(The New Pacific Trio Official Website) - The New Pacific Trio will premier a composition by famed Chinese composer Chen Yi at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 27 at the Faye Spanos Concert Hall. Chen, a New York and Kansas City, Mo. resident, will be at the concert to hear her new music performed for the first time.
"Chen Yi is one of the most distinguished composers of our time," said Stephen Anderson, dean of Pacific's Conservatory of Music. "It is an honor for the New Pacific Trio, the Conservatory and the Pacific community that she accepted our offer of a commission to create this new work."
Chen's new work, "Tibetan Tunes," was commissioned by the New Pacific Trio through a $10,000 Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University. The piece is in three movements: Du Mu, Dui Xie and Lang Ma respectively.
According to Chen, "The music presents the rich gestures of Du Mu (a name of a god in Tibetan Buddhism) in a serene mood. Dui Xie is a kind of Tibetan folk ensemble music with a same tune in the introduction and the coda, played with the plucking instrument Zhamunie, the bamboo flute and the fiddle Erhu. Lang Ma is a form of Tibetan folk song and dance, which consists of an instrumental introduction, a delicate song and a fast tap dance. The performer stands and dances on a long piece of plank during the performance."
Besides being a new musical score, this also represents the first time that Chen has written music for a piano trio. Her music often is described as a mix between traditional Chinese music and European classical composition.
Chen was born in China in 1953 and learned how to play European-style violin as a child. As a teenager, she was ordered by the government to work on a farm as part of the Cultural Revolution. Despite 12-hour workdays, she still practiced her violin, often playing Chinese folk and revolution songs. After China reopened its universities in 1977, Chen enrolled in the Beijing Central Conservatory.
In 1983, Chen composed her first Chinese viola concerto. In 1986, the Chinese Musicians Association, the Central Conservatory of Music, Radio Beijing, CCTV and the Central Philharmonic of China jointly gave an entire program devoted to Chen's orchestral works, when she became the first woman in China to receive the degree of Master of Arts in composition. In 1986, Chen went to the United States for further musical studies.
In 1993, she received her Doctor of Musical Arts, with distinction, from Columbia University. She has since performed dozens of times around the world and received numerous awards and honorary degrees. Her music has since been performed worldwide by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and by musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Yo-Yo Ma. She has residences in both New York and Missouri and she teaches at University of Missouri at Kansas City.
The New Pacific Trio is made up of three faculty members at Pacific: concert violinist Igor Veligan, Grammy-nominated cellist Nina Flyer and award-winning pianist Sonia Leong. The members of the trio regularly perform and teach at several music festivals and have collaborated with musicians from the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the Iceland Symphony and several other well-known symphonies and string quartets around the world. Active solo performers and teachers in their own right, their exciting collaborations have caused critics to hail them as "fresh and absorbing" and "energy-packed and engaging."
