Chen Yi Wins $225,000 Ives Prize

Chen Yi photo by Jim Hair

Chen Yi, a prolific composer who was born in China and became an American citizen last year, was recently named the second winner of the Charles Ives Living, a $225,000 prize awarded every three years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Ives Living, which is the largest prize available exclusively to composers, was established in 1998, and is paid in three annual installments of $75,000. Its first winner was Martin Bresnick.

The prize carries a single condition: that its recipient give up any employment outside composition for the three-year term. Winners may, however, accept commissions for works during that time. Ms. Chen is the Lorena Searcy Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor of Music Composition at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Her award term begins in July.

Currently, at UMKC, Ms. Chen shares the education of 45 composition majors with two other professors. Along with other faculty members, she also performs in new music concerts at the school. During the next three years, Chen will continue advising dissertation projects and giving some lectures, but will cut back on her other teaching. She will return to full time teaching in July 2004.

“I am very grateful to the Academy for granting me freedom and time to focus on my composition” Chen writes, “though it's hard to imagine how I could live without speaking/writing/talking to my students everyday for such a long period! I love teaching, I share all of my energy and experience with my students in my teaching.” The sharing of musical ideas in composition classes, however, is problematic. “I don’t want to repeat the ideas that I have given to my students because I don’t feel that they are fresh any more,” Chen confesses. Most of her recent output has been completed during school vacations.

Ms. Chen has ambitious plans for the upcoming years. There is an impressive list of commissions to complete: a trio, Ning, for Yo-Yo Ma and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota; Chinese Mountain Songs for Kitka; a cantata, To the New Millennium, for the Miami University Chorus; a concerto for the Rascher Saxophone Quartet and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; an overture for The Women’s Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra; a chamber work for Network for New Music; and an American folk-song arrangement for the Dale Warland Singers, among others. Chen recently completed a song, Bright Moonlight, for the New York Festival of Song, and the Chinese Dance Suite, a violin concerto, for The Women’s Philharmonic; both works will receive their premiere in March 2001.

Ms. Chen will also take time during the next few years to attend concerts and activities relating to her music. For instance, Chen will be present when the China National Symphony in Beijing performs an entire evening of her orchestral and choral works, and when Evelyn Glennie and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Lan Shui, record her Percussion Concerto for the BIS label. Performances of Ms. Chen’s works have also been scheduled at Arizona State University; Seattle Symphony's Fusion Festival; Lawrence University; Lehigh University's Choral Music Festival; the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East; the Asia South Pacific Symposium on Choral Music; and the National Symphony Orchestra's percussion music festival.

Composers cannot apply for the Ives Living. Ms. Chen, 47, was selected by a committee that included the composers Ezra Laderman, Gunther Schuller, Francis Thorne, Joan Tower and Olly Wilson. The committee met several times over a period of three months, studying scores and listening to recordings to narrow the list of nominees down to the final choice.

They made their choice based on Ms. Chen's large body of work, which includes every classical genre except opera. In her music, Chinese and Western influences and instrumentation mingle freely and colorfully.

Ms. Chen was born in Guangzhou and studied the piano and violin as a child. In 1977 she enrolled at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where she studied composition with Wu Zuqiang and the British composer Alexander Goehr. In 1986 she became the first woman to earn a master's degree in composition in China.

That year Ms. Chen came to the United States to study at Columbia University, where her teachers included Mario Davidovsky and Chou Wen-chung. She completed her doctorate in 1993, and became composer in residence for Chanticleer, the Women's Philharmonic and the Aptos Creative Arts Program, all in San Francisco. Before taking her teaching position at the University of Missouri, she was on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

Among the ensembles and organizations that have commissioned music from Ms. Chen are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the New Music Consort, the San Francisco Arts Commission and Meet The Composer. She is married to the composer Zhou Long.

The Ives Living is one of several prizes supported by royalties from Ives's music, the copyrights for which were bequeathed to the academy by the composer's wife, Harmony. She died in 1970 and wanted the money to be spent on supporting composers.