Bright Sheng, whose Chinese name is Sheng Zong-Liang, works as a classical composer whose training and creative sources extended across the notorious Cultural Revolution and two continents. The pieces H'un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-1976 and Four Movements for Piano Trio each placed as first runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, the former in 1989 and the latter in 1991.
He entered the world on December 6, 1955, in Shanghai and started piano instruction at age four under his mother before continuing with a private teacher. The Revolution erupted in 1966, the year he turned eleven; because employment proved scarce, many youths were dispatched to rural areas, and he received a three-year assignment in western China’s Qinghai province with a song-and-dance troupe, for which he performed on piano.
Once the Cultural Revolution concluded in 1976, Sheng resumed structured study by enrolling at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and completing his undergraduate degree there. Both the upheaval itself and his Qinghai period left decisive marks on his output. He drew on those years for H'un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-1976 and China Dreams, while the opera Song of Majnun and Two Folk Songs from Qinghai incorporate melodies he encountered in Qinghai. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, whose own scores likewise incorporated folk elements, supplied an additional influence.
Sheng serves as professor of music at the University of Michigan and took part in Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, returning to China for that endeavor in summer 2000. His work has reached broader audiences than that of most fellow academics. In opera he has produced The Silver River (1997, co-commissioned by the Kennedy Center and later staged elsewhere), Madam Mao (2003), and Dream of the Red Chamber (2016), whose entire run sold out at the San Francisco Opera. Recordings of his instrumental music circulate widely. He frequently merges Chinese folk sources with Western methods and sonorities, as illustrated by the nonet The Singing Gobi Desert, scored for erhu/zhonghu, sheng, pipa, yangqin, saxophone quartet, and percussion. Several works also feature marimba, an instrument native to neither Chinese nor Western traditions. Northern Lights, recorded in 2017 for Naxos, drew on the Norwegian hardanger fiddle tradition. Sheng has described himself as “100 percent Chinese and 100 percent Western.”
