Xingyue Song is a Chinese-born composer and pianist whose music asks how contemporary techniques can stay communicative — how complexity can be heard the first time. Her work draws on close collaboration with performers, treating each piece as a study in how compositional choices shape the way music is played, heard, and remembered.

Recent commissions include works for the St. Luke Orchestra through the DeGaetano New Music Institute, an American Composers Orchestra program, the China International Chorus Festival, San Francisco Choral Artists (where she also served as Composer-in-Residence), Luna Composition Lab and River & Rail Theatre Company, and a sinfonietta for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players supported by an ARTZenter Emerging Composer Completion Grant. She was a semi-finalist for the Zemlinsky Prize 2024 and won the 9th Annual Kristen Pankonin Award, which included a commissioned art-song cycle at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Her music has been performed by Telegraph Quartet, Friction Quartet, Hub New Music, the International Orange Chorale, and the East China Normal University Chorus, with recent festival appearances at the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival and the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and an invited residency at the Composer-Librettist Studio of the Alliance for New Music-Theatre in Washington, DC.

Xingyue is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she studies with Felipe Lara and holds the Artistic Excellence Award Scholarship. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Mason Bates. Earlier composition study includes work with Xingzimin Pan and Joseph Stillwell, and she has received guidance in masterclasses with Gabriela Ortiz, Du Yun, Derek Bermel, Andrew Norman, Zhou Long, Andreia Pinto Correia, Augusta Read Thomas, Amy Williams, and Gabriela Lena Frank.