Durwynne Hsieh grew up in the Hudson Valley region of New York, but for many years has lived and composed music in the San Francisco Bay Area. His compositions have been heard throughout Northern California, across the U.S., and in Europe, and they cover the range from solo works to chamber music to orchestra and vocal music, and have included performances by the Toledo Symphony, San José Chamber Orchestra, Marin Symphony, Tassajara Symphony, Sonnet Ensemble, the San Francisco Symphony’s Chamber Music at Davies Hall series, and the Mendocino, West Marin, and Music in the Mountains music festivals, as well as community, school, and youth groups. An extensive collaboration with violinist Rick Shinozaki has produced a growing number of works, most notably a concerto for marimba, violin, and orchestra, a violin concerto, and the solo violin suite Five Friends, which was featured in Stringwreck, a modern dance work staged by Garrett + Moulton Productions. His chamber music piece Broken Dances was a semi-finalist in the nationwide 2012 Rápido Composition Contest, and received its premiere by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Other works include the ballets Prisms and Legacy, both commissioned by Benicia Ballet Theatre. He is the current Composer in Residence of Nova Vista Symphony, a collaboration that has produced several major works, including Symphony #2. Durwynne is also on the board of the Nevada County Composers’ Cooperative, and is a frequent contributor to their new music concerts in the Sierra Foothills of California.

Also of note are commissions from the Farallon Quintet (featured on their Farallon Quintet Originals album), Black Cedar Trio (the triptych Miscellaneous Music featured on their debut album A Path Less Trod), and TriMusica (the trio Mask). In addition, his music has been put to other diverse uses as incidental music, wedding ceremony music, musical theater pieces, and as underscore for cooking webisodes and science tutorial programs.

Durwynne’s works show a fondness for romanticism and traditional forms, but they also draw from disparate influences, and one is likely to find crunchy atonality alongside lyrical melodies, minimalistic textures followed by romantic excess, and the use of effects of questionable taste. One of the common threads throughout his music is his desire to tell a story, although listeners (as well as the composer) are sometimes unsure what that story is.