The Music of Chen Yi

Award-winning composer Chen Yi takes audiences on a journey through her own music and cultural background in the OSL’s NYC Five Borough Tour. St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble travels to locations across the city for free concerts and this year Chen Yi headlines a program highlighting the influences that have shaped her compositions. Born in China and a longtime resident of the United States (she has been a professor of music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music since 1998), Chen Yi’s work reflects a mix of cultures, sounds, and instrumentations. Sound of the Five, for cello and string quartet, explores the similarities between Chinese and traditional Western string instruments. “At some level, all the instruments of the world divide into wind, percussion, or strings, either bowed or plucked,” the composer has said. “The erhu, for example, is just a vertical violin.” Sounds that colored Chen Yi’s early years can be heard in the works for traditional instruments she introduces, along with Chinese Folk Songs, arranged for string quartet, by Zhou Long, who shares Chen Yi’s homeland and musical background. 

Event Duration

The program will last approximately 60 minutes with no intermission.