China's first avant-garde composer. After receiving degrees in violin and composition from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, he was forbidden to play anything but scales during the Cultural Revolution and later incarcerated and tortured. In 1983, he was awarded a fellowship to Columbia University where he studied with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky and received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree. He has composed concert music, as well as music for dance, theatre, and several film scores: Tang Dynasty, Who Killed Vincent Chin (1988 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Film), and A Great Wall, the first Chinese-American feature film collaboration. His dramatic and effective music combines "contemporary Western compositional techniques with my Chinese feeling and experience along with Chinese musical characteristics inherited from thousands of years ago, so as to set up a universal music world expressing natural and primitive beauty." Watch for a future recording of his composition Wu (Rising to Height) (1986) for piano and chamber orchestra. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi