Born and raised in Hong Kong, Hon Ki Cheung started learning music as a pipa player at the age of 9, and started her formal musical studies in the Junior Music Program at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She passed the performance diploma exam by the Central Conservatory of Music with merit in 2008, and have performed both as a soloist, and as a member in multiple Chinese orchestras. In 2012 She completed her undergraduate studies in Electronic Engineering with first class honours at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she was an exchange student at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in 2011.
In Stockholm she started learning organ from Ulf Samuelsson, and this led her to pursue a second degree at the University of Kansas, majoring Organ Performance, Music Theory and Composition. Her organ teachers include Michael Bauer and James Higdon. She has received instructions from Karel Paukert, and she has played in masterclasses by David Higgs and Olivier Latry. She has also performed at the Community of Christ Temple in Independence, Missouri. After graduation with distinction from KU in 2016 and a master’s degree in music theory at the Florida State University, she is pursuing her PhD studies in Music Theory with a minor in Sociology at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Sumanth Gopinath. She is a member of ASCAP.
Hon Ki started composing in 2013. Her composition teachers include James Barnes, Cliffton Callender, Bryan Kip Haaheim, Ladislav Kubik, David Lipten, and Forrest Pierce. Her first work for organ, Chorale Prelude on “Millar”, has been selected to feature in the Bayoubüchlein for the American Guild Organists (AGO) 2016 Convention in Houston. She, as a composer, has also chosen to be one of the awardees of the 2016 AGO Student Commissioning project with organist Alexander Meszler. A Star Ferry Ride for tuba and piano is featured in the FSU Festival of New Music 2017 and the Music by Women Festival in 2019.
As a theorist, her current research interest include history of music theory and the analysis of intercultural music. Previously she has worked on transformational theory. Her undergraduate thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Scott Murphy, is titled “A Study of Inter-Cardinality Voice Leading Using Voice-Leading Zones and the Extended 4-Cube Trio,” and is published in GAMUT. Her current work on the study of contemporary Chinese music and modernism is presented at the American Musicology Society Pacific-Southwest Chapter and Midwest Music Research Collective.
Hon Ki was a participant of the Silkroad’s Global Musician Workshop in 2015, where she, as a pipa player, worked with many other like-minded musicians and instructors including Mike Block, Sarah Jarosz, and Kaoru Watanabe. She also participated in the composer’s retreat in the Wintergreen Music Festival in 2016.
See Hon Ki’s CV here.