and Orientalism in Musical Theater. She has taught undergraduate and graduate music courses at Baruch College, The Conservatory at Brooklyn College, Montclair University, Rutgers University Honors College, and Westminster Choir College. Her publications include the chapters, “Meyerbeer in New York: ‘How, therefore, could New York have remained behind?’” in Meyerbeer and Grand opéra from the July Monarchy to the Present and “(Re)Establishing Southern Patriotism: Professional and Amateur Minstrelsy in Lynchburg, VA.” in Music, American Made. In addition, she has worked as web manager on the NEH-funded Music in Gotham project and digital publishing analyst in Scholarly Reference at Oxford University Press.

Mandi Magnuson-Hung, Secretary and Co-Founder
Mandi Magnuson-Hung practices public history at the Wells Fargo History Museum in Philadelphia. Her days are fantastically varied; her favorite work activities are researching mid-19th century history, partnering with local institutions, designing and giving tours, developing programming, and using power tools. Magnuson-Hung received her MA in Public History from Rutgers University-Camden. She serves on the board of the Friends of West Hill Manor in Burlington, New Jersey and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia’s Emerging Museum Professionals committee.

Byron Au Yong, Member-at-Large
Byron Au Yong composes songs of dislocation prompted by a broken lineage. Born to Chinese immigrants in Pittsburgh and raised in the Pacific Northwest, his upbringing informs a creative process where the American Dream and sustainability play vital roles. Variety calls one of Au Yong’s works, “claustrophobic and expansive, intimate and existential, personal and political all at once.” The Seattle Weeklysays that his “interdisciplinary works are as exquisite and imaginative as they are unclassifiable.” Dedicated to intercultural collaboration, Au Yong creates across disciplines with an attention to the ways people connect with the places they call home.

Examples include Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China, choreographed by Donald Byrd for Spectrum Dance Theatre and Stuck Elevator, libretto by Aaron Jafferis, directed by Chay Yew, premiered at American Conservatory Theatre with performances at Long Wharf Playhouse. Multimedia installations such as Piano Concerto–Houston, for 11 pianists, commissioned by the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and YIJU 移居 (to migrate) for the Jack Straw New Media Gallery combine local and global currents as well.

Site-responsive projects include Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas, for hiking opera singers and water percussionists, performed in 64 waterways throughout greater Seattle, TURBINE, commissioned by Leah Stein Dance Company and Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia for the 200th anniversary of the Fairmount Waterworks, and Occupy Orchestra 無量園 Infinity Garden, influenced by Chinese gardens, John Cage, and Occupy Wall Street, performed by the Chicago Composers Orchestra in the Garfield Park Conservatory.

Au Yong holds degrees in musical theatre writing, dance studies, and music composition and theory from NYU, UCLA, and the University of Washington. Residencies include Asian Arts Initiative, Berkeley Rep’s The Ground Floor, Exploratorium, Hermitage Artist Retreat, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Jerwood Foundation Opera Writing Programme, Montalvo Arts Center, NYU’s A/P/A Institute, Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design, Portland Taiko, Rutgers University’s Center for Migration and the Global City, Sundance Institute Theatre Labs, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Virginia Tech Center for the Arts, Westminster Choir College, Weston Playhouse, and Yale Institute for Music Theatre.

Honors include a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Creative Capital Award, Doris Duke Foundation Building Demand for the Arts Award, Ford Foundation Fellowship, and Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. He serves on the Music of Asian America Research Center board and NEFA’s National Theater Project Advisory Panel. Au Yong is an Assistant Professor in Performing Arts & Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

Ricky Punzalan, Member-at-Large
Ricky Punzalan is an assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies (iSchool), affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director of Museum Scholarship and Material Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on anthropological archives and the digitization of ethnographic records in historical collections. Punzalan has been a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives since 2014 and currently Chair of the Native American Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists.

Punzalan’s research engages anthropological records and collections in various ways. In 2016, he received an Early Career grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for my research, Valuing Our Scans: Understanding the Impacts of Digitized Native American Ethnographic Archives, to study and develop strategies to assess the impact of access to, and use of, digitized ethnographic archives for academic and Native American researchers. The pilot study for this project received funding support from the 2013 University of Maryland-Smithsonian seed grant program.

Punzalan continues to pursue his dissertation research that examines ‘virtual reunification’ as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival images online.  He has also been active internationally in developing community-focused archival work

Interns (June to November, 2019)

Joe X. Jiang
Joe X. Jiang is a filmmaker and musician who has called Portland, Oregon home for over ten years. His movies, which range from intimate documentaries to artistic narratives, have been featured at film festivals around the world. As a musician, Joe tours nationally and internationally in The Slants, Jessica Dennison + Jones and FRGD. He is also a producer and songwriter at Track Town Records in Eugene, OR.  Joe has an extensive network of Asian American popular musicians, and will help us contact and document bands around the country.