Sing, Sing a Song Saturday

I started doing what I call Sing, Sing a Song Saturday.  I'm going to post one song on Saturdays that the boys or I like.
The song may be part of a movie, a kid's video or just a song we like. I'll try and include why we like it and/or the history of the song/singer.

This week I'm covering a composer with a past, future and present. I just love people that have a story! Chou Wen-chung has many stories to tell.

Chou Wen-chung was Born in China’s Shandong Province only a decade after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. Chou grew up during a period of social and political transformation in which traditional Eastern and contemporary Western culture briefly co-existed. Chou arrived in the United States on a fellowship to study architecture at Yale. He dropped out before completing a semester. He knew his true calling was music. After briefly studying in Boston with Nicolas Slonimsky, he then moved to New York City where he met Edgard Varèse. After only a couple of lessons with the legendary French-American iconoclast in his Greenwich Village home, Chou became his assistant, helping to turn Varèse’s byzantine sketches into decipherable and performable musical scores; that home would later be the place where Chou Wen-chung and his wife have lived for decades.

Pien was composed awhile ago, but is still interesting to me.