The Shepherd School of Music Professor selected as 2023 music award winner by American Academy of Arts and Letters

Shih-Hui Chen, a professor of composition and theory at The Shepherd School of Music , was selected as a 2023 music award winner by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Chen is the recipient of the Walter Hinrichsen Award in Music, which was established in 1984 and is given for the publication of a work by a gifted composer. The award will be presented at a ceremony May 24.

“I am honored to receive the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Walter Hinrichsen Award, my second award from this prestigious institution,” Chen said.

Born in Taiwan, Chen has been on the Shepherd School faculty since 2000. Her 2007 Goddard Lieberson award from the Academy stated, “Among the composers of Asian descent living in the U.S.A., Shih-Hui Chen is most successful in balancing the very refined spectral traditions of the East with the polyphonic practice of Western art-music. In a seamless narrative, her beautiful music, always highly inventive and expressive, is immediately as appealing as it is demanding and memorable.”

In addition to garnering a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy in Rome Prize, her compositions have been performed widely throughout the U.S. and abroad, including China, Japan, England, Germany and Italy.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers and writers. The academy’s 300 members are elected for life and pay no dues.

In addition to electing new members as vacancies occur, the academy seeks to foster and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts by administering over 70 awards and prizes totaling more than $1 million, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding performances of new works of musical theater, purchasing artwork for donation to museums across the country and presenting talks and concerts.