1. Chou Wen-chung was a Chinese American composer of contemporary classical music.
33 Facts About Chou Wen-chung
1. 2.
Chou Wen-chung emigrated in 1946 to the United States and received his music training at the New England Conservatory and Columbia University.
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Chou Wen-chung grew up in China and developed an early love for music.
4.
In 1946, Chou Wen-chung turned down a scholarship in architecture at Yale University in order to pursue music, studying with Nicolas Slonimsky at the New England Conservatory and with Edgard Varese and Otto Luening in New York.
5.
On one occasion, Chou Wen-chung showed his Chinese-flavored fugues to Bohuslav Martinu, who started to read them on the piano and suddenly stopped after a few measures.
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Chou Wen-chung became a naturalized citizen of the US in 1958.
7.
Slonimsky commented on how Chou Wen-chung successfully fused two seemingly incompatible musical materials and wrote: When pentatonic melodies of the Orient are harmonized in this conventional manner, the incompatibility between the melody and the harmonic setting is such that the very essence of Oriental melody is destroyed.
8.
Chou Wen-chung addressed the problem of conciliation between melodic pentatonicism and dissonance.
9.
Chou Wen-chung distinguished himself as vice-dean of the School of the Arts and director of the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music at Columbia University.
10.
In 1978, Chou Wen-chung established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University to promote mutual understanding between the two countries through the channel of culture.
11.
From Varese's purely Western perspectives, Chou Wen-chung's music represented cross-cultural pollination, by integrating the East and the West with a requisite understanding of both cultures.
12.
Chou Wen-chung can be regarded as the founder of the contemporary Chinese musical idiom, one whose music sets the standard and an example for succeeding generations to emulate.
13.
Chou Wen-chung recognized the intrinsic contribution of qin music and the single tone concept to Chinese music, and more importantly, he recognized their value to composers.
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Chou Wen-chung believed the West has mastered formal structures, whereas the East has focused on controlling subtle inflections of tones.
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Chou Wen-chung's works have been performed by the orchestras of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo.
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Chou Wen-chung received grants from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Koussevitsky Foundations, from the National Institute of the Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
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Chou Wen-chung was the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
18.
Chou Wen-chung was composer-in-residence at Tanglewood, Bennington and the University of Illinois.
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Chou Wen-chung was an honorary life member of the Asian Composers League.
20.
Chou Wen-chung was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2001, he was named Officier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
21.
Chou Wen-chung was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory in 2019.
22.
Chou Wen-chung quoted a traditional folk song Fengyang Flower Drum in Landscapes and this orchestral piece is inspired by poems that evoke the scenery and atmosphere of a Chinese landscape painting.
23.
Peter Chang commented that through these early works, Chou Wen-chung developed a mode of musical thinking in terms of Chinese visual and literary artistic principles such as the emphasis on the control of ink flow in calligraphy, brevity in landscape paintings, poetry in musical form, and pictorial depiction of the qin playing gestures.
24.
Chou Wen-chung applied and experimented with the principles of the I-Ching in harmonic, thematic, textural, and rhythmic structures.
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Later, Chou Wen-chung applied the modes to other works such as Cursive, Pien, and Yun.
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Chou Wen-chung stated that the structure of Pien is based on the concept of balance between the positive and the negative forces as stated in I-Ching.
27.
Ideogram is another evolutionary concept Chou Wen-chung experimented with while attempting to synthesize western and eastern elements and render Chinese sounds through western instruments.
28.
Chou Wen-chung is an accomplished calligrapher and after years of practicing the various styles and scripts of Chinese calligraphic writings, Chou Wen-chung began to see the parallels in the art of calligraphy and music.
29.
Chou Wen-chung compares the ink flow to the density of the music and experimented with the ideograms of cursive style writing in the piece Cursive in 1963.
30.
Chou Wen-chung wrote his second string quartet, Streams in response to Bach's Art of Fugue, which was commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet.
31.
Chou Wen-chung wrote a version for western instruments, Ode to Eternal Pine, for the New York New Music Ensemble and a version for traditional Chinese instruments, Sizhu Eternal Pine, for the Taipei Chinese Orchestra.
32.
Chou Wen-chung was born into a literati family with ancestral roots in the ancient cultural center of Changzhou in Jiangsu province.
33.
Chou Wen-chung married Chang Yi-an was born on Shanghai in 1927, died April 12,2016 and in 1962.