Chou Wen-Chung: The Life and Work of a Contemporary Chinese-Born American Composer by Peter M. Chang, and: The Music of Chou Wen-chung by Eric C. Lai (review)

When individuals act as agents across multiple disciplines, they gain importance not only as players within those fields but also as arbiters of newly formed cultural links. Assessing one’s contributions via biography or theoretical analysis becomes both complicated and illuminating, however, when the affected disciplines themselves have stubbornly opaque boundaries. Chou Wen-Chung (b. 1923) has gained attention as composer, cross-cultural experimenter, mentor, administrator, and US-China exchange facilitator through the course of his career since he moved from China to the United States in 1946. He is a pivotal figure in linking Chinese and Western cultures, tradition and modernity, as well as musical, scholarly, and administrative pursuits. Ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and music theorists may therefore all take an interest in this remarkable personage.

Two recent accounts of Chou’s work—Chou Wen-Chung: The Life and Work of a Contemporary Chinese-Born American Composer by Peter Chang, and The Music of Chou Wen-chung by Eric Lai—adopt different approaches in assessing his importance, and both prove worthy resources for those engaged in aspects of cross-cultural studies, modern compositional techniques, and East-West musical fusion, depending on the specific interests of the readership. The publication by Chang precedes that of Lai by several years, and it received highly informative reviews before Lai’s book became available. However, the fact that Chou is not a household name among musical circles begs the question: Why the sudden appearance of two related accounts? At the same time, the addition of Lai’s book has raised a number of issues that merit further consideration in relation to Chang’s earlier work, and a comparative assessment of the authors’ approaches can help refocus issues of musical and cultural identity as Asian composers—or compositions that incorporate Asian features within a largely Western musical context—become increasingly prominent in the early twenty-first century. This review considers Peter Chang’s contribution in relation to Lai’s newer work.

Chang and Lai both completed PhD dissertations on Chou in 1995—the former in Musicology, the latter in Music Theory—which served as precursors to the books under review. The approaches they adopt reflect their different disciplines, and the timing of the studies marks Chou Wen-Chung’s position amid the growing interest in Chinese composers in recent decades. Chou himself had attained his own success as student and disciple of Edgard Varèse, as well as composer, Columbia University administrator, and initiator of the US-China Arts Exchange. He also influenced the generation of China’s “New Wave” composers by demonstrating modern compositional techniques to Central Conservatory students shortly after the Cultural Revolution and supervising a number of them as doctoral students at Columbia University in the late 1980s. Some of Chou’s most successful students, such as Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Zhou Long, saw their careers propelled forward after June 1989. The rise and sustained success of an entire class of internationally renowned composers has accentuated interest in Chou as a forerunner.

Chou’s background, intellectual development, approach to musical composition, and experience in curricular development and cultural exchange render him a pioneer of sorts, and both authors offer valuable biographical and musical insight in this respect. Chou was born into a family with an elite scholarly heritage, and he grew up in China’s turbulent interwar and civil war period. He went to the United States for studies in 1946 and eventually settled in New York City in 1949, where he became a devotee to Varèse. He received an MA from...