At the dinner of well-dressed Washington dignitaries, Zhou Long was about to make the faux pas of a lifetime.
The Beijing-born composer was being honored for a piece he had written for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, which was receiving its premiere at the Smithsonian Institution. Surrounded by arts donors and political figures, strangers all, Zhou picked at his food and made conversation with the friendly lady to his left.
"So what do you do?" he asked. Eyes widened around the table, all trained on the composer and his neighbor, a septuagenarian with distinguished waves of white hair.
"I'm a lover of the arts," the woman said. "And a judge."
The looks were those of people about to see a car wreck they couldn't prevent.
Zhou persisted: "What kind of judge?"
"I'm a Supreme Court justice," replied the woman.
Zhou laughs today about his 2000 chance encounter with Sandra Day O'Connor.
"She was very nice, very down-to-earth," he said.
Yet the moment is indicative of the dangers of the cross-cultural life: globe-trotting and meeting hundreds of people high and low each year and conversing in a half-dozen languages imperfectly. (He's still ashamed he didn't recognize O'Connor.)
Zhou is one of a few Chinese-American composers who in the last two decades have revolutionized classical music with a hybrid of Asian and Western styles.
But, like many immigrants, he often feels torn between two
cultures and vaguely outside of both. He has made his mark precisely by tackling
the conflicts and contrasts of living in both worlds — in his music.
"I am Chinese, and I am American, and I am Chinese-American," he said. Despite having lived through trauma and abuse under communism during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou said giving up his Chinese passport "felt a little strange." His music is now embraced by the nation that sent him into forced labor at age 16.
At the same time the 52-year-old Zhou is recognized as a leading American composer. With commissions by Kronos, Chanticleer and major orchestras, Zhou's renown spreads in gently concentric circles.
On Saturday [October 1] his 12-minute orchestral work, The Enlightened, will open the first concert of Michael Stern's tenure as music director of the Kansas City Symphony.
"I wanted something written just for us to start out with," Stern said. "The fact that we have someone locally of international stature made it even better."
Zhou, who teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory alongside his wife, composer Chen Yi, was a bold choice for the Symphony. The Enlightened is a companion piece to Zhou's The Immortal, which created a minor sensation among an audience of 7,000 at a July 2004 Proms concert in London.
That dark work paid tribute to artists and intellectuals of 20th-century China, many of whom lost everything during the revolution, including Zhou's father, an artist, and mother, a voice professor.
The Enlightened focuses on the plight of the world today. Will the planet and its inhabitants survive? Zhou's answers are full of both optimism and uncertainty, much the way the Kansas City Symphony is beginning its new season.
"When I first started on this piece, I had little hope for the future of mankind," he said.
Writing The Enlightened was a personal journey toward optimism, something Zhou is not willing to abandon. "This piece is a statement that we should be moving toward hope, that we should find peace and harmony between human beings."
East is west
The expansive condominium off the Country Club Plaza that Zhou shares with his wife seems designed for contemplation.
Furnished sparely, with clean lines, it's actually two apartments with the central wall knocked out, with twin studies at opposite ends. Running laterally along the long living room wall is a Chinese scroll, a replica of an ancient pictorial history of China. Zhou is equally conversant in dynasties and brushstrokes: His father was an artist and expert calligrapher.
All around are photographs of famous musicians — violinist Cho-Liang Lin, cellist Ma, conductors and Zhou's and Chen's teachers Mario Davidovsky and Chou Wen-chung. Zhou is in few photos.
"Most of the time I am the photographer," he said, and both he and Chen laughed.
The two are amiable together but as different as wind and water. She is a dynamo; he is laid-back and gregarious.
Chen: "I have a hundred compositions." Zhou: "I don't." Laughter. (Oxford University Press has published 42 of Zhou's works.)
Chen Yi has fistfuls of commissions and writes fast. Zhou takes on fewer projects and composes slowly.
Privately friends and colleagues believe Zhou is envious of his wife's greater success. Zhou vigorously denies this, calling macho attitudes about husband breadwinners "working-class."
"With professionals it's different," he said. "I am happy for her success. We are very close in our views. We talk all the time."
All Zhou will admit is trying to get Chen to step down from the board of directors of Meet the Composer, a primary source of composer funding. Her status made it awkward for getting him nominated for funding. Zhou finally got a Meet the Composer grant in 1997, late for a composer of his stature. Unlike Chen, who composes in planes, trains and automobiles, Zhou needs solitude.
"I need a perfect environment to compose," he said, smiling at his wife. "When Chen Yi is around, she has to get out." He likes to compose in the morning, he said, jumping out of bed "almost in a dreamlike state" to write down an idea.
He attaches each idea to the wall, gradually filling the room with pieces of music-staff paper. "I feel structure in my bones. I like to think about the structure of a piece like it's an object, like a builder does."
Earlier works explored combinations of Asian and Western instruments, but The Enlightened is for Western instruments only.
"I get a little tired of mixing them," he said.
Zhou's works are darker and more inward than Chen's. He is known as a colorist and craftsman.
"Of any composer's music I know today, his mastery of color, for whatever instrument he's writing for, is unequaled," said percussionist Mark Lowry, who has performed Zhou's music on NewEar concerts and elsewhere. "He has an ear that 'sees' colors."
Higher ground
The horrors of Zhou's youth have been balanced somewhat by subsequent good luck.
His beginnings were inauspicious. At 5, he hated practicing and broke a window to go out and play. Life seemed uneventful until he was 16, when intellectuals and artists and their children were sent off to remote camps. Zhou ended up on a state farm in northeastern China, where he labored hard carrying 100-pound containers of wheat.
"I was popular because I played the accordion," he said. He discovered the riches of folk music, tunes of Mongolia and northeastern China that would later become prime source material for his music. He lived off the land. He recalls how close to nature he felt when, late at night, he and Mongol nomads would ride horses in utter darkness, trusting the animals' footing. He has recalled his rural experiences in works like The Future of Fire, inspired by memories of raging fires during the burning off of chaff.
After nearly five years in the countryside, Zhou injured his back and was sent to Zhang-Jia Kou, a small town near Beijing. There, he was arranger, conductor, accordionist and composer for a small dance company. It was his first experience as a practical musician.
Through a friend who composed for film, he gained access to the film studio's huge record collection and became acquainted with opera and with "communist masters" like Shostakovich and Prokofiev. He was drawn to composers known for their orchestral color: Rachmaninoff, Respighi, Ravel.
After the revolution, in 1978, Zhou and Chen Yi were among 32 students admitted to the first class of the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music.. They quickly ascended to the top of the class. Handsome and muscular, Zhou was popular among the women.
"But he always wore a dark-blue, long-sleeved uniform jacket," Chen Yi said. By their third year at conservatory they were an item, and Zhou made it clear to the other young men in the class they were to stay away from Chen.
"He was very rude," Chen said, laughing. "He wouldn't let other boys sit in my studio."
They married, and together they achieved permission to study in the United States. Both were star pupils at Columbia, and eventually the grants and commissions began to roll in: Koussevitzky, Guggenheim, orchestras, chamber ensembles.
When UMKC offered Chen Yi a post, Zhou stayed in New York for several years before finally joining her. Now he and Chen are the life of the parties locally and around the globe. Their music is at home, as are they, in Hong Kong, Berlin, Geneva, Los Angeles.
They don't plan to have children.
Chen: "Our students are our children." Zhou: "Compositions are our children."
The real truth is that Chen Yi is too busy, Zhou said, "though I'm not."
Again the infectious laugh.
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