22 Facts About Bright Sheng

Bright Sheng is a Chinese-born American composer, pianist and conductor.

Bright Sheng's music has been performed by such musicians as the conductors Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, David Robertson, David Zinman, Neeme Jarvi, Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff; the cellists Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, and Alisa Weilerstein; the pianists Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, and Peter Serkin; the violinists Gil Shaham and Cho-Liang Lin; and the percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

Bright Sheng graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory and went on to continue his education at Queens College and Columbia University.

Bright Sheng was born in Shanghai, China on December 6,1955.

Bright Sheng's mother had been his first piano teacher, having started learning at the age of four.

Related searches

Bright Sheng went back to playing a year later, using his school's since he didn't have one at home.

Bright Sheng was sent to Qinghai Province, China, and stayed there for seven years.

Bright Sheng became a performer, playing the piano and percussion to not only perform, but to study and collect folk music.

Bright Sheng had to teach himself how to play musical instruments and learn music theory to play, Qinghai folk music became and continues to be a strong inspiration in his compositions today.

Bright Sheng used Tibetan folk music from Qinghai as a basis for his opera The Song of Majnun.

Bright Sheng left China in 1982 and joined his family in the United States, where he had to re-learn different elements of music to adjust to the Western style of music.

Bright Sheng served as a composer-in-residence for the Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1989 to 1992, the Seattle Symphony from 1992 to 1995, and as an artistic director for the Wet Ink Festival hosted by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1993.

Bright Sheng taught at the University of Washington for a year and joined the composition department at the University of Michigan in 1995, as associate professor of music.

Bright Sheng was involved in the Silk Road Project, a music project that stretches across different nations and cultures.

Bright Sheng had wanted to write a research article to document the composition, gain the help from a graduate student, as well as lecturing on American music.

Bright Sheng allegedly failed to give students any warning that the film contained blackface.

At the beginning of his musical career, Bright Sheng started out by making simplistic pieces of Chinese-Western mixtures since he had been exposed early on to both traditional Chinese music and 'mainstream' Western music.

For nearly his whole composing career, Bright Sheng has represented the Chinese culture he came from with the Western culture he moved to.

Bright Sheng looked at the history of Western music, closely studying the musical styles of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, as well as the music of other composers and his teachers.

Bright Sheng believes that his music fits within two of the ways Bartok believed folk music can be used in composition: imitating the melody in the folkloric style and writing not deliberately in the style of folk music but with its flavor.

In 1996, Bright Sheng traveled back to his home country of China after fourteen years to compose Spring Dreams, commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma.

Bright Sheng's orchestral composition H'un, which premiered with the New York Chamber Symphony in 1988 and was a memorial to the Cultural Revolution in China, was awarded the first runner-up for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize.