Biography

Cʜᴇɴ Yihan is a concert and commercial composer, pianist, scholar, and educator who approaches music as a communal and deeply personal form of human experience, shaped by cultural inheritance and continual transformation. His compositions span concert music, media, popular idioms, and music production, which he sees as interconnected practices shaping how music is experienced, remembered, and shared.

Musical grammar is a recurring concern in Chen’s work. His scholarship examines inherited musical grammars, particularly the hierarchical pitch syntax of Peking opera, while his compositions explore how inherited grammars can remain culturally specific yet open to transformation, generating musical structures and expressive possibilities. Drawing on traditional Changzhou chant, his native Changzhou variety of Wu Chinese, literary Chinese prosody, and Middle Chinese phonology, he investigates how the pitch contours, rhythms, timbres, and cultural memory of speech and verse can shape melody and musical form.

Chen’s music has been performed and recorded by orchestras including the China Philharmonic Orchestra, the China National Symphony Orchestra, the China National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra, the China National Opera House Symphony Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra; ensembles including Alarm Will Sound and Latitude 49; and artists including pianists Tamara Stefanovich and Shigeo Neriki, multi-instrumentalist Min Xiao-Fen, violinist Julia Glenn, and clarinetist Thomas Piercy. His projects include the feature-film score Manifesto, produced by Shanghai Film Group and recorded by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, and the touring dance production Nine Songs, presented at major performing-arts venues across China. His work has received a Copland House Residency Award and three ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, among other distinctions, and has been published by Edition Peters and People’s Music Publishing House. As a pianist, he has been a featured performer at contemporary-music festivals and concert series including The Clearing, presented by Portland Piano International, and Tokyo to New York, and has premiered numerous works by contemporary composers.

Chen joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in fall 2026 as Teaching Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition. He earned his Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Princeton University, his M.M. from The Juilliard School, and his B.M. in Music Composition and Piano Performance from Indiana University Bloomington. His principal composition teachers were Samuel Adler, Claude Baker, Don Freund, Christopher Rouse, Sven-David Sandström, and Dmitri Tymoczko; his principal piano teacher was Arnaldo Cohen.