Composer Chen Yi
Recipient of the prestigious Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001-04), Chen Yi has served as the Lorena Searcey Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Music Composition at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1998. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Born April 4, 1953, in Guangzhou, China, Dr. Chen has received music degrees from the Beijing Central Conservatory (BA and MA) and Columbia University in the City of New York (DMA). Dr. Chen’s major composition teachers included Professors Chou Wen-chung, Mario Davidovsky, Wu Zu-qiang and Alexander Goehr.
Chen Yi was the first woman to receive a master’s degree in composition in China in June, 1986, when she presented a full evening concert of her orchestral works in Beijing. In 2001 and 2008, she was invited by the China National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to give evening-length concerts of her orchestral and choral works in Beijing. By combining Chinese and Western traditions, Chen Yi transcends cultural and musical boundaries, and serves as an ambassador for the arts, creating music that reaches a wide range of audiences and inspires people of different cultural backgrounds.
Chen Yi’s most recent orchestral work, Olympic Fire, commissioned to mark the opening of the Beijing Olympics, was first performed at a Proms concert in London on August 8, 2008, by Leonard Slatkin and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Olympic Fire evokes the image of fire and represents a meeting of cultures, in anticipation of the London Olympics in 2012.
For a complete biography, visit Chen Yi.