Composition

Fifth Stream Music actively seeks opportunities to develop new works for the Asian American Orchestra and in collaboration with other artists, ensembles and artistic disciplines. Anthony Brown has been composing music for over thirty-five years beginning with his first commission awarded in 1983 by the San Francisco Chamber Music Society to compose Incantation Suite, an extended work for jazz quartet and string trio. He has received successive commissions from Festival 2000 for Suite: Oakland (1990), the Asian Heritage Council for Never Again! (1995), and the Guggenheim Foundation for American Rhapsodies (2003), works that are now part of the Orchestra's standard repertoire. Also among these is the Rockefeller Foundation-funded E. O. 9066: Truth Be Told (1996), from which “Rhymes (For Children)” became the theme music for KQED's “Pacific Time,” a Public Radio International (PRI) syndicated weekly newsmagazine broadcast. His documentary credits include soundtracks for Alternative Facts (2019), The Worlds of Bernice Bing (2013), Don’t Lose Your Soul: The Music of Anthony Brown and Mark Izu (2012), A Divided Community (2011), and the critically acclaimed, Witness To Hiroshima (2009).

Recent dance collaborations include Port of Embarkation (2016) for Zaccho Dance Theater’s Aerial Arts Festival, He Moved Swiftly . . . (2013) with Dancers' Group, Between Me and the Other World (2012) with Zaccho Dance Theater, and Cross Currents (2007) with Dimensions Dance Theater, supported by the Creative Work Fund for which Dr. Brown received an Isadora Duncan Award in Music nomination. Theater commissions include the scores for San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater's world premiere production of Philip Gotanda's After the War (2007), Cherylene Lee’s world premiere of The Legacy Codes (2003) for Theatre Works in Palo Alto, CA and The Actors’ Delicatessen (1982) for Intersection Theater for the Arts.