卓 越
ZHUO Yue

Zhuo Yue is a composer, sound artist, performer and conductor whose practice moves between notated composition, electroacoustic music, improvisation and performance. He is currently an Honorary Lecturer in Composition at Cardiff University and the founder of JOSON, a Xiamen-based platform for artistic practice, education and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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Originally trained in economics before turning to music, Zhuo later completed a PhD in Composition at Cardiff University on a full scholarship. This non-linear trajectory has shaped his understanding of artistic identity and his resistance to treating music as a fixed discipline or form. As a composer, his work explores timbre, musical structure, cultural identity and the relationships that can emerge between different musical traditions and contemporary practice. His music has been performed and commissioned by ensembles including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Riot Ensemble and Juice Vocal Ensemble, and his notated works are published by Universal Edition.

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In recent years, Zhuo’s practice has increasingly moved beyond conventional notation and the concert format. Influenced by experimental music, Fluxus, improvisation and performance art, he has become interested in sounds and actions that sit at the edges of what might conventionally be understood as music: the sound of bodies and everyday objects, the behaviour of performers in response to physical environments, and the role of uncertainty, instability and accident in live performance.

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This has developed into an approach he describes as Staged Improvisation. Rather than determining every sound or action in advance, Zhuo constructs situations in which events are allowed to emerge. Objects, bodies, spatial relationships, possible actions and simple rules establish the conditions of a performance, while its actual sounds and events unfold through improvisation, interaction, accident and real-time response. In this sense, the situation is composed, but the outcome remains open.

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Electroacoustic composition forms another strand of his practice. Working with recording, amplification, electronic processing, live electronics and spatial sound, Zhuo approaches sound as physical and malleable material: something that can be captured, magnified, displaced, transformed and returned to space. His electroacoustic work frequently overlaps with his improvisational and performative practice, allowing technology to become part of a changing relationship between performer, object, sound and environment.

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Place, memory and cultural identity recur throughout his work. In recent years, Zhuo has studied and practised Nanyin, an ancient musical tradition from southern Fujian, exploring its relationship with contemporary composition through performance, fieldwork and creative practice. At the same time, his work has increasingly returned to Xiamen and its changing urban landscape, including its industrial history, disappearing spaces and personal memories. Rather than treating these materials simply as cultural references, he uses them as points of departure for thinking about time, identity, memory and the experience of place.

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As a performer, Zhuo is particularly interested in the unpredictability of live situations. His work can take place in concert halls, galleries, independent art spaces and unconventional environments. Sound may emerge from instruments and electronics, but equally from metronomes, cassette recorders, found objects, physical actions or accidental events. The boundary between performer, object, environment and audience is often deliberately unstable. Increasingly, his interest lies not simply in producing a repeatable musical work, but in creating the conditions for something to genuinely happen.

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Education and collaboration are also integral to his wider practice. Alongside his university teaching in composition and music technology, he develops lectures, workshops, improvisation sessions and interdisciplinary projects involving musicians, artists, students and wider communities. He sees education not as separate from artistic practice, but as another space for exchanging knowledge, testing ideas and creating shared forms of experimentation.​ This approach extends into JOSON (卓诵文化), the cultural platform he founded in Xiamen. Beginning with music and sound, JOSON brings together artistic practice, education, cultural programmes and interdisciplinary collaboration, providing a framework through which individual artistic work can develop into broader forms of exchange and collective activity.

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Across these different strands, Zhuo is less interested in defining what music should be than in approaching the places where its boundaries become uncertain: when sound becomes music, when an action becomes performance, and what might happen when a work is allowed to move beyond the complete control of its creator.