Max I. Chung is an American new music composer, sound artist and video game composer, traversing borders and building bridges between distinct genres of electroacoustic music.  He creates immersive sound experiences that evoke the non-linear temporal space of memory, amplifying emotional resonances with dynamic and unfolding narratives.   Through the free association of texture, timbre and color, Chung’s compositions express powerful sonic stories of memory and time, creating work that explores primal and visceral sound worlds.

Renowned composer John Harbison has called Max “a composer to watch”.  For the last two years, he has received the American Society of Composers Morton Gould Young Composers Award (Honorable Mention-2025 & Semi-Finalist-2026 ), the Walter J. Nelson Prize, the ICE Commission Award, and the Margery MacColl Award for Excellence in Music.  Max Chung’s original compositions have been performed by leading new music performers, including the Neave Trio, the Bergamot Quartet, LOADBANG, the Da Capo Ensemble, the PRISM quartet, Yarn/Wire, Alice Ivy-Pemberton, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) the Contemporary Art Music Project (CAMP), and Hypercube.    His commissions have premiered at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and the Paulson Center in New York City.

Most recently, his multimedia installation, Metroequilibrium was exhibited on Governor’s Island for Harvestworks’ Art & Technology show in New York City.  Max has participated in numerous fellowships and festivals, including the Iceberg Institute, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, New Music on the Point Festival, the SPLICE Institute Festival, the Atlantic Music Festival at Colby College, CubeLab6 Composers Workshop, the Longy Divergent Composition Workshop, and the Mid Career New Music on the Point Retreat.   He is currently commissioned for an interactive sound art project for the Vitra Museum in Germany for an exhibition in Paris.

Max received a degree in music composition at Brown University and a master’s in music technology from New York University.  He has studied with Eric Nathan, Wang Lu, Amy Williams, Dafna Naphtali, Marti Epstein, Butch Rovan, Robert Rowe, Lelia Adu, and Tae Hong Park.  He has participated in masterclasses with John Harbison,  Zhou Long, Amy Beth Kirsten, Chen Yi, and Reiko Fueting.