MOZART PIANO CONCERTO NO. 23
About the Concert
GE XU (ANTIPHONY)
Chen Yi
Born in Guangzhou, China, April 4, 1953;
now living in Kansas City, MI
Embodying today in her music a potent
blend of Chinese and Western influences,
Chinese American composer Chen Yi
undertook a truly dramatic and arduous
journey to reach her present eminence.
Born into a talented family that adored
Western music, she began violin and
piano lessons at age three. But then in
1966 when she was in her early teens, the
Cultural Revolution wrenched the Chinese
away from their original lives and stopped
Chen’s training cold in its tracks. For two
years, she resorted to practicing piano
with a blanket stuffed inside to muffle its
sound and likewise with a mute on her
violin. Finally, at age 15, her instruments
were confiscated, and she was sent away to
perform hard labor on a farm.
Chen Yi
Nevertheless, Chen is a person with
a strong, unshakably optimistic nature,
and she does not look back even on that
time with regret. She eagerly explored the
folk songs of rural China throughout this
period, and later she was finally allowed
to enter the Beijing Central Conservatory,
China’s leading music school. “Actually,
that was the first time for me to realize that
this is my native language! It’s not classical.
It’s not Mozart .…Then I started to realize
that I should find my own voice .…
I realized that I had to think into my
cultural roots very deeply in order…to
have a unique voice to speak in,” said Chen.
After the Cultural Revolution, Chen
studied both Western and Chinese music
at the Central Conservatory, where she
became the first Chinese woman to be
awarded a master’s degree in composition.
She then traveled to the U.S. and earned
her doctorate in composition at Columbia
University in 1993. Becoming a U.S.
citizen, Chen taught composition for three
years at the Peabody Institute and now
serves—alongside her husband, the noted
composer Zhou Long— as a professor at
the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
However, Chen has retained her close
connection with her homeland, and
Chinese folk music still plays a major
role in shaping her singular creative
voice. Written during a residency in San
Francisco in 1994 on a commission from
The Women’s Philharmonic, her orchestral
work Ge Xu (Antiphony) was inspired by the
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