Biography

Sidney Chen, vocalist and performance artist, specializes in creating new work through collaboration with artists of all disciplines. His bass-baritone voice has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “expressive and richly mellifluous.”

Recent projects include touring with ODC/Dance as a guest performer and musician liaison in KT Nelson’s immersive work Path of Miracles, premiering Anne Hege’s laptop opera The Furies, and recording Lisa Mezzacappa’s serial podcast opera The Electronic Lover.

As a member of composer/choreographer Meredith Monk’s Vocal Ensemble, he has performed in On Behalf of Nature, Monk’s recent music theater work, which toured internationally and was recorded for ECM Records. With the San Francisco Symphony he traveled to Carnegie Hall to premiere Monk’s concert work Realm Variations as part of the 2012 American Mavericks Festival. He is also a co-founder of The M6, a New York-based vocal sextet dedicated to continuing Monk’s legacy, which has been heard on NPR and featured in The New York Times.

In recent seasons he has premiered Ryan Brown’s theatricalized “medical oratorio” Mortal Lessons; collaborated with the Friction Quartet on a program of new works for vocal quartet and string quartet; toured to Denmark with San Francisco Lyric Opera’s production of the little match girl passion by David Lang; and performed Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra at the Mondavi Center for the Music and Words Festival. He has been featured in the Other Minds Festival in Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Capital Capitals with pianist Sarah Cahill, and in the premiere of Brian Baumbusch’s The Pressure, with a large ensemble of custom metallophones. In 2009 he sang in Carnegie Hall’s 45th-anniversary celebration of Terry Riley’s In C.

He has performed at Garden of Memory, an annual new-music extravaganza in Oakland, with his DIY music boxes and intricately hand-punched scrolls, which have been the subject of a San Francisco Chronicle Datebook cover story.

In his hometown of San Francisco, Sidney regularly performs with the new-music chorus Volti, the only group to have received the Chorus America/ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award seven times. He is also the group’s Artistic Advisor, and has served as Executive Director. The ensemble has released four critically acclaimed albums on Innova Recordings, which he co-produced.

Sidney is a member of the nine-voice chamber ensemble Clerestory, which sings music ranging from Gregorian chant to the American songbook. He appears frequently as a guest soloist with Bay Area ensembles such as Marin Baroque and the San Francisco Choral Society.

From 1997 to 2018, Sidney worked for the Kronos Quartet, most recently as the famed ensemble’s Artistic Administrator, overseeing the production of dozens of recordings, managing countless commissions, and developing multi-faceted educational residencies at Carnegie Hall and in university presenter settings. Prior to that, while living in New York he worked for Nonesuch Records, where he managed the production of retrospective box sets for composers Steve Reich and John Adams, and worked as the Production Assistant for several iconic Reich recordings including Music for 18 Musicians and City Life. More recently, he was the Editorial Director for Nonesuch’s John Adams Collected Works, a 40-disc box set featuring recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career.

Sidney’s writings about contemporary music have been published by NewMusicBox, for which he was the magazine’s San Francisco Bay Area Regional Editor, and by SFist. For about a decade starting in 2004, he wrote an influential blog called The Standing Room, one of the very first blogs about classical music; for several years it appeared regularly on lists of top classical music blogs, and was covered in traditional media from Gramophone to NPR.

His movement training includes regular Gaga movement language classes with James Graham and an Intensive course with Danielle Agami, several workshops with Joe Goode Performance Group, modern and contemporary technique classes at LINES Dance Center and ODC, and Alexander Technique study with Kari Prindl. Sidney is a dedicated practitioner of Ashtanga yoga and Vipassana meditation, and a novice calligrapher.

He and his husband make their home in San Francisco. He is a graduate of Harvard University.

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