Analysis Of Chou Wen-Chung And Ode To Eternal Pine

Yihan Chen
Chou Wen-Chung and Ode to Eternal Pine Being the first Chinese-born composer to be established professionally in a prestigious institution (Columbia University) in the West, Chou Wen-Chung was highly influential to the later generations of Chinese composers by writing music in a highly original style, being a prolific writer on issues of Chinese identity and musicology, having taught highly successful Chinese-American composers such as Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, etc., as well as establishing the exchange programs between American and Chinese institutions that opened Chinese composition students to the world after the Cultural Revolution. Being a Chinese composer in the west when few Asian composers were physically present, Chou explored the cultural significances and the artistic dilemmas of what being an ethnically Chinese composer meant, and his music was perhaps the best response to that inquiry and the most direct way of investigating him as an artist. Chou’s recent chamber work “Ode to Eternal Pine” (published in 2014) was a crystallization and culmination of both his intellectuality, i.e. his matured compositional language, as well as his sensibility, i.e. his pursuit in East Asian aesthetics. This paper is divided into two parts; the first part will provide the

His decision to pursue music was solidified when his parents decided to support his musical studies. Chou enrolled in New England Conservatory, was later introduced to Varèse, and became his protégé in 1949. It was during these years when he first faced the artistic decisions of how to incorporate his Chinese heritage into a western syntax. Chou later commented that he learned from Varèse on how to look at traditions critically, for Varèse forced him to defend the logic behind his compositional language and the techniques that he used, and this would eventually have a profound influence on Chou’s artist