Overview

Winner of the Leila Webster Memorial Music Award for the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music Chen Yi is the most prominent woman among the renowned group of new wave composers who came to the US from mainland China in the early 1980s. Known for her creative output and a distinctive merging of Chinese and Western influences, Chen built a musical language that references a breathtaking range of sources and crisscrosses geographical and musical borders without eradicating them. Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards provide an accessible guide to the composer's background and her more than 150 works. Extensive interviews with Chen complement in-depth analyses of selected pieces from Chen's solos for Western or Chinese instruments, chamber works, choral and vocal pieces, and compositions scored for wind ensemble, chamber orchestra, or full orchestra. The authors highlight Chen's compositional strategies, her artistic elaborations, and the voice that links her earliest and most recent music. A concluding discussion addresses questions related to Chen's music and issues such as gender, ethnicity and nationality, transnationalism, border crossing, diaspora, exoticism, and identity.

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9780252043543

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Reviews

"""Chen Yi is a remarkable addition to biographies of living women composers essential for any library's collection. The book's appeal to a variety of readers and its uses from score study to music appreciation present a wealth of musical, cultural, and personal context about the composer's life and artistic voice."" --Music Reference Services Quarterly ""The publication of Chen Yi, an illuminating book by American scholars Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards, is by no means a small accomplishment. . . . Chen Yi presents a captivating narrative of the composer's career and highlights her unique musical identity through concise and insightful readings of nearly thirty selected works. . . . Miller and Edward's examination of Chen Yi's life journey and compositional strategies is quite informative and revealing, drawing on current scholarship, the authors' own research and analysis, and their own extensive interviews with Chen Yi conducted in 2015 and 2016."" --Notes ""Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards's book Chen Yi is a much-needed study of the composer's music and provides an excellent guide for those interested in programming and engaging in further research on her work."" --Bulletin of the Society for American Music ""To say that Chen Yi is the definitive guide to the life and works of Chen Yi is to say something true but not nearly enough. Not only is it a fascinating and insightful account of the journey of one extraordinary woman composer and her music, but it is also a primer on the history of twentieth-century China, a resource on Chinese music, and a volume to which readers will return again and again for both its utility as a reference book and the pleasure of a good read."" --International Alliance of Women in Music ""Chen Yi is a remarkable addition to biographies of living women composers and is essential to any library's collection. The book's appeal to a variety of readers and its uses from score study to music appreciation present a wealth of musical, cultural, and personal context about the composer's life and artistic voice."" --Music Reference Service Quarterly ""An intimate picture of Chen’s life and music. The incredible details, nuanced discussion, and dynamic analyses have made Chen Yi an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of contemporary music."" --Kapralova Society Journal “This welcome contribution to UIP’s landmark series chronicles Chen Yi’s inspiring journey from her childhood in Guangzhou and Shimen to her musical studies in Beijing and New York to her position as an internationally renowned composer and educator. A touching portrait of a remarkable person and a worthy guide to her incomparable music.”--Ellie M. Hisama, author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon"

A composer of extraordinary works and a musician of extraordinary talents, Chen Yi is brilliantly portrayed in this compelling study of her life and compositional career. Miller and Edwards display an impressive grasp of the complex political and cultural context of China from 1949 to post-Cultural Revolution. Drawing on extensive interviews, they depict this globetrotting composer's cultural milieu in vivid detail and persuasively demonstrate the multifaceted and transnational dimension of the composer's musical world. Their musical readings are vivid and insightful, full of rich information about Chen's aesthetics, idioms, and distinctive style. This is a must read for anyone who is interested in concert music of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.--Nancy Rao, author of Chinatown Opera Theater in America This welcome contribution to UIP's landmark series chronicles Chen Yi's inspiring journey from her childhood in Guangzhou and Shimen to her musical studies in Beijing and New York to her position as an internationally renowned composer and educator. A touching portrait of a remarkable person and a worthy guide to her incomparable music. --Ellie M. Hisama, author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon

A composer of extraordinary works and a musician of extraordinary talents, Chen Yi is brilliantly portrayed in this compelling study of her life and compositional career. Miller and Edwards display an impressive grasp of the complex political and cultural context of China from 1949 to post-Cultural Revolution. Drawing on extensive interviews, they depict this globetrotting composer's cultural milieu in vivid detail and persuasively demonstrate the multifaceted and transnational dimension of the composer's musical world. Their musical readings are vivid and insightful, full of rich information about Chen's aesthetics, idioms, and distinctive style. This is a must read for anyone who is interested in concert music of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. --Nancy Rao, author of Chinatown Opera Theater in America This welcome contribution to UIP's landmark series chronicles Chen Yi's inspiring journey from her childhood in Guangzhou and Shimen to her musical studies in Beijing and New York to her position as an internationally renowned composer and educator. A touching portrait of a remarkable person and a worthy guide to her incomparable music. --Ellie M. Hisama, author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon

Author Information

Leta E. Miller is a professor of music emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of biographies about Aaron Jay Kernis and Lou Harrison. J. Michele Edwards, musicologist and conductor, is a professor emerita of music at Macalester College and focuses her research on women musicians, especially from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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