Biography
China's pioneering avant-garde composer earned violin and composition diplomas at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music before the Cultural Revolution restricted him to practicing scales alone; authorities later imprisoned and tortured him. A 1983 fellowship brought him to Columbia University, where he worked with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky and completed his Doctor of Musical Arts. Beyond concert works he has written for dance and theatre while scoring the films "Tang Dynasty," the 1988 Oscar-nominated documentary "Who Killed Vincent Chin," and "A Great Wall," the first Chinese-American feature-film collaboration. His dramatic, potent scores fuse "contemporary Western compositional techniques with my Chinese feeling and experience along with Chinese musical characteristics inherited from thousands of years ago, so as to set up a universal music world expressing natural and primitive beauty." A recording is anticipated of his 1986 composition "Wu" (Rising to Height) for piano and chamber orchestra.