Ignite Master Artist Series

Zhou Long is internationally recognized for creating a unique body of music that brings together the aesthetic concepts and musical elements of East and West. Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, Madame White Snake, Dr. Zhou also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2012-2013 Elise Stoeger Prize from Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. He has been two-time recipient of commissions from the Koussevitzky, Fromm Music Foundations, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, and the New York State Council on the Arts. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2015, Zhou Long and Chen Yi both were nominated the 58th Grammy Award.

Born on July 8, 1953, in Beijing, Zhou Long enrolled in the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1977. Following graduation in 1983, he was appointed composer-in-residence with the China Broadcasting Symphony. He travelled to the United States in 1985 under a fellowship to attend Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-Chung, Davidovsky and Edwards, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts in 1993. Dr. Zhou is currently Bonfils Distinguished Research Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory. Dr. Zhou’s music of all genres has been widely performed, recorded, and published by the Oxford University Press and the Shanghai Music Publishing House.

Recently, he has completed a Symphonic Oratorio: Men of Iron and the Golden Spike for voices, choir, and orchestra (c. 50 minutes) co-commissioned by Stanford University and Bard College, premiered at the Carnegie Hall 2019, Classic of Mountains and Seas – Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Tipsy Poet for violoncello and orchestra, co-commission by the WDR Symphony in Cologne, premiered at 2019 Dresden Music Festival and Singapore Symphony, Tsingtao Overture, which awarded China National Arts Fund; Beijing Rhyme – A Symphonic Suite, commissioned by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, a quartet co-commissioned by the Wigmore Hall and Lincoln Center, and his first piano concerto Postures co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and Singapore Symphony. In 2013, Zhou Long composed a whole evening symphonic epic Nine Odes on poems by Qu Yuan for four solo vocalists and orchestra, commissioned by the Beijing Music Festival and premiered by the Guangzhou Symphony. Zhou’s opera Madame White Snake will be co-produced by Paris’ Opera Comique, Beijing Music Festival and San Francisco Opera to a brand-new stage in 2022.