Sheng, Bright (EN)

Sheng Bright, *6 December 1955 Shanghai, Chinese composer living in the United States. He was taught to play the piano by his mother from the age of four. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked for seven years in a folk music and dance ensemble in Chinhai Province, near the Tibetan border. In 1978, he enrolled at the reactivated Shanghai Conservatory of Music and, after graduating with a degree in composition, he left for the United States in 1982. He studied under G. Perle at Queens College (City University of New York), then under M. Davidovsky at Columbia University, and in 1993 he received his doctorate. Since 1995, he has been teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 1989 to 1992, he served as a composer-in-residence for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, for which he wrote the opera The Song of Majnun, then from 1992 to 1995 he held a similar position at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. He has received scholarships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1990) and Guggenheim (1990), and Rockefeller (1991) fellowships, among many other awards, including the Kennedy Center Award (1995) in Washington, D.C. In 1996, he returned to China after a 14-year absence to compose a concerto for cello and traditional Chinese instruments commissioned by Yo Yo Ma.

Sheng’s aim is to bring together the music – and more broadly the cultures – of East and West without blurring their distinct identities. He gained renown with a work that presents a dramatic portrayal of the Cultural Revolution in China, entitled H’un, a title with a double meaning: “wounds” or “scars.” Performed by leading American orchestras, including those in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, it was presented in Europe in 1993 during the New York Philharmonic’s tour. The threnody Nanking! Nanking!, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the mass extermination of civilians by the occupying Japanese army in 1937. The solo pipa instrument symbolizes a victim of terror who survived and became a witness to the crime. The opera The Song of Majnun is based on an Islamic theme, but the composer used Tibetan folk melodies, combining them with contemporary musical language and effective instrumentation.