Chen Yi is recognized as one of the most important and talented composers of her generation. Her orchestral, chamber and vocal works are widely performed in the U.S. and abroad as she has received commissions and awards from numerous prominent performing organizations and funding institutions.
Chen Yi is a native of Guangzhou, China, and a graduate of the Central Conservatory of Beijing where she studied composition with Wu Zu-qiang and Alexander Goehr. She came to the United States in 1986 and received a DMA degree with distinction in May, 1993 from Columbia University, where her principal teachers were Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky.
As part of the Meet The Composer New Residencies program, Chen Yi served as Composer-in-Residence from 1993 to 1996 for three San Francisco organizations. The Woman’s Philharmonic, the vocal ensemble Chanticleer, and the Aptos Creative Arts Program for middle school children. The residency culminated in June 1996 with a three-day festival of Chen Yi’s music at the Center for the Arts Theater, in the Yerba Buena Gardens of San Francisco. Included were performances by the Philharmonic, Chanticleer and the Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company. Works from the festival were recorded and released on the New Albion label. The composer continues as a new music advisor to the Philharmonic and Chanticleer.
From 1996 to 1998, Chen Yi was a member of the composition faculty of Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In the fall of 1998, she became the Lorena Searcey Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Composition at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Chen Yi also maintains a home in New York City with her husband, the composer Zhou Long. Since 1986, Zhou and Chen Have participated in and advised the Music from China program, which produces annual concerts in New York.
Chen Yi’s awards include the first prize from the China National Composition Competition, an NEA composer fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lili Boulanger Award from the Women’s Philharmonic, the 1996 Sorel Medal for Excellence in Music from the Center for Women in Music at New York University, and the 1997 Cal Arts Alpert Award. Commissioning grants have been received from Meet The Composer/Reader’s Digest, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Chamber Music America, the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundations, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Creative Work Fund, Eastman School of Music, the San Francisco Art Commission, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others.
I express my feelings through my music, which combines Chinese and Western musical materials and media. The inspirations and ideas behind the pieces are mostly Chinese. But the instrumentations of the pieces usually came from the musicians in America who suggest of commission them.
Shuo is written for string orchestra or string quintet. The word “Shuo” in Chinese means initiate. It represents the first day of every month in the lunar calendar. In my piece Shuo, I applied initial materials taken from Chinese folk music, in terms of tunes and mountain song-singing gestures and developed them for string instruments. The pentatonic lines are woven vividly in different layers, to paint a delicate oriental landscape.
Based on the first movement of my 1982 string quartet, the work was commissioned by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra (directed by Barbara Day Turner), for the opening concert of its 1994-95 season, and is dedicated to Prof. Wu Zu-qiang, my composition teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, who brought me into the professional composition field, and guided me to find my own voice in new music creation.
--Chen Yi