After decades of isolation from the world and the end of China's Cultural Revolution in 1976, many Chinese composers have come to the United States to study and since then established themselves as some of the most distinguished and promising composers in the world. Despite of their different educational and social backgrounds, they all strive to express their cultural identities and to search for compositional inspirations from Chinese traditional cultures.
In this document, I will focus on such prominent Chinese composers who came to the United States after the 1980s as Bright Sheng and Chen Yi from the older generation, and Huang Ruo, Lei Liang and Gao Ping from the latest generation. Through studying their backgrounds and musical styles, along with analyzing their representative compositions, I will demonstrate the strong Chinese traditional cultural influences on their music, and how they infuse the various Chinese cultural elements with modern western compositional techniques, such as serialism and cyclicism, in their compositions.
I hope this document will help musicians and audiences to better understand and appreciate this beautiful Chinese piano music. Also, I hope there will be more composers like these pioneers, so that the traditional Chinese culture and music will be kept and carried forward for generations.