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Tuesday, January 18, 2000

By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Writer

It's said that music transcends the boundaries of culture. If that's true, then so must laughter. And composer Chen Yi has an abundance of both. Born in Guang-zhou, China, and now a U.S. citizen, Chen has made a name for herself combining Western and Eastern compositional styles. Her vibrant body of works reflects the bouncy exuberance of the woman herself.

Chen is part of an increasingly well-known group of Chinese-American composers such as Tan Dun and Bright Sheng, leading her to speak, teach and perform all around the country. Tonight in a public concert and tomorrow with students, Chen will do just that under the aegis of the University of Pittsburgh's Music on the Edge series. Chen is the 2000 Lehar composer-in-residence, named for the composer Franz Lehar.

Chen's music is like a breath of fresh air - but it blows across you like a whipping wind. Her music, written for both Western and Eastern instruments, moves perpetually. It's an almost manic sound, with scant downtime for the listener.

And manic is just how you could describe Chen herself. "I am told that my music sounds like my personality," says Chen. "I go very fast." Indeed, Chen, 46, bubbles with enthusiasm talking about anything, especially her attempts to bridge the cultural gap between the hemispheres. "If you listen to my orchestra works, I always combine the technique of playing on Chinese instruments and apply it to Western instruments," she says. "You can find some refreshing sounds, technique and textures."

Interestingly enough, she learned Western instruments first. Her father was a doctor who had a passion for classical music. And Chen started on the violin and piano at age 3.

What's most amazing about her effervescent personality is that it survived intact through a horrific experience: the Chinese Cultural revolution of the 1960s onward. When she was 15, the Red Guard deported Chen and her entire family to the countryside to toil in a military labor camp.

"In the hard labor you get up at 4 o'clock to beat the sun to carry rocks, sand and stones to the top of the mountain to build those military castles, and you go back to your tent at 8 o'clock," she says. "Sometimes more than 10 hours a day."

As horrible as it was, the forced labor was at least a known element for the workers. Far worse for Chen was the unknown that followed. "You didn't know your future," she says. As a student, Chen wasn't considered particularly harmful to the state. "[But] my father and mother were medical doctors, the worst intellectuals, so my father was sent to the countryside for more than 10 years."

But not even the weight of a revolution could quell Chen's love for music. "I brought my violin with me. When I played it in the spare time, I could only play the revolutionary songs, because Western music was prohibited."

In a most dangerous and surreptitious behavior, she sneaked all types of Western figurations, techniques and flourishes into the agitprop. "I'd [embellish] the melody with all the techniques that I learned before from the Western repertory, [making] up all kinds of technical passages to go along with the revolutionary tunes," Chen recalls. "They didn't recognize it because the audience was farmers and soldiers."

Chen escaped that horrific situation after two years. But characteristically, she credits it with touching her life in a positive way. "Through this hard labor work, I started learning the value of life ... the importance of individual life," she says.

After two years, the government allowed her to return to her hometown, and soon Chen took the concertmaster position with the Beijing Opera Troupe.

When Beijing Central Conservatory opened its doors again, Chen enrolled. Her excellence there - she was the first woman in China to get a master's degree in composition - led, in 1986, to her continuing her studies in the United States. She received a doctorate from Columbia University in 1993 and never lived in China again. She currently is teaching at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Conservatory.

"Chen Yi has been getting an awful lot of recognition lately throughout the country and elsewhere," says University of Pittsburgh composer and Music on the Edge co-director Eric Moe. "There's a lot of lip service paid to multiculturalism, but here's someone who really does it well and at the highest possible level."