2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition Judges

Piano Division Judges

Professor Jeffrey Gilliam 

Professor at Western Washington University The Department of Music

Previous faculty at University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance

Previous faculty at The Juilliard School 

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition Piano Division Judge

Since joining the faculty at Western Washington University in 1992, pianist Jeffrey Gilliam has performed throughout the Pacific Northwest as solo recitalist; as guest pianist with The Seattle Chamber Players at Benaroya Hall; as chamber musician and soloist in the Marrowstone and Bellingham Festivals; and as concerto soloist with local orchestras. In addition, Prof. Gilliam’s extended association with the late Lord Yehudi Menuhin has led to his collaboration with superb instrumentalists, with whom he has performed at London’s Wigmore Hall, The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City; in numerous concert tours across the U.S. and Canada, and in distinguished European, Asian, and South American festivals.


Originally from Akron, Ohio, Jeffrey Gilliam studied piano with Cécile Genhart at the Eastman School of Music, and with Theodore Lettvin at the University of Michigan. A Fulbright Scholarship in piano and in German literature enabled him to continue his studies with Günter Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, where he made his European recital debut in 1982. He has also performed in master classes for Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, John Perry, Maria Curcio Diamand, Dorothy Taubman, Tatiana Nikolayeva, and György Sandor.  He studied piano accompanying with Martin Katz and with Margo Garrett.


Prof. Gilliam taught an accompanying course at The Juilliard School, and for three years he was Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of Michigan School of Music. He worked on the faculty of the International Menuhin Music Academy in Gstaad/Blonay, Switzerland for fourteen years. He has recorded with violinists Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggerio Ricci, and Alberto Lysy, for EMI, Opus 111, and Dinemec Classics, respectively.


At Western Washington University, Jeffrey Gilliam teaches piano and directs the piano accompanying program. In addition he is Artistic Director of The Sanford-Hill Piano Series. Several of his recent former WWU piano performance majors have gone on to distinguished graduate programs at Rice University Shepherd School of Music; Manhattan School of Music; Stony Brook University School of Music; and The New England Conservatory.


Prof. Gilliam remains active as an adjudicator and clinician with the Washington State Music Teachers Association (WSMTA). His WWU piano students frequently distinguish themselves as state and divisional winners in Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) competitions.


In recent years he has taught as a guest professor at The University of Pretoria, South Africa (1998-99), and at Silpakorn Fine Arts University in Bangkok, Thailand (1999). In 2005, he received his second Fulbright, a Senior Specialist Award for performance and teaching in Thailand. In May, 2006 he accompanied the Asian recital debut of WWU soprano alumna Erin Wall at the Musashino Cultural Center in Tokyo, Japan.  In June, 2006 & 2007 he taught on the faculty of The Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at The New England Conservatory in Boston.

Dr. Boya Li

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition Piano Division Judge Assistant



Dr. Boya Li is an accomplished pianist celebrated for her outstanding achievements in music competitions and extensive performance experience. She triumphed with First Prize at the 2019 Denver International Piano Competition, and continued her winning streak by securing First Prize at the 2020 Mississippi MTNA Young Artist competition. Additionally, she was awarded Second Prize at the 2021 Mississippi Music Teachers Association Graduate Solo Division, showcasing her exceptional talent and dedication to her craft.

Dr. Li has an impressive record of performance, having given 7 solo recitals and participated in over 20 chamber music and collaborative performances in the last five years. In addition, she has been actively involved in charity performances over the past few years. Dr. Li’s ability to adapt her repertoire to traditional Baroque, Classical, and Romantic styles, as well as avant-garde contemporary music, highlights her versatility. Her playing integrates lyrical beauty and technical prowess with profound expressiveness and emotional depth. Professor Georg Friedrich Schenck of Robert Schumann Hochschule said after listening to Boya's performance: " Boya is a passionate and thoughtful pianist. Her playing blends a purity of expression with youthful vitality."

Additionally, Dr. Li is also a passionate educator, guiding students from beginner to professional levels. She served as an instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi, teaching courses such as MED 101 Piano Level I, MED Piano Level II, and MUP 103 Private Piano Lessons for Non-Piano Majors. Her effectiveness as a teacher is further highlighted by her online private students winning Second Place in both the 17th Century Music and the 18th Century Music categories of the Great Composers Competition in 2020.

Dr. Li holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The University of Southern Mississippi and a Master of Music degree from the University of Northern Colorado. She has furthered her education with studies at the China Conservatory of Music and the Tianjin Conservatory of Music (affiliated Music Middle School), under the guidance of esteemed mentors including Manchun Chen, Meina Yu, Adam Żukiewicz, and Ellen Elder.

Winds Division Judges

Professor Michael Brockman

Faculty at University of Washington School of Music

Artist Director of Seattle Jazz Repertory Orchestra

Clinician of Selmer Company

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition Wind Division Judge

Michael Brockman, DMA, moved from the East Coast to Seattle in 1987 to join the UW School of Music faculty. He instructs concert and jazz saxophone performance, and jazz arranging and composition. Brockman earned a Doctor of Musical Arts from the UW, and a Master of Music degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied arranging with Jaki Byard, composition with George Russell, and woodwind performance with Joe Allard. He earned a bachelor of music degree from Lewis and Clark College, and also attended both the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.


Brockman's doctoral dissertation is titled "Orchestration Techniques of Duke Ellington," and he has transcribed numerous classic large ensemble scores by Ellington, Mingus, Mulligan, Lunceford, Kenton, Monk and others. He is the lead saxophonist and co-director of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, and has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Quincy Jones, James Moody, Benny Carter, Ernestine Anderson, Arturo Sandoval, Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Joe Williams, and many other luminaries of jazz. The SRJO presents the annual Duke Ellington Sacred Concert in Seattle (now in its 23rd year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare big band works. In addition to performing in the SRJO, Brockman has prepared scores for much of the band's repertoire, based on rare vintage recordings of unpublished works by great composers.


As both a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, he has toured throughout Europe and the eastern United States. He is an active professional performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, including the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and appears on nationally acclaimed recordings with Jimmy Heath, the SSO, the SRJO, and Seattle drummer Clarence Acox, whose 1991 CD Joanna's Dance and 1992 CD Indigenous Groove were consecutively selected as Album of the Year by Seattle's Earshot magazine.


A perpetual student of woodwind acoustics, Brockman is the inventor of a patented device called the "Broctave Key" (U.S. Patent WO/2010/068909) that provides an additional octave/register vent to any wind instrument.


Brockman has premiered many new works for saxophone, including the West Coast premiere of Sonata for Saxophone by Gunther Schuller, and has appeared as a soloist in the Reims Music Festival, the Dubrovnik Music Festival, the World Saxophone Congress, the Stanford Computer Music Festival, the New Music Across America Festival, the Seattle New Music for Saxophone Festival, the Northwest Saxophone Symposium, and many others. Brockman is a clinician for the Selmer Company.

Miao Liu

Flutist of Olympia Symphony Orchestra

Flutist of Seattle Wind Symphony

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition Wind Division Judge Assistant


Miao Liu, born in Beijing, China, is currently a DMA candidate at Arizona State University (ASU). She received her Masters of Music degree from University of Washington and Bachelor of Science in Psychology degree with a focus on education from Fujian Normal University in Fujian, China. 


An active soloist, Ms. Liu has performed as a featured soloist with the Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble, Arizona State University Percussion Ensemble, Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, University of Washington Symphony Orchestra, and University of Washington Wind Ensemble. As a passionate ensemble and chamber musician, Liu has been actively performing with local ensembles including the Olympia Symphony and the Seattle Wind Symphony. She also organized and performed in a biannual chamber concert series featuring local musicians, showcasing a diverse program that promotes works by BIPOC composers. Among her achievements, she is an award-winning flutist, having recently won the 2024 National Flute Association Convention Performer Competition and performed at the 2024 National Flute Convention. Liu has also won first prizes at the 2019 Arizona Flute Society Collegiate Competition, the 2017 Seattle Philharmonic Don Bushell Concerto Competition, and the 2016 Concerto Competition at the University of Washington. She was also the finalist of the 2021 Concerto Competition at Arizona State University and the 2019 Jacqueline Avent Concerto Concerto Competition.


In addition, Ms. Liu is a dedicated educator. During her time as a Teaching Assistant of the ASU Flute Studio, Ms. Liu taught non-major students flute lessons; offered freshmen and sophomore fundamental technique classes; substitute taught undergraduate students and lead studio classes; taught pedagogy classes to undergraduate and graduate students; and gave  flute introduction classes for music education majors. Passionate about equity in the arts, Miao gave flute lessons and ensemble coachings to underprivileged elementary and middle school students in the Greater Phoenix Area as a flute teacher/performer at the Harmony Project. Liu was also the director of the ASU Community Flute Choir where she led rehearsals and organized concerts in venues such as the Musical Instrumental Museum. Fluent in Mandarin and English, Ms. Liu offers lessons in both languages in order to help students from different backgrounds.

Strings Division Judges

Dr. Xuecong Sunny Xia

Assistant Conductor of Seattle Symphony Orchestra 

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition String Division Judge



Recognized for her innate musicality, compelling presence, and technical precision, conductor Sunny Xuecong Xia’s ability to forge an immediate and captivating connection with orchestras and singers alike has led to engagements around the globe. Xia joined the Seattle Symphony at the beginning of the 2022/2023 season as Douglas F. King Assistant Conductor and was quickly promoted to Associate Conductor. In the 2023/2024 season, Xia leads the Seattle Symphony in over a dozen programs featuring soloists such as Conrad Tao, Noah Geller, and Mahani Teave, and makes her second appearance on the Celebrate Asia program.


Highlights of the 2022/2023 season include leading the world premiere of Seattle Symphony Composer-in-Residence, Angelique Poteat’s Dear Humanity for Youth Chorus and Orchestra, a work that harnesses the power of 50 voices and full orchestra to confront climate change, the Celebrate Asia program with violinist Kerson Leong, the Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop Concert that featured 10 world premieres, and numerous Community, Family, and School concerts. She has additionally assisted Dame Jane Glover and James Gaffigan at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.


In the 2021/2022 season, Xia was named a Conducting Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where she made her festival debut leading the world premiere of Marc Migó Cortés' Dumka. She led a production of La bohème with the Chandler Opera Company to great success and appeared with double bassist Xavier Foley and violinist Eunice Kim in Foley’s poignant work For Justice and Peace. Additional engagements included Assistant Conductor of the Phoenix Youth Symphony Orchestra and Arizona Musicfest. In the 2020/2021 season, she appeared as guest conductor with the MusicaNova Orchestra and was invited to serve as Assistant Conductor at the National Music Festival and Pierre Monteux Music Festival.


Equally at home in the opera pit, prior to leading La bohème with the Chandler Opera Company, Xia has served as assistant conductor for productions of Così fan tutte, Hänsel und Gretel, Die Zauberflöte, Cavalleria rusticana, Le Rossignol, and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, among others. A dynamic interpreter of contemporary music, Xia has conducted works by Michael Abels, Katy Abbott, Quinn Mason, Gabriela Ortiz, Gabriella Smith, and Tan Dun, among others. She has previously led the Cleveland Institute of Music New Music Ensemble in series such as the Cleveland NEOSonicFest and CIM New Music Series and has over a dozen world premieres under her credit, including performances with the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, MusicaNova Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony.


Xia holds a dual master’s degree in Orchestral Conducting and Violin Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music where she studied under the tutelage of Carl Topilow and Jan Mark Sloman. She also holds a doctoral degree from Arizona State University where she studied under the guidance of Dr. Jeffery Meyer and Tito Muñoz. At Seattle Symphony, she is mentored by Conductor Emeritus, Ludovic Morlot. She is further kindly mentored by Marin Alsop, JoAnn Falleta, Cristian Măcelaru, Larry Rachleff, and Carl St.Clair. For three summers, she attended the Monteux School and Music Festival as a Kurt & Torj Wray Conducting Scholar where she studied with Michael Jinbo. An accomplished violinist, prior to becoming a conductor, Xia performed as a soloist with orchestras in China and Australia, including the symphony orchestras of Harbin, Zheijiang, Hunan and Guangxi, and the Concertante Ensemble. While attending Cleveland Institute of music, she served as concertmaster of the CIM Orchestra.


Originally from Guangzhou, China, Xia relocated to Sydney, Australia at the age of 14 on a sponsorship from the Australian String Academy that allowed her to further her violin studies with Peter Shi-xiang Zhang and Charmian Gadd. A talented basketball athlete, she competed in the semi-professional New South Wales Metro Junior League before focusing primarily on her musical pursuits. When not performing or enjoying a pick-up game, Xia can be found reading, hiking, kayaking, or learning languages. She speaks Cantonese, English, Mandarin, and Teochew, and is improving upon her French, German, and Italian.

Dr. Yang Lu

Faculty at Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra

Faculty at Seattle Conservatory of Music

Trio Camellia and Corda Quartet

2024 to 2025 World Harmonies Competition String Division Judge



Yang Lu received Doctor of Music Arts degree in Cello Performance from the University of Washington, a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree from Central Conservatory of Music in Bejing, China. Her principal teachers include Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, Mingqing Yu, Eric Gaenslen, and David Premo. Lu was the recipient of the Alcor Endowed Scholarship and the Louis G. Marsh Endowed Music Scholarship in her DMA studies at the University of Washington, where she performed with the Corda Quartet, winner of the Strings and Piano Chamber Music Competition for the 2016 – 2017 academic year. She has had masterclasses with world-renowned chamber quartets such as the Emerson String Quartet, the Brandis String Quartet, the Tokyo String Quartet, and the Calidore String Quartet. She also had solo masterclasses with eminent cellists that include Wolfgang Boettcher, Lynn Harrell, David Geringas, Walter Grimmer, Albert Rome, Solow Jeffery, and Xavier Phillips.


As a dedicated cello teacher, Lu has developed a studio that strives to teach cello to students across an array of experiences, from beginners to advanced levels. Lu’s passionate commitment to her students’ success has helped them win many domestic and international competitions, including the David Popper VI International Cello Competition for Young Cellists, the 23rd Heran Violoncello Competition, the Liezen International Cello Competition, the Russian Chamber Music Competition, the Performing Arts Festival of the Eastside, and the Bach Festival. Her students have received admission to the Juilliard School, New England Conservatory of Music and to the University of Pennsylvania Department of Music. Although the fruits of her commitment to teaching have recently begun to appear, they bode well for her as she continues her journey as an artist-teacher.


Always seeking to intersect technology with music, Lu believes that technology-assisted music education will be critical for the future because it will allow performers and students to practice with objectivity. As a music scholar, she undertook research into recorded excerpts of renown cellists in performance environments, analyzing those excerpts with digital signal processing techniques. This allowed her to visualize and discuss cello vibrato as it was actually executed. She will continue to create such innovate methods to improve musicians’ understanding of the instrument, in terms of both technique and musicality.


As cellist and founding member of Seattle-based chamber music groups Trio Camellia and Corda Quartet, Lu enjoys the variegated life of a musician. She has been a recitalist and chamber musician both nationally and worldwide, appearing in performances at Carnegie Hall, Music Center at Strathmore, the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Tokyo Metropolitan Center, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and Graz Opera in Austria. Lu served as cellist in many local orchestras including Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, Seattle Collaborative Orchestra, Bellevue Ballet Orchestra, and Ensign Symphony Orchestra.


Since moving to Seattle in 2013, Lu has devoted herself to musical outreach in the local community. She was invited to perform on Seattle’s KING 5 TV, which interviewed her on-air. Lu additionally performed with Trio Camelia for the project Music Under the Stars, hosted by Seattle Chamber Society, to offer chamber music to local Seattle communities. She was also a mentor at Seattle Music Partners, helping to eliminate racial and economic barriers to quality music education.


Yang Lu serves as cello coach at the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra and as faculty at the Seattle Conservatory of Music, where she teaches chamber music. She is also a member of American String Teachers Association and Washington Music Teachers Association.