Luyen Chou: Legacy in Harmony - Bridging Cultures Through Music

In the next episode of SLANT podcast, host Dana Tai Soon Burgess engages in a compelling conversation with Luyen Chou, an education technology entrepreneur, and consultant, who shares insights into the remarkable legacy of his father, the visionary composer Chou Wen-chung. From pioneering electronic music to fostering cultural exchange between the US and China, Chou Wen-chung's life beautifully illustrates the power of music to bridge cultures and enrich lives. Join us as we explore the profound impact of Chou Wen-chung's work and his enduring influence on contemporary music and cultural diplomacy.

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Transcript

Dana 0:21

Welcome to slant podcast. This is your host, Dana Tasson Burgess. This podcast is an ongoing conversation around the Asian American experience through the lens of artists and luminaries. Thank you for tuning in. Today's guest is Luyan Chou. Luyan is an education technology entrepreneur and consultant. He is the son of late visionary composer Chou Wen-chung. Luyan is here today to discuss the legacy of his father, Chou Wen-chung. Your father was born in China in 1923 and moved to the United States in 1946. This is such a tumultuous time. Can you tell us about his early years in China?

Luyen 1:08

Sure. And you're right. It was an incredibly tumultuous time from all of his accounts of it. On the one hand, it started when he was born in 1923 during a period of incredible growth and development in China. And, he moved in 1927 to Shanghai, which was really a very cosmopolitan city. He had vivid memories of growing up, walking along the Bund and seeing ships from all of the countries around the world moored up there, and he was an incredible maritime aficionado, loved ships. Obviously, things changed quite dramatically with the The beginning of the war. And even before that, I think the growing tensions and animosity around the nationalist government and other factions in China. It was a complex time, but certainly by the time of the Japanese invasion in 1937 things got turned pretty upside down for his, middle brother actually contracted typhoid which only many decades later, we realized was a result of Japanese biological warfare and died you know, tragically at a young age. And that was an event that really scarred my father and that he talked about referred to a lot throughout his childhood. So it was a challenging time and then he spent a lot of the time post 37, 38 running from the Japanese because he entered conscription age and traveled through a lot of the interior of China to three parts of China specifically in order to avoid capture and conscription by the Japanese Imperial Army.

Dana 2:46

Hmm. Interesting. His earliest work, Landscapes, from 1949, is often cited as the first composition that is independent of either Western or Eastern musical grammar. Can you tell us about his innovative approach to composition and how it evolved over time?

Luyen 3:09

So, you know, my, father interestingly enough, grew up in China, studying the great Western musical masters. The fact that when he came to the United States, even though his English was quite broken, that he was always noted for his depth of knowledge and the scholarship he exhibited regarding Western history, Western music Western compositions. So it's actually quite ironic that it was when he started studying with Varese, and there's actually a famous story that he always told that, you know, when he first started working Varese, he brought Varese, who to him was this icon of the Western classical compositional tradition, he brought him these works which were quite prototypical Works in more of the Western idiom and Varese was quite critical and said to him, this is not you. In fact he talked often about one of the first works he brought to Varese and Varese threw it on the ground and said, I piss on this work. And my dad was stunned and, only after conversation realized what Verraz meant was, this is not you. You need to come back with music. That is you. And that is what separates great composers from run of the mill composers. And that caused a deep reckoning on the part of my father about what he was trying to say with his music. And that is really what led. In many respects, neither specifically Western nor specifically Asian was not a strategy or rational decision on his part. It really was the product of the uniqueness of his global upbringing.

Dana 4:55

Interesting. And then in the early 1950s, he does graduate work at Columbia University and then begins this long career from 1964 to 1991 at Columbia. Now, Columbia seems to have been an anchor point for him. Can you tell us about what Columbia meant to your father?

Luyen 5:17

For my father, Columbia was his second home and it's interesting because we grew up and lived in Greenwich Village and he grew up in the orbit of Edgar Verres. So between family and the just incredible creative intensity and counter cultural spirit of the downtown scene that he was part of with folks like Verres, and then his day job at Columbia University in upper Manhattan it was really kind of the sun and the moon of his life. Columbia represented his participation in the more academic and established world of composition and the arts. And he was deeply dedicated to Columbia and its mission. Now, when you get into the 1960s, that was quite a complex time in New York and in the United States more broadly, and he has incredible stories about navigating the complexity of riots and civil disobedience and his own growing political awareness as an American at a complex time when he was both a teacher and then ultimately an administrator at Columbia University. And he loved being an educator which not all composers or artists do. He really was as rewarded by his ability to pass on as his teachers, like Rez did this passion and the technical knowledge and skill. That a new generation of musicians and artists and composers needed to be successful. He was as, excited by that, as he was by his own creative journey and his own compositional production.

Dana 6:58

In 1978, he founded the Center for United States China Arts Exchange, which has collaborated with specialists and institutions from East and Southeast Asia on projects for decades. And what did this program mean in terms of being a conduit for his work and for his continued learning and dissemination of information?

Luyen 7:22

To understand the context for that, you have to realize that. He had been separated from China physically and from his family and his parents for over 30 years at that point. And it wasn't until 1972 with the Shanghai communique that the United States China began a gradual process of rapprochement. There was almost no contact between the two countries. Or even the denizens of the two countries the populations of the two countries for over 30 years. And so I think with the founding of the US China Arts Exchange, my father both saw a personal opportunity to go home and to see his parents and to reconnect with the motherland. But I also think he was incredibly excited intellectually and artistically by this notion of. Bringing together two of the great world powers who had traversed the last three decades independently in terms of creative, intellectual, artistic development. And just as he was trying to do in his music, see if there was a synthesis between these two great traditions that would be greater. than the sum of the parts. And so, you'll notice it wasn't the U. S. China musical exchange. It was the arts exchange. And his idea was to bring great artists from both Countries to the other country to experience and learn from each other, and I think it was a very, very cocoon time for him personally, in terms of his intellectual development and contributed greatly to his musical theory and the works that came after that time,

Dana 9:17

Chou Wen-chung was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was an honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and He also received the officier des arts et lettres.What did acceptance in the field and accolades mean to your father?

Luyen 9:40

my father was. A real iconoclast and could be quite countercultural he appreciated the acceptance by institutions that represented the establishment orthodoxy. But he also participated with a, I think, healthy sense of. Both skepticism, but also to use his own word, a sense of mischief. So, I remember even when he was admitted to the Century Club, which is one of the most prestigious clubs in New York City. He was seminal in fighting for the election of the first female member of the club which was Beverly Souls. So he always had both, he did take satisfaction out of the recognition that was afforded to him by Those established institutions, but he also saw it as an opportunity to be a little bit of a free spirited gadfly in that context.

Dana 10:44

That's wonderful. You know, I sense that your father was not only brilliant, but also was a very generous and understanding individual because I was reading recently that he invested in the next generation of composers and understood the significance of that, that he brought over or helped bring to the U. S. Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and, and Bright Sheng, among others. What did the continuum of composers from China mean to him?

Luyen 11:17

The continuum of composers from China coming to the United States into the West in general was very important to Dad because he knew what his travels to and experiences in the West had meant to him in his own personal and creative journey. And he felt deep responsibility to help the next generation of talented musicians and artists benefit in the way that he did from that breadth of experience that could only come from getting out of the specific context. And at that time, you In China, even after normalization, everyone in Beijing wore either a blue or green mouse suit, and there were no cars and there were millions of bicycles. And it was like, you'd step back a century going there coming from the United States. And obviously, for anyone who's been to China in recent years, I mean, that seems almost unfathomable. really committed to giving those young people who showed extraordinary promise, the opportunities, the resources, the exposure that he was afforded having left China when he did in 1946. And so that was very important to him. But, and this is talked about a lot, but I think maybe not even enough. He was very, committed to the notion that if he brought students and young talent to the West in particular, this was a time when there were very complex and stringent immigration and visa hurdles actually, sadly not, unlike today, all of a sudden again, that, they committed to going back to China. That they, he really felt it was critical that they took the opportunities they were afforded by traveling to the West as a responsibility to bring their learnings back to the homeland.

Dana 13:15

Interesting. Your referred to the role of emotions in his work. When you hear your father's scores today, do they trigger memories from your own youth? And do they continue to even define and refine your relationship with him?

Luyen 13:35

That's a great question. Yeah, I think my father had an external veneer of, reason and Rationality and of a, objective academic sensibility, but he was a deeply emotional person. And that was not obvious or evident when you first met him necessarily, but it was certainly for anyone who spent any time with him and you do hear it. in his music and he experienced a lot of grief and tragedy during his years growing up and as an adult and he talked often and very candidly about how that was reflected in his compositions, in his music. But He did it in a very distinctive way. He didn't wear his heart on his sleeve. He expressed it through his soul. And you have to listen to the music carefully to really understand how he was trying to communicate those emotions in a way that wasn't superficial. There's so many stories about my father that I think about and that, when I hear his music it evokes many of those memories, probably most profoundly in the piano works. So my mom was a pianist. The legend which they both corroborated was that my father disliked the piano. He considered it a bourgeois 19th century, Western instrument of not great import. So that did not go well initially.

Dana 15:09

Ha

Luyen 15:10

And but I think one of his most deeply spiritual and touching and emotional, compositions is really his solo piano piece The Willows Are New, which he composed in 1957. But my mom as the definitive recording of which she performed in 1972, and that was performed on the piano that we grew up with in our apartment. And so when I hear that, it just brings back a flood of memories because I can picture my mother. playing that piano. And my father used that to compose. And that piano, ironically for all of my dad's, initial kind of instinctive dislike for the piano became the central icon of our upbringing in Soho, on Sullivan street.

Dana 15:57

When you heard your father composing or playing the piano, could you tell what mood he was in or what he was thinking about?

Luyen 16:10

I could never tell he was thinking about what his mood was. My dad was an engineer and an architect by training and while he was a deeply emotional person, he approached composition as a scientific endeavor. And so what you would hear were chords mostly and combinations of chords and combinations of notes and intervals. And he was incredibly meticulous and precise about the acoustic characteristics of what he was doing. Not just pitch but timbre. And he used those as tools to convey emotions, but you couldn't tell while he was composing what the emotions were that he was trying to express. He was very scientific. About his approach to composition.

Dana 17:00

What an interesting dichotomy, because here you have that scientific side, almost mathematic side that you're talking about, but then there's this deep well of emotions that he accesses, and one cannot exist without the other.

Luyen 17:16

I think that's exactly right. And I think it's very Asian, actually. I think my dad felt very, deeply that there was a discipline behind everything that you do. And even if it's expressing a very raw emotion, you did it with that sense of discipline and that sense of order And efficiency that made it truly meaningful. And I think that is what sometimes irked him about, parts of the Western musical tradition was, emphasis on the emotional without necessarily the rigor of the theory and, the technique behind it.

Dana 17:55

Interesting. When you were in college, you discovered that your father was married before. Can you tell us a little bit about the manuscript you discovered called Tu Oyu?

Luyen 18:09

Yeah. When I was in college, I discovered through a casual conversation with my mother. Much to my surprise that my father had actually been previously married which was an incredible shock to me and to my brother. I confronted my father about it and asked him about this. And he explained that he had been married previously and that he never really had talked about it because his previous wife, Catherine Boyu Choi, had died very tragically in February of 1958. So they were married in November of 1957. She died in February of 1958. And his previous wife was a Japanese Chinese. Ceramicist and she was quite talented. And the reason I know she was quite talented is we grew up actually with a couple of her ceramic works at the house. I just had no idea that the backstory of those works they were part of the family collection, really beautiful. When my dad died, I actually came across a box of press clippings and other material on Catherine and her life her obituary, even her passport and letters that they'd written to each other. And, it was such a deeply tragic event that he buried the whole story. And so the reason that this piece in the mode of Sean, is so interesting is because when my dad died I worked with the folks at edition Peters, his longtime publisher going over his musical estate. And we discovered there were a small handful of works that had never been formally published. One of which was this piece in the mode of Sean which, was composed in, I think it was 1956. My dad was incredibly meticulous about his work, his manuscripts, his publications. And so the fact that he hadn't published it was quite surprising. I just initially chalked it up to the fact that he didn't consider it something that was ready for prime time or it wasn't up to his, standards, but my dad's longtime assistant Belinda Kwan actually found a recording of it. From 1957, it was performed in a workshop recording at Columbia universities at the time McMillian theater, and I listened to the scratchy recording of it, which concluded with my dad being interviewed by the host of the performance about the work, which as you can imagine. So I'm now listening to my father 10 years before I was born. It was just an absolutely, incredible experience, but most of all, the work was really great. And I'm not a musician. I'm not a composer or a musical theorist by any stretch of the imagination, but listening to it and knowing my dad's works, it was very evident that this was a significant piece and that it connected a lot of dots in his corpus. And so was really intrigued by this mystery. Why had he not? Publish this work. And it was then that Belinda reached out to me and she said, Hey, by the way, I have the score. Do you know it was dedicated to Poyu? And Poyu was a nickname for his first wife Catherine. And then all the dots connected that clearly it wasn't that the piece wasn't up to my dad's standards, but that it was just too painful for him to ever actually publish at work. And didn't want to do it in a way that disrupted the incredible family that he had created subsequent to that tragic marriage. And so he buried it. And it was after his death that my brother and I both realized we had a responsibility to finish this piece and put it out there and publish it and have it perform because it is really important. I think from a musical historical standpoint and the key stakeholders, in the story are no longer on this earth. And so this is the moment where it felt right to put this into the public trust?

Dana 22:17

Beautiful story. What is your favorite score of your father's?

Luyen 22:24

I love his late string quartets in part because they were composed at a time where I probably had more understanding of what he was trying to do think Echoes from the Gorge, his percussion quartet is an incredible piece. It's unlike anything else that he wrote. a quartet for 72 percussion instruments. I think it's a really important historical work. But I think emotionally, The piece that, I have the most affinity with will always be the willows are new because when I listened to it and I'm actually getting emotional as I talk about it, the recording is my mother playing it. And I think that is deeply meaningful as a son.

Dana 23:11

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. What was it like for you growing up with a father who was a prolific composer and a mother who was such an amazing pianist? How do you think this shaped the way that you look at the world?

Luyen 23:26

It certainly didn't shape it in a way that resulted in my becoming a musician music is an incredibly important part of my life, and I think more broadly, this sense that the arts in general, are our attempt as human beings to express something that transcends our short time here on earth, that transcends the existential. For us the arts were the closest thing to religion. We talked about the arts all the time. we, debated about it. We talked about aesthetics. My father believed That no great composer was ever truly appreciated in his or her time on earth. Whether you were, Bach or, Beethoven or Brahms that you were building something for posterity and that you were serving a higher purpose. And we have a responsibility that transcends personal fulfillment during our lives. And There's also a profound sense of gratefulness and appreciation for the incredibly rich life and set of experiences that they provided to me and to my brother. We didn't go on fancy vacations around the world. They were experiences that were. Deeply intellectually and emotionally engaging and that challenged our sense of purpose and mission in life and challenged our sense of context in a way that I think was very profound

Dana 24:59

Joe Wen Chang passed away at the age of 96 in New York City on October 25th, 2019. How do you now ensure that his legacy continues and that his works are maintained properly to your standards?

Luyen 25:15

I think that It's challenging to preserve dad's tradition and to build on his legacy in part because neither my brother nor I took after my dad or my mom as musicians. And so we don't have the same technical tools or access but in part by being deeply involved in the incredible work that is being done in China at institutions like the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in GuangChou, where they built this Chou Wencheng Center and they're bringing, dad's musical principles and scholarship to a new generation of Chinese composers and musicians working with folks at UC San Diego to really bring a new generation of American. And really global composers and musicians into the fold and providing them with an understanding of dad's mission. think it's a very important part of what we're doing to nurture, encourage engagement with dad's vision and mission and to find ways to provide access. To my father's point about composers never really appreciated during his or her lifetime. I think that's actually true. I was in China in November and there were, composers and musicians and audiences that were far younger than I, who had never met my dad, who were deeply and profoundly affected by his music. And so encouraging that ongoing generational engagement. With the ideas and the music and the principles of what my dad did is very important to us. I think his time in a funny way is still to come. And, when I talk to younger people about his music, there's an excitement that is actually quite amazing to me because he was so far ahead of his time in many respects.

Dana 27:11

Wonderful. Lu Yan, thank you for joining us today and for sharing your deeply personal insights about your father with us.

Luyen 27:21

It's my pleasure. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about my dad.

Dana 27:26

Thank you for tuning in today. Please rate the podcast on your listening platform and tell your friends. Feel free to contact me at slantpodcast. com. It's always great to hear from you, our listeners. A special thanks to our sponsors, the Dana Tassun Burgess Dance Company, the Cherry Blossom Giving Circle, and the Dehde Liam Gunawan Hickory Legacy Fund.