About the Composer

DUN-NAN LIU

Dun-nan Liu is a Chinese-American composer who was born in Sichuan Province in 1940. He entered the Middle School Associated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 1957 and earned his B. A. degree from the conservatory in 1966 with a major in composition. He worked at Anhui province Maanshan City Cultural Center in 1968; then he worked as a composer at Maanshan City Song and Dance Ensemble. Starting in 1974, he served as a composer-in-residence with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and taught in the Composition Department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music until 1983. At this time, Mrs. Robert Downs III, of Wilmington, Delaware, supported Mr. Liu in his advanced studies at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, where he received his M.A. in 1986. Then, under the composer and pianist Easley Blackwood's instruction, he finished his Ph. D. at the University of Chicago in 1993.

Among his compositions, the representative works include the piano concerto The Mountain Forest (1979), the orchestra suite The Poem of Fantasia (1982), the piano trio Five Pieces for Piano, Violin and Cello (1987), the symphonic poem Lament (1990), the ballet Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (1997) and its First Suite and Second Suite (2002), the compositional theory Tonal Twelve-Tone Aggregate (2017) and many other works.

Dun-nan Liu has created his own compositional system called "Tonal Twelve-tone Aggregate"and has established himself in this unique style. His compositions are held in high regard in China and abroad. The piano concerto The Mountain Forest won first place at the First National Competition of Symphonic Works in China in 1981; it was also selected as one of the Twentieth Century Masterpieces by Chinese Musicians in 1993. His harp solo Fantasy, which was commissioned by the harp master Susan MacDonald for the Second World Harp Congress in Israel in 1985, was critically acclaimed as "one of the very few excellent harp pieces in recent times." His piano suite Nursery Rhymes _For 21st Century Pianists (2002) is one of the repertoire requirements selected by the Music Teachers Association of California for the Piano Syllabus of Certificate of Merit. The world premiere of piano suite Four Folk Songs (2016) was on November 12, 2016 in New York city Carnegie Hall by the outstanding pianist Tianshu Wang. This music, which fills of oriental style, won strong repercussions from the western audience, they said:"Four Folk Songs is the highlight in this concert."