Chou Wen-Chung

There has for quite some time been a trend in music for the fusion of traditional European/American ideals, forms, and designs with Pacific Asian musics. Today the tendency offers maybe become commonplace or even hackneyed, however when Chou Wen-chung relocated from China to america after World Battle II and started to research the customs of both Eastern and Traditional western music, such a fusion was not. Chou Wen-chung was created in Chefoo in July 1923 (notice: according to Chinese language custom, his name is definitely Chou Wen-chung, not really Chou, Wen-chung or Wen-chung, Chou). As a man he ready for a profession as an engineer, acquiring an undergraduate level for the reason that field while still surviving in China. He transferred to New Haven, CT, in 1946 to sign up in the structures college of Yale School, but he sick and tired of his research after a couple of years and was shortly spending almost all of his period building musical abilities beneath the tutelage from the well-known Nicholas Slonimsky. Chou also received the advantage of Edgard Varèse’s teaching (afterwards getting musical executor of Varèse’s property), and finally had taken a master’s level in structure from Columbia School (1954). Post-graduate research included analysis on Chinese language music and portion as Columbia’s Electronic Music Laboratory’s initial technical associate. From 1964 on, Chou taught at Columbia School, portion also in the administration from the University’s College of Arts. He is definitely as full of energy an organizer as he’s a composer and instructor, and he provides lent this energy to many notable American institutions, including a stint as leader of CRI, Inc., founding the Fritz Reiner Middle for Modern Music, and founding and directing the guts for U.S.-China Arts Exchange. In his music, which isn’t plentiful (he ended composing altogether through the 1970s and early 1980s), Chou Wen-chung occupies elements of Chinese language custom, folklore, and/or background and applies these to functions have scored for traditional American ensemble types. Unlike Toru Takemitsu, who might put a normal Asian device (the shakuhachi, for instance) in to the ensemble, Chou appears articles to transplant the audio patterns of his resource — say, Chinese language zither music — onto the piano key pad (he did exactly that, actually, in the 1957 single piano function The Willows are New). He in addition has sought to use something from the concepts and mysteries from the I Ching to his music (for instance, in the 1966 orchestral function Pien). Beijing in the Mists (1986), a chamber function for ten players, was the initial piece to seem after the pension from the 1970s and ’80s, and Chou Wen-chung provides since implemented it up using a Cello Concerto (1992) and three additional chamber ratings. He continues to create and lecture thoroughly over the integration of Eastern and Traditional western musical ideas and practices, aswell as on Asian and modern music.