Lei Liang

Lei Liang

Fellow: Awarded 2009
Field of Study: Music Composition

Competition: US & Canada

University of California, San Diego

Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose mostly stage and chamber works have been performed throughout the world. He earned numerous prizes as both a composer and pianist in China before coming to the US at age seventeen. He studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, Mario Davidovsky, Joshua Fineberg, and Bernard Rands, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D). 

Lei Liang has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Ying Quartet, the Shanghai Quartet, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, pipa player Wu Man, flautist Masahiro Arita, pianist Stephen Drury, percussionist Steven Schick, among other organizations, ensembles, and soloists. He was the recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, a Heinrich Strobel Foundation bursary from the South West German Radio Experimentalstudio, and an Aaron Copland Residency Award.

Groups and soloists who have performed his works include the Arditti Quartet, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Argento Chamber Ensemble, ALEA III, the North/South Chamber Orchestra, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Verge Ensemble, Ensemble Courage, the Formalist Quartet, Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, conductors Efrain Guigui and Jeffrey Milarsky, flautist Paula Robison, pianist Aleck Karis, and saxophonist John Sampen.

Lei Liang is active in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music. His articles have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and in China. His recordings are released on Telarc International, GM, Spektral, Opal, Encounter Records, and Mode Records (due 2009).

Lei Liang was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has taught in China as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an, served as Honorary Professor of Composition and Sound Design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music, and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. Since 2007, he has served as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

 

Photograph by Carl Cao.

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