ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Biography and Framework
Chapter 3. Compositional Processes
Chapter 4. Solo and Chamber Music Works
Chapter 5. Works for Large Instrumental Ensembles
Chapter 6. Choral and Solo Vocal Works
Chapter 7. Issues
Glossary
List of Works
Notes
References
Index