Next Week’s Trees

A new compositional voice in demand worldwide, Viet Cuong hears music in nearly all aspects of everyday life. Born in California to Vietnamese immigrants, Cuong grew up in Georgia before studying composition at the Peabody Institute, Princeton University, and Curtis Institute of Music. He is currently the Pacific Symphony’s composer-in-residence and an assistant professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and renowned ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, and the PRISM Quartet, have performed his music.

Next Week’s Trees is one of three original works Cuong composed as the Young American Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony, a position he held from 2020 to 2023. Written for string orchestra, it was inspired by a poem by Mary Oliver called “Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks.” It was premiered online during the pandemic in May 2021. Cuong considers both the poem and the piece a reflection of the pandemic, calling it “a gentle reminder of the uncertainty of the future, the confident hope of the present, and the propulsive force of life that drives us through any doubt that any new day will arrive.”