Cheong Yew Choongholds his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate Degrees from West Virginia University (USA) under full scholarship and graduate assistantship. His teachers include Prof Dr Peter Amstutz and Prof Dr P’ng Tean Hwa. Despite hearing impairment, Yew Choong is a prizewinner of several competitions: Music Teachers National Association Collegiate Artist Piano Competition in the State of West Virginia, WVU’s Annual Young Artists Auditions and the VSA Arts’s International Young Soloists Award.
Among the highlights of solo performances are appearances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C., Thailand’s First Mozart Piano Competition and Festival, the International Piano Festival by People with Disabilities in Osaka and Vienna, UCSI International Piano Festival and Competition, Free Hand Contemporary Composers Piano Festival and KL Piano Gala Concerts.
As an educator, Yew Choong has presented lecture recitals on historical performance practice, at the international and local conferences in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and Switzerland. Most recently, he is one of the featured presenters for a lecture recital about practice-led research on Brahms’s late Intermezzi at UCSI Music Performance Research Symposium 2024. His scholarly contributions include his first textbook Music Theory Rudiments, and articles about historically-informed perspectives of dynamic markings of Beethoven and Romantic composers. He has also played multi-faceted roles as the Chair of the UCSI Piano Pedagogy Conference 2023, adjudicator–presenter for piano competitions and masterclasses, external examiner for PhD Viva Voces and postgraduate recitals, external assessor for full accreditation of MMus Programme, peer reviewer for music journals and a committee member of Mahidol Music Journal’s Editorial Board.