Haibei Chen
A B O U T
Haibei Chen is a composer, pianist, and violist whose work is deeply influenced by literature, often setting poetry and prose as integral musical material. She has written for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and voice, with performances at Juilliard's Paul Hall, Tanglewood on Parade, and the Tianjin Juilliard Recital Hall. Her orchestral music has been read by the Young Artists Orchestra at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, where she attended the Young Artists Composition Program on full scholarship. In 2026 she took part in Yellow Barn's Young Artists Program and the CCI//St. Louis festival, where her work Fantasy was premiered by the Unheard-of//Ensemble. She has received First Prize at the Belvedere Festival Student Composition Contest and was named a finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.
Originally from China, Haibei is pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Composition at The Juilliard School on scholarship, where she studies with Amy Beth Kirsten. She began her composition training with Niccolò Athens at Tianjin Juilliard Pre-College. She has additionally taken lessons with Kevin Puts and David Ludwig at Juilliard, and worked in masterclasses with Katie Balch, Daniel Temkin, Juri Seo, and Stephen Coxe at Yellow Barn; Liliya Ugay, Chris Stark, and Adam Maness at CCI//St. Louis; Martin Amlin, Justin Casinghino, and Nico Muhly at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute; and Jennifer Jolley at Interlochen.
She is particularly drawn to literature. It began with poems she wanted to set to music, and has grown into a broader way of working — using texts as starting points and letting them shape entire sonic worlds. She thinks of this as "secondary creation," making art from another's work: a conversation across time and space.
For Haibei, music has always been relational. She loves writing for the people around her, and sees composition as a collaboration with performers as much as with the text. She performs as a violist in chamber ensembles and the Tianjin Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra, sings alto in the Juilliard Community Choir and WCM Choir, and as a pianist has competed in national and international competitions.
When not at the piano or her laptop, Haibei is usually browsing second-hand bookstores, singing in choir, or searching for the best matcha in New York.