Prof. John Winzenburg
Professor
Conducting and Choral Activities
Director, Cantoria Hong Kong

Office: AST807
Tel.: (852) 3411-7618
E-mail: jwinzenb@hkbu.edu.hk
John Winzenburg is a professor of music at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he conducts the Cantoria Hong Kong. He and the Cantoria have actively promoted Chinese choral music in dialogue with international repertoire since they first earned a Gold Medal at the Czech 2010 Festival of Songs Olomouc and they presented a Weekend Concert at the National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing in 2012. Winzenburg performed as Choral Director of the premiere of “Hong Kong Odyssey” at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Festival and served as Chorus Master of “The Suppliant Women” in collaboration with the Actors Touring Company (UK) and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh at the 2018 Hong Kong Arts Festival. He has appeared regularly in vocal and instrumental performances with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Since 2015, he has conducted the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the Choir of Royal Holloway, and he has appeared on the BBC Radio 3 program In Tune. He has also collaborated with the New Zealand Secondary Students Choir, the National Youth Chamber Choir of Great Britain, and the King’s Voices at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University. His new CD “Quotation of Queries: Choral Encounters of Hong Kong, China, and the Distant West” with the Cantoria will be released by PARMA/NAXOS in April 2020.
He has recently been active as clinician, presenter, and adjudicator at international choral events in Argentina, Hong Kong, Korea, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Singapore. Winzenburg has premiered a number of Chinese works, including “Hong Kong Odyssey” and a special Colla Voce 2019喜粵! concert of all newly composed Cantonese works, as well as a wide range of contemporary music that includes the U.S. premiere of “Karura” by Japanese composer Akira Nishimura with renowned oboist Thomas Indermuhle, “Aurora” by Joyce Tang (Ablaze Records Millenium Masters series), the cantata “Anesti” by James Boznos, and new compositions for Indonesian gamelan, percussion, and piano with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.
Scholastically, Winzenburg’s international publications have appeared in the Journal of Musicological Research, Perspectives of New Music, Palgrave Macmillan, The University of Michigan Press, Twentieth-Century China, Asian Music, CHIME, and the Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music. His recent research has focused on 1) musical experimentation by Aaron Avshalomov in pre-1949 Shanghai, 2) hybridization and hybridity in Chinese-Western “fusion concertos,” and 3) on new Chinese choral music. Winzenburg is the editor of the anthology Half Moon Rising: Choral Music from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan (Edition Peters, February 2015).