Wen-Chung: Echoes from the Gorge

This recording has its impetus in a retrospective concert of Chou Wen-Chung's music that took place at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City on April 1, 1993, in honor of his 70th birthday. Chou was born in China in 1923. He developed an early fascination with music and was educated in the 1920s through the 1940s against a backdrop of upheaval in a country recovering from Western colonialism, Eastern feudalism, and World War II. Urged to help rebuild China, he studied civil engineering instead of music, earning his degree in 1945. He came to the United States in 1946 on a four-year architecture scholarship to Yale. He gave this up to pursue his career in music. He studied with Varese, Martinu, Slonimsky, and Luening, attending the New England Conservatory of Music and Columbia. In 1978, he founded the Center for U.S. China Arts Exchange. It has designed and implemented many far-reaching projects in the arts. Writing in "Contemporary Composers" in 1992, Brian Morton noted: "It is difficult to overestimate Chou Wen-Chung's importance His work is of considerable significance in the slow rapprochement of Western and Eastern musics in the second half of he 20th century." In the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Edward Murry wrote, "Chou's music is a remarkably successful fusion of Chinese tradition and sophisticated Western vocabulary and style. Almost all his major works take as points of departure Chinese poetry, painting, calligraphy or philosophical and aesthetic ideas, and he is conscious of his place in the long tradition of Chinese art."