Deconstructed profiteroles, 4-hour days and cycling to work: Bright Sheng on life as a composer
Cooking, like composing, requires an intensity of focus, says the famous composer
Composers are often depicted as almost other-worldly beings, tortured geniuses trapped in their own worlds who must toil around the clock sleeplessly in search of musical inspiration and perfection.
And while he might admit to sometimes getting lost in another world, Bright Sheng Zongliang, the Chinese-American composer extraordinaire whose works have been performed by most of the world’s major orchestras, does his best to dispel any notion of round-the-clock toiling. “I can’t compose more than four hours a day. That’s my maximum. Beyond that, I would get very tired and my mind [would be] numb,” says Shanghai-born Sheng, 61, a professor in composition at the University of Michigan.
That might seem to some like an enviably short working day, but it hasn’t affected Sheng’s productivity. His CV reads like a who’s who of the orchestral world. Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Tokyo Philharmonic and the China National Symphony are just a few of the more high-profile performers of his work. He is the New York City Ballet’s first composer-in-residence and in 1999 was commissioned by the White House to compose a piece to welcome Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) to a state dinner hosted by President Bill Clinton.
More recently, in 2011, he founded the art appreciation initiative the Intimacy of Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Yet despite such a high-brow background, Sheng is adamant that true inspiration comes from seemingly trivial acts of life, such as cooking and cycling.