10 Of The Greatest Chinese Composers You Should Know

Start with: “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”🏆 Oscar win

Tan Dun grew up in a village in Hunan during the Cultural Revolution and was sent to plant rice on a commune, where he played traditional string instruments with other workers. He entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1977 and moved to New York in 1986 to study at Columbia University, where he wrote his first opera, Nine Songs.

His score for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma, won an Oscar, a Grammy and a BAFTA. In the concert hall he is known for “organic music” played on water, paper and stone, as in his Water Passion After St. Matthew, and his opera Marco Polo won the Grawemeyer Award.

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Start with: “Ba Yin (The Eight Sounds)”Pulitzer Prize finalist

Chen Yi learned piano and violin as a small child, then spent part of the Cultural Revolution in a countryside work camp, where she was allowed to play only revolutionary songs. She later became the first Chinese woman to earn a master’s degree in composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, before taking a doctorate at Columbia University.

Her music blends Chinese folk sources with Western forms, and she has written for orchestra, choir, chamber groups and traditional Chinese instruments. She was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Si Ji (Four Seasons), has held Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory since 1998.

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Start with: “Wu Xing (The Five Elements)”Messiaen’s last student

Born in Shanghai, Qigang Chen spent three years in “ideological reeducation” during the Cultural Revolution but kept studying composition. In 1977 he was one of 26 students accepted from about 2,000 applicants to the Central Conservatory’s composition class, and in 1984 he moved to France, where he became Olivier Messiaen’s last student. He took French citizenship in 1992.

His orchestral piece Wu Xing (The Five Elements) was a finalist for the BBC’s Masterprize in 2001, and Iris dévoilée blends a large orchestra with female voices and Chinese instruments. He was music director of the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2013.

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Start with: “Yellow River Cantata”“People’s Composer”

Xian Xinghai was among the first Chinese composers to draw on Western classical music. Born in Macau, he studied in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, then went to Paris, where in 1934 he became the first Chinese student admitted to the Paris Conservatory’s advanced composition class. He wrote two symphonies, a violin concerto, an opera and nearly 300 songs.

His best-known work is the Yellow River Cantata, written in Yan’an in 1939, reportedly in about six days, as a rallying cry during the war against Japan. Pianists know it through the Yellow River Piano Concerto, arranged from it in 1969. He died in Moscow in 1945 at 40, after tuberculosis brought on by overwork and malnutrition.

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Start with: “Drizzle (Maomao Yu)”Father of Chinese pop

Li Jinhui is generally regarded as the father of Chinese popular music. A teacher and folk song collector from Hunan, he wrote children’s songs and operas for his magazine Little Friend, and broke a taboo in the 1920s by putting young women on stage in his song and dance troupes. One early satirical song angered a local warlord so much that Li was beaten for it.

His 1927 song “Drizzle”, recorded by his daughter Li Minghui, set a pentatonic folk-style tune against jazz-band instruments and is often called the first Chinese pop song. Critics attacked his music as “yellow music”, meaning pornographic, and it was banned after 1949. He died in 1967, a victim of persecution during the Cultural Revolution.

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Start with: “Symphony No. 5, Kalmar Nyckel”Grammy nominee

Benjamin Lees was born Benjamin George Lisniansky in Harbin, Manchuria, to a Russian-Jewish family that emigrated to California when he was an infant. He began piano at 5, studied at the University of Southern California, and then spent four years under the guidance of George Antheil, who he said “changed my life”.

Lees rejected both atonalism and Americana in favor of classical structures with restless, shifting rhythms. The NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast his Profiles in 1954, and the Dallas Symphony commissioned his Symphony No. 4, Memorial Candles, in 1985 in memory of the Holocaust. His Symphony No. 5, Kalmar Nyckel, earned a Grammy nomination in 2003.

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Start with: “and blue sparks burn”

Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and moved to Vancouver with her family in 1974, at the age of eight. She studied piano at the University of British Columbia, then took a master’s in composition at the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate at Yale. She taught at Stanford from 1994 to 2004 and joined McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in 2010.

She writes mostly chamber music, along with orchestral works for the Vancouver, Winnipeg and Oregon symphonies. Her violin and piano piece and blue sparks burn (2002) reflects on the September 11 attacks. She also wrote the music for Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square (1998), an animated documentary from the National Film Board of Canada nominated for an Oscar.

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Start with: “Below the Lion Rock”Over 1,200 songs

Joseph Koo was born in Guangzhou and moved to Hong Kong in 1948, starting piano lessons at 17. With sponsorship from Run Run Shaw he studied at Berklee in the early 1960s, then returned to score films for Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, including the Bruce Lee films Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon.

As music director at TVB from 1973 he wrote theme after theme with the lyricist James Wong, including “The Fatal Irony” (1974), the first Cantonese TV theme song and one of the first Cantopop hits. His more than 1,200 songs include “Below the Lion Rock” (1979), later regarded as an unofficial anthem of Hong Kong. He was appointed MBE in 1982.

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Start with: “Nostalgia, from the Inner Mongolia Suite”“King of Violinists”

Known in China as “the King of Violinists”, Ma Sicong was a performer and composer who became the first president of Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music in 1949. His Nostalgia for violin, part of the Inner Mongolia Suite of 1937, is one of the best-loved Chinese pieces of the 20th century.

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 he was targeted by the Red Guards. In January 1967 he and his family escaped by boat to Hong Kong and then, with help from the US Consulate, to the United States. China charged him with treason, a charge not lifted until 1985. He died in Philadelphia in 1987, and his ashes were returned to his hometown in 2007.

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Start with: “Twilight in Tibet”

Born in Shanghai, Ye Xiaogang studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and then at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He writes symphonies, concertos, chamber music and film scores, often inspired by Chinese landscapes, poetry and Buddhist ideas, as in Twilight in Tibet and his Great Wall Symphony.

Lang Lang premiered his piano concerto Starry Sky at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Ye teaches composition at the Central Conservatory, founded the Beijing Modern Music Festival, chairs the Chinese Musicians Association and is an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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