AMPLIFY! A Festival of Asian American Music, Sound, and Scholarship 2026
Organized by the Music of Asian America Research Center
in partnership with Asian Improv aRts Midwest and Elastic Arts
In-Person Component: Chicago, September 24-26, 2026 (with livestream)
Virtual Component: Second Wednesdays at 7pm ET starting in July
Call for Proposals | Schedule | Registration | Invited Artists | Presentation Abstracts & Bios
Invited Artists
Thursday Afternoon Opera
All of US: An Anti-Asian Hate Chamber Opera
Synopsis
Yi Xiao Guan and Min-Ji Seondeok, two strangers brought together by defending teenager Emiko Ko-Hime, share a moment and then face leaving and going back to their own lives. Each realizes that they share something with the others that they shouldn’t let go of.
Performance History
All of US (2024), a chamber opera composed by Hippocrates Cheng in collaboration with librettist Maya Kanazawa, was originally commissioned as the winning work by the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts. It celebrated its world premiere in June 2024 in Carmel, Indiana. In May 2026, the opera was featured and performed as a winning work by the Atchley Opera in Fort Worth, Texas.
Now, All of US makes its Illinois debut with a performance on September 24 for the AMPLIFY! Festival 2026 organized by the Music of Asian America Research Center, followed by another performance on September 25 at the Northern Illinois University School of Music.
Thursday Evening Concert
Reduction Quartet from the MIYUMI Project
Tatsu Aoki’s ensemble, The MIYUMI Project, is one of the longest-standing amalgams of Chicago’s avant-garde jazz and Japanese traditional music. Drawing from aesthetics rooted in the Japanese tradition and Japanese taiko drumming permeate the laboratory of sound where he explores the nexus of cultures: Asian and American; Japanese and African; past and present. The improvised compositions provide a conceptual framework for each band member to interpret, which in turn coalesce and transform into a vast contemporary expanse of musical immersion for the audience. Over the past two decades, each successive grouping of Miyumi Project musicians has contributed to the unique blending of modern application with a traditional sensibility. The final result is a continuous evolution of a “live and raw” musical happening.
A smaller ensemble of Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, The Reduction Quartet features Tatsu Aoki on bass, Edward Wilkerson Jr. on woodwinds, Jamie Kempkers on cello, and Kioto Aoki on taiko for a pared back textures of cross-cultural and multi-generational instrumentation.
The SamaSama Project
SamaSama Project is the Midwest’s premier Filipino Folk Fusion band. “SamaSama”, translated as “united, together”, truly lives up to its name, blending Filipino folk, rock, ska, and Latin music inspired by the 1970s Manila Sound movement. Over the years, the talented group has made its mark by showcasing a fusion of Filipino traditional folk and contemporary music at many notable venues and events, including Navy Pier, the Harold Washington Library, the Chicago White Sox, and Davenport’s Piano Bar, among others.
SamaSama Project won 1st runner-up in Best World Music Act by Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago 2023 and was selected as one of only 20 semi-finalists for Chicago DCASE’s Chicago Made Music Showcase, besting close to 200 artists.
Inspired by the drive to promote diversity and honor the shared history of the two countries they call home through music, SamaSama Project is currently touring “The Great Filipino Songbook”, a collection of songs and stories that shaped the trajectory of Philippine Music during America’s Golden Age of music.
SamaSama Project is set to release their 1st full-length album in 2026.
Friday Evening Concert
Joyce Kwon
Joyce Kwon is a singer, songwriter & gayageum player making folk music from the future. Her practice has been built on a series of discipleships under culture bearers and supported by the California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and UC Berkeley. She holds a degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer with Chao Tian: FROM
CHINA TO APPALACHIA
GRAMMY Award winning American Roots artists Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer join with Chinese classical hammered dulcimer player Chao Tian in a show that combines music from China to Appalachia and beyond. Instrumentation includes yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer), gourd banjo, five-string banjo, ukulele, guitars, dumbek, cello-banjo and mandolin.
The group’s repertoire includes traditional Chinese and Appalachian music as well as contemporary and traditional music from around the world. Unusual combinations explore new arrangements to old music, such as “Dark Eyes.” Ukulele, yangqin and guitar create a new pallet for this Russian folk song turned jazz manouche tune. Cathy and Marcy join Chao in singing a Chinese lullaby, “Nani Wan” and Chao easily adds her love of American Old-Time music to fiddle tunes and songs.
From China to Appalachia was borne of a friendship and mutual love of musical exploration experienced in jam sessions that inspired a show speaking to the power of music to connect cultures. The trio’s inaugural performances include the Music Center at Strathmore (N. Bethesda, MD) and the Ashe Civic Center (Ashe Co., NC). On their own, these awesome artists have performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art, on PBS and National Public Radio.
Classically trained since the age of five, Chao Tian spent years working as an instructor and the director of the Arts Education Center at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU). She is a founding member of BLCU Arts College’s music department and has been appointed as an officer of the International Culture Exchange Program in 2019.
Saturday Evening Concert
ghOstMiSt
ghOstMiSt is a Balinese experimental duo that uses reflexive improvisation as way to interrogate cultural contradiction and reclaim performance place. Dewa Ayu Eka Putri and I started this duo as a critique of traditional frames of value judgement. By enacting performative inquiries of Balinese-ness we question spiritual and cosmological epistemologies of performance. It is important that we teach through community-based methods and engage in diverse participation in efforts to create works of art that promote creativity, while understanding historical privilege to address social and philosophical issues.
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity), where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Electronic Music, and Noise and Activism.
Dewa Ayu Eka Putri is a Balinese artist-anthropologist and is currently a Lecturer of Dance at Grinnell College. She teaches courses on Balinese Dance and Performing Arts, specializing in traditional and contemporary dance styles. Putri also maintains her position as dance instructor at the critically acclaimed arts organization, Sanggar Cudamani, from Pengosekan, Bali, Indonesia.
the state of (un)becoming
Juan Flores, gordon fung, Peixuan Ouyang, Kyle Price, and Sharkey Zalek will present “the state of (un)becoming.” This improvisatory collaboration between sound, butoh, movement, and expanded cinema presents a real-time metamorphosis of undulating materials. Through an unconventional combination of diverse multimedia idioms, the quintet co-composes a dreamy and meditative state that arises and dissipates simultaneously and spontaneously, guiding audiences into an introspective journey.