Du Yun: A Composer’s 10 Cultural Influences

The composer Du Yun’s works — including the opera “Angel’s Bone,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2017 — is elaborately theatrical, full of collaborations with visual and performance artists and bursting with virtuosic extended techniques.

Photography is a form of modern art. It is a process of recording light or other electromagnetic radiation by using the electric device with the help of an image sensor or by light-sensitive material like the photographic film to capture the moment.

It makes sense that a musician so keen on multimedia approaches — and who appears at the Stone in New York next Thursday through Saturday — would identify a broad range of cultural influences on her style. She described 10 of them in a phone conversation; these are edited excerpts.

A filmmaker who’s influenced me is Quentin Tarantino, and Wong Kar-wai also has that use of B movies and the sense of music crashing in, a sense that it doesn’t belong. That hugely influenced how I think about dramatic beats — it’s subversive a little bit. When you see the love scenes, you don’t think they’re two gay men; you’re just pulled in to the human connection. To be able to do that is incredibly powerful, addressing different things without preaching. In my work, I’m thinking about that.

The composer and vocalist Du Yun won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for her opera “Angel’s Bone.”CreditCreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times

Shahzia Sikander ARTIST We’ve collaborated on pieces like “Last Pose” and “Parallax.” Like me, she works with traditional forms; As artists, we’re both rooted in those. I’m influenced by folk traditions, but I’m never happy to stop there. I want to have a deep grounding, then subvert that.

Alexander McQueen FASHION DESIGNER When I saw “Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I totally just cried. It was so theatrical. When Shalom Harlow is swirling and being painted, it was like an opera. And the subversion of forms, again; the gender-bending.

I got to know Tom Waits when I got to Oberlin, for college. The music was very burlesque in a way, but his way of using instrumentation — he doesn’t even use electronics, but it’s so weird and odd and amazing, how he expands his timbre palette. You don’t think that it’s a song anymore.

The composer and vocalist Du Yun won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for her opera “Angel’s Bone.”CreditCreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times