Kenneth Kwan’s facebook post on Chou Wen-chung’s 90th birthday celebration concert in Taiwan prompted me to find out more about this remarkable musician, calligrapher and pedagogue. He found his way to the USA after travels in China evading the Japanese. He was then offered a scholarship to study architecture in Yale after the war He returned to music and eventually met Edgard Varèse with whom he studied for seven years and whose assistant he became.

He is notable for creating his own musical language which resulted from deep research into the two cultures he was influenced by – Chinese and American. He is also a calligrapher and painter and draws parallels between art and music.
“One must search beyond the procedures of a musical practice, discern its original aesthetic commitments, and trace how its tradition has evolved. If one is blessed with a cross-cultural heritage, one must then regard it as a privilege and obligation to commit oneself to the search in both practices.”— Chou Wen-chung (from Sights and Sounds: Remembrances, 1990

Here is a fascinating insight into his early life.

I did find one piece of his which included the guitar, but it is electric and part of a band. Chou and the principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, Jacques D’Amboise, began the collaboration on this event in 1985, involving more than fifteen hundred American children and fifty-six children from the People’s Republic of China. The piece is called Beijing in the Mist to suggest “a veiled and fractured impression of an ancient city with sharply-etched contours.” It is also a musical portrait of an ancient China filtered through the mist.

One of Chou’s underlying influences is Pien
“The word pien means transformation and change… In philosophy, pien is synonymous with the term I of I-Ching (Book of Changes), which refers to, on one level, simplicity from which complexity is evolved; on another level, phenomena out of complexity; on still another level, conglomeration and dispersion of phenomena; and finally invariability. The meaning of I is the underlying principle.”
Here is an excerpt

Here is one of Chou’s early pieces, Landscapes. It employs three traditional Chinese melodies to create three “landscapes:” and is extremely tonal in contrast to his later works.

And here are some interviews with the man, and his commentary on life and art