We're thrilled to welcome Dr. Chen Yi as our 2025 Composer in Residence for the LunART Festival! Dr. Chen will join us in Madison for our 2025 Festival Season (May 27 - June 1), where she’ll mentor participants in our Composers Hub and collaborate with our musicians to showcase several of her compositions.
When asked what she is most looking forward to for the festival, Dr. Chen expressed her excitement about connecting with young composers and engaging with the vibrant local community. While talking with Dr. Chen, it was so apparent how much she values connection in her music and teaching. We’re truly grateful to work with her this season!
Dr. Chen is the Lorena Searcy Cravens/ Millsap/ Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri/Kansas City Conservatory (UMKC Conservatory). She has been on faculty there since 1998 and, impressively, has never once missed a class. Her dedication to her students comes from her belief that “The next generation is our future.”
The UMKC Composition Department rotates students through faculty, something that Dr. Chen loves because she works with new students every semester. With four faculty members in composition, each student receives a wide range of ideas and input on their work while at the conservatory.
Dr. Chen is also an exceptionally talented violinist who spent eight years working as the concertmaster of the Peking Opera Orchestra in Guangzhou, China, her hometown. The daughter of two medical doctors who had studied music, Dr. Chen started piano at age three, followed by violin at age four.
During her middle school years, Dr. Chen lived not in Guangzhou, but in the countryside, separated from her parents to go work as part of Chairman Mao’s Down to the Countryside Movement during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She was permitted to bring her violin because it was small enough to sit at the end of her bed.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, it became apparent that the Red Guards would come door to door, confiscating anything deemed “Western propaganda.” Dr. Chen recalled that there was a two-year period of anticipation before they actually arrived. During this time, to continue practicing, she would close up all of the windows and dampen the hammers on the piano. Only then could she spend hours playing the Paganini Caprices and other works of Western violin repertoire and memorizing orchestral textures from listening to LP records in her father’s collection.
While in the countryside, Dr. Chen was only allowed to play revolutionary songs in public. However, she played through her memorized caprices in private, even beginning to
improvise on them. After two years of manual labor building military watchtowers and farming vegetables and rice, Dr. Chen’s virtuosic violin abilities were noticed by the Peking Opera Orchestra and she was hired as the concertmaster of the ensemble.
“The traditional Peking Opera is accompanied by an ensemble of Chinese traditional instruments. During the Cultural Revolution in China, the Revolutionary Sample Operas were infused with communist propaganda messages and used the western orchestra to enhance the dramatic experience in Peking Opera shows in the 1970s. The orchestra members were allowed to learn western music repertoire extensively in order to improve their performing technique used in the orchestra, which was mixed with the traditional instrumental ensemble.”
Dr. Chen spent eight years playing for the opera company before attending the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Admitted for both violin and composition, she chose to focus on composition and became the first woman to graduate from the Central Conservatory with a Master's degree in Composition.
Dr. Chen spoke fondly of her time at the Central Conservatory, noting that she still used her music theory notebooks to teach her own students while pursuing her DMA at Columbia.
During her Conservatory years, students were often sent to the countryside to learn folk tunes which continue to inspire Dr. Chen’s compositions today. For example, her piano solo Duo Ye, which won First Prize in the 1985 China National Composition Competition, was based on a folk tune sung by farmers during her Conservatory travels.
Check out a performance of Duo Ye here:
An exceptionally generous educator, Dr. Chen dedicates countless hours to her students and has served on numerous boards and organizations throughout her career. From 1993 to 1996, she received a New Residencies Award from Meet The Composer (MTC, part of the current New Music USA) to serve as a resident composer for three arts organizations in the San Francisco area. During this residency, she adapted her pieces to fit the needs of the three different ensembles: a choir, an orchestra, and middle school students.
“The real experience I learned is the time I served as the resident composer of the Women’s Philharmonic and Chanticleer and Aptos Middle School...I helped these three organizations to build up communities, to collect audiences, and share audiences between these fields.”
Dr. Chen passionately believes that “If you don’t love the music you write, you are not going to touch the musicians and the audience.” She advises younger composers to approach the composition process with a plan or sense of purpose. While changes in direction are natural during the composition process, she noted that it is helpful to enter the draft stage with an idea of why you’re writing that particular piece.
The LunART team is so excited to have Dr. Chen’s mentorship for the 2025 Composers Hub Cohort. Her personal philosophy reflects a deeper vision for why women composers need to make their ideas shared.
“Go to society and love the people around you, and serve your community, and seek your own unique voice. It’s the most important for a creative artist, and particularly for women composers, because you should make sure your voice [is] heard and heard more. That is, for the people around the world and also for the humanity, for the future of the piece. We need your voice to be heard and that’s why we can improve the environment for the whole world.”
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Article by Keeley Brooks
Keeley Brooks is a senior at Yale University, majoring in music and studying violin with Wendy Sharp. She is currently working on her thesis, an oral history on violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay that will be housed as a public archive at Yale’s Oral History of American Music. In addition to playing in the ensemble, Keeley has loved exploring various administrative roles in the Yale Symphony Orchestra from Head Librarian, to co-Social Chair to President for the 24/25 school year. This past summer, Keeley took her first steps into composition while working for the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison where she wrote a piece that incorporates field recordings from a prescribed burn. She hopes to premier the piece at Yale in January of 2025. When Keeley isn’t participating in music, she enjoys teaching fitness classes, spending time exploring outside with friends and family and baking. Keeley is very excited to join the LunART team!
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