Behind the Scenes: Filming My Childhood Memories with Chen Yi
On August 6, the two met to workshop My Childhood Memories, the piece Chen Yi wrote for Rabia. Side by side, they worked through the score phrase by phrase: tempos, colors, and the memories behind the music.
The next morning, the team moved to the Sanctuary at Winnetka Congregational Church, chosen for its natural acoustics. With director Nicolas DeGrazia and the crew of Bitter Jester Studios, the day unfolded in three parts: a workshop session on camera, a full performance of the piece, and a conversation between composer and performer.
Chen Yi’s path to composition was hard won. Sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, she carried her violin with her, and in the folk songs and rhythms of rural life she began to hear the music she would one day write. She went on to serve as concertmaster of a Peking Opera troupe orchestra in Guangzhou, entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing when it reopened, and in 1986 became the first woman in China to earn a master’s degree in composition.
That drive to excel has never slackened. Her music, which joins the folk traditions and landscapes of China with the Western concert tradition, has earned her a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation, the Charles Ives Living award, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has shaped generations of composers as a Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory. My Childhood Memories returns to where her voice began.
“Chen Yi is a talented composer, generous in spirit, and working on the documentary was truly inspiring and transformational. Spending two days with her was a dream come true and time that I will always cherish.” —Rabia Brooke
“I was amazed that she really read my mind and spoke in my musical language in the violin solo work, My Childhood Memories.” —Chen Yi
