Chinese-born composer credits move to U.S. for her success

Although Europe is not farther from Seattle than East Asia, the cultural emphasis here traditionally has been more Asian than European, especially in the visual arts. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried that emphasis another step with its commitment to new music with Asian connections.

COMING UP

SEATTLE CHAMBER PLAYERS

WHEN: Sunday night at 7:30

WHERE: Nordstrom Recital Hall

TICKETS: $22, with student discounts; 206-215-4747 or www.seattlesymphony.org

SEATTLE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

WHEN: Thursday night at 7:30 through March 21

WHERE: Benaroya Hall

TICKETS: ; $16-$60, with student/senior discounts; 206-215-4747 or www.seattlesymphony.org.

The latest chapter is the two-week residency of Chinese American composer Chen Yi, which opens Sunday with a concert of the Seattle Chamber Players at Nordstrom Recital Hall titled "Music of New Asia." Chen's music, as well as that of Zhou Long (her husband), Bun-Ching Lam, Tan Dun and others, will be performed.

"We are playing music from the Chinese diaspora, composers from many parts of China, who currently live all over the world," said Paul Taub, flutist and executive director of the players.

Chen's Third Symphony, subtitled "My Musical Journey to America," commissioned by the SSO in honor of its centennial, will be premiered at Benaroya Hall on Thursday night with Gerard Schwarz on the podium. The program, which also includes works by MacDowell and Saint-Saens and features pianist Andre Watts and organist Joseph Adam as soloists, will receive additional performances through March 21.

Chen also will participate in a number of workshops for educators and meet with members of the Garfield High School Orchestra and the choir at Whitman Middle School, who will perform her music. She will conduct a rehearsal of her music for concert band at Interlake High School in Bellevue.

Now 50, Chen can readily address musical life in China and the United States. She spent her first 33 years in her native country, coming to America to study at Columbia University on a full scholarship as part of the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange. The program, led by Chou Wen-Chung, became a kind of school of Chinese American composers.

Her path to Columbia was not an easy one. She and her parents, both doctors, suffered in the Cultural Revolution, with Chen spending two years deep in the countryside carrying 100-pound loads of mud and rocks up a mountain with a stick and basket 22 times a day. By the time she was able to enter the Beijing Central Conservatory, she'd already had a career, as a composer and concertmaster of the Beijing Opera Troupe, a national company specializing in a Westernized Socialist Realist style. She had studied piano, then violin before the Cultural Revolution forbade such things. When the government lifted the ban on higher education, Chen was among 10,000 applicants to the Central Conservatory. She was one of six women and 26 men to be accepted. In 1986, she was the first woman composer to receive a master's degree in China after the Cultural Revolution.

The United States changed her life.

"Studying here opened up my mind and helped me grow," she said the other day in a telephone interview from Orange County. "My friends, composers and musicians, and those in other fields inspired me. In New York, you learn a lot just walking down the street. I don't think one person should stay in one place forever. Then you don't have a chance to look back and compare your culture with other cultures. That is how you find your own voice."

When asked how she wanted to be described -- Chinese or Chinese American -- she said Chinese American. "My roots remain Chinese, not only the skin but the culture itself, but I have been so influenced by living in America."

Her music reflects that, with its coupling of Chinese and Western flavors contained within a Westernized structure.

Not surprisingly, she has done well in her adopted country. Her works are performed by leading musicians and ensembles throughout the United States and Europe, and she has received prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In the early '90s, she was a composer-in-residence in San Francisco (Chanticleer, the vocal ensemble, and the Women's Philharmonic), then a member of the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music for the past six years.

Her Third Symphony is perhaps a summation for Chen, with its three movements titled "Dragon Culture," "Melting Pot" and "Dreaming."

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