Chou Wen-Chung Chou Wen-Chung

Chou Wen-Chung's earliest orchestral work, “Landscapes” (山水; completed in 1949 and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1953), is widely recognized as the first work to successfully fuse the musical languages of East and West. Taking the “I Ching” as a point of departure, Chou went on to combine Daoist philosophy, calligraphy and qin music with European music, developing an original theory of “variable modes.”

From 1949, Chou studied with the French composer Edgard Varèse while also serving as his assistant and taking part in the creation of several of his works. The manuscript of Varèse's last work, “Déserts”, is in Chou's own hand. Chou spent many years studying and editing Varèse's works, and even completed two of Varèse's unfinished pieces. A graduate of Columbia University, where Chou studied with Otto Luening and served as an assistant at the computer music center, Chou also studied composition with Nicholas Slonimsky and Bohuslav Martinů and history with the musicologist Paul Henry Lang.

Chou taught in the music department of Columbia University (1964–1991), chairing its doctoral program in composition for more than twenty years and during that time helping many Chinese composers come to study in the United States. To encourage and nurture young composers, Chou founded the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music at Columbia in 1984 and became the first Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition. In 1977, Chou sent the ancient Chinese piece “Flowing Water” (流水) into space aboard Voyager 2. In 1978, Chou founded the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange at Columbia, leading many ongoing programs across cultural fields. Born in Yantai, China, in 1923 and living in the United States from 1946, Chou was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an honorary member of the ISCM and the ACL, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2001.