Essays about Bright Sheng

Music Life No.1 in the year of 2024
Nanking!Nanking!for Pipa and Orchestra
(Article in Chinese)

Creating A Honglou Meng for Twenty-First-Century San
Francisco: Musical Confluence in Bright Sheng’s Opera,
Dream of the Red Chamber (2016–2022)

Jingyi Zhang, Harvard University

CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature,

Volume 42, Number 2, December 2023, pp. 165-191 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press

Bright Sheng’s opera Dream of the Red Chamber, based on the eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng, premiered at the San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) in September 2016 and, by the end of 2017, had been performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, Changsha, andWuhan. Ticket sales and reviews were so strong that in 2022, the production was revived—a first for a piece commissioned by the SF Opera. This phenomenal success occurred despite the difficulty of condensing a 120-chapter novel that most Americans have probably never heard of into a three-hour Western opera.
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盛宗亮中西混合编制室内乐研究

-- 以 《清水谣》和《大戈壁的鸣沙》为例

作者：于洋

Understanding of Authentic Performance Practice
in Bright Sheng's Seven Tunes Heard in China
for Solo Cello

This document will attempt to put Bright Sheng’s Seven Tunes Heard in China in a context of solo works for the cello that follows a universal tradition of concert works based on folk music and dance style. In this case, these seven works emanate from seven diverse regions of China, and all represent a different style and character which Sheng has translated to a single work for solo cello. Based on preexisting models of folk song tradition, I am seeking parallels between the work of Mr. Sheng and the original traditions behind this composition. I will discuss the various regional influences and the methods in which Sheng exploits the cello to produce the sounds, character and general feeling of these different folk idioms...
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-- Chiao-Hsuan Kang, 2016

The Music of Bright Sheng: Expressions of Cross-Cultural Experience

Most of Bright Sheng’s compositions are cross-cultural. But, beyond specific Oriental and Occidental compositional resources and techniques, Sheng has developed a distinct personal style, which is characterized by an affinity to tonal language and motivic development, driving rhythm, lyricism, dramatic contrasts, and a sense of proportion and balance. Essentially, he is a modern classicist who transforms the classical values with new cross-cultural guises in his works. He sees his cross-cultural musical experiences as bi-cultural, in a sense of bi-lingual, and his music is an outlet to express and reflect that experience. Thus, his musical fusion is achieved at a quite sophisticated level where his cross-cultural materials are easily recognizable without the attachment of identification tags...
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Read the Essay in Chinese

-- Peter Chang, March 5, 2006

Ancient journey on 'Silk Road' links East, West

In a remote mountain village near the Taklamakan Desert in far western China, Bright Sheng seeks out an elderly man named Mamaty, who plays the kumuz, a nasal-sounding, traditional two-stringed instrument. Before the music starts, the visitor is feted as an honored guest. "When all of us were half-drunk," Sheng recounts, "he took out his kumuz and started to play. An incredible phenomenon happened: The music sounded so beautiful and heavenly that I was sure I was hearing something special."...
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-- Pierre Ruhe, September 10, 2000

Composition in the Digital World in depth interviews with leading composers of contemporary classical music including Bright Sheng and others