Landscape Impression

Chen Yi (family name Chen) was born in Guangzhou, China, on April 4, 1953, and lives in the Kansas City, Missouri area. She wrote Landscape Impression on a commission from the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and its music director Xian Zhang, who led the first performances in concerts of June 1-4, 2023, in Newark, Princeton, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. First BSO performance: October 17-19, 2024, Xian Zhang conducting.

The score for Landscape Impression calls for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (2 players: I. triangle, suspended cymbal, 3 temple blocks; II. tam-tam, bongos, conga, bass drum), harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

A brilliant sonic colorist, Chen Yi writes equally vibrantly for instruments and for vocal ensembles, often taking imagery or the images of text as a point of departure, as she does in her orchestral work Landscape Impression. The very title of the piece is a familiar trope, as applicable to painting as to poetry, as recognizable in East Asia as in the American Midwest. Chen’s celebrated penchant for blending the Chinese music of her upbringing, exploration, and earliest professional experience with the models and techniques of Western classical practice emerges clearly in this piece. As the composer suggests in her note below, Landscape Impression is in the tradition of the orchestral tone poem, building a musical edifice on imagery from two 1,000-year-old Chinese poems.

A U.S. citizen since 1999, Chen Yi is among the most recognizable members of a distinguished generation of Chinese-born composers who came of age in the years following the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76). She was introduced to Western classical music by her parents at a young age and learned to play piano and violin. During the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese citizens were sent to the countryside to do agricultural and manual labor ostensibly to purge bourgeoise and capitalist sentiments, the teenaged Chen traveled with her violin. She continued to practice and improvise while playing folk songs and revolutionary songs for the local population. Her skill on the instrument was rewarded with a position as concertmaster for Guangzhou’s Jingju (Beijing opera) troupe. When China’s Central Conservatory reopened in 1977 following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chen—one of 200 successful enrollees of 18,000 applicants—resumed her formal study, working with composer Wu Zu-qiang. She was the first woman to receive a master’s degree in music composition from a Chinese music institution.

In 1986, Chen became one of many acolytes of the Chinese composer and famed teacher Chou Wen-chung (1923-2019), who created a robust bridge of relationships between China and Columbia University, where he taught for many years, by encouraging Chinese musicians to study in the U.S. Chou himself had studied with the legendary French-born avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse, becoming the leading scholar and proponent of the composer’s music. He advocated not only for cross-cultural cooperation between China and the West but for a pan-Asian philosophy calling on artists from China, Japan, and Southeast Asia to explore kinships among their aesthetic heritages. Others within Chou’s orbit included the Chinese-born Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Chen Yi’s husband Zhou Long (who she had met at the Central Conservatory). Chen Yi received her doctorate from Columbia in 1993, studying with Chou Wen-chung and with Mario Davidovsky, and became a noted teacher herself, most prominently at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where in 1998 she was named Lorena Searcy Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition. She has also taught at the Peabody Institute, the Juilliard School, and frequently in China.

Already a highly accomplished composer before she left China, Chen anchored her work in the illustrative traditions of Chinese instrumental music while bringing the sounds of Chinese folk ensembles into Western contexts. A prominent example is her 1983 viola concerto Xian shi, in which the viola mimics the Chinese instruments yehu (a bowed instrument similar to the more familiar erhu) and pipa (a plucked instrument) and the percussion section of the orchestra evokes that of Chinese ensembles. While at Columbia in the early 1990s, she received commissions from New York’s New Music Consort (for her mixed-ensemble Sparkle) and the Brooklyn Philharmonic (for her Piano Concerto). She has been composer in residence with the Women’s Philharmonic and the choral group Chanticleer. She has received grants and commissions from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, eighth blackbird, the BBC, Carnegie Hall, Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, among many others. She was elected a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which presented her with the prestigious Charles Ives Living Award in 2001. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her Si Ji (Four Seasons), which was premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra in 2005.

Chen’s musical language incorporates distinctly Chinese melodic elements but also sonorities gleaned from European modernism, Chinese folk music practice, and Jingju (Beijing opera). These sonorities include atonality, microtonality, dissonant harmony, and percussive textures not uncommon in Western contemporary music that also serve expressive and descriptive purposes in Chinese folk music and opera. Chen works with both Western and Chinese instruments, sometimes combining them, and also with voice and chorus. Her music ranges on the one hand from straightforward arrangements of Chinese folk songs to big, original projects such as cantatas for voices and orchestra, concertos, and orchestral works including several symphonies. Her pieces for soloist with ensemble include two piano concertos, concertos for flute, percussion, viola, violin, organ, and cello, a double concerto for flute, pipa, and orchestra, and the Fiddle Suite for huqin (a bowed instrument) and orchestra, among others.

Among Chen’s catalog of several dozen works for chorus (mostly Chinese or English settings) are a cappella settings from 2004 of the two 11th-century Su Dong-Po poems that inspired Landscape Impression, “Landscape” and “The West Lake.” Both settings feature harmonic clarity distinct word-painting (glissandos for “spilt ink,” staccato writing for “bouncing pearls”). It’s fascinating to compare to these settings Chen’s orchestral response, nearly twenty years later, to the same poems. Landscape Impression—Chen’s own title for the orchestral work suggests a line to the coloristic orchestral impressionism of Debussy and Ravel—features a recurring, fanfare-like opening idea, energetic, swooping gestures often layered with shimmering, sustained harmonies, and passages of sharp, insistent patterns that leave a memory of excitement and scintillation.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

Composer Chen Yi on her Landscape Impression:

The music is inspired by the two ancient Chinese poems by Su Dong-Po (another name Su Shi, 1036-1101), written in 1072 and 1073. The two sister poems are entitled Landscape, and The West Lake respectively. My musical sound imagination came from the text in the poems:

Landscape (Su Dong-Po, 1072)
Like spilt ink dark clouds spread o’er the hills as a pall,
Like bouncing pearls, the raindrops in the boat run riot.
A sudden rolling gale comes and dispels them all,
Below Lake View Pavilion sky-mirrored water’s quiet.
 

The West Lake (Su Dong-Po, 1073)
The glittering waves delight the eye on sunny days,
The dimming hills give a rare view in rainy haze.
The West Lake looks like the fair lady at her best,
Whether she is richly adorned or plainly dressed.