Chiang Wen-yeh

Kang Bûn-iā, Chiang Wen-yeh or Jiang Wenye (; June 11, 1910 – October 24, 1983) was a Taiwan-born composer, active mainly in Japan and later in China. He was born in Dadaocheng, Taipei, Taiwan and died in Beijing. While often known in the West by renditions of his Chinese name, the three Chinese characters that form his name are pronounced Kō Bunya () in Japanese, and thus he is also known as Koh Bunya in the West. In his compositions, which range from for piano to choral and orchestral works, he merged elements of traditional Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese music with modernist influences. Due to the political turmoil surrounding his life, he came to be largely forgotten during the latter part of his life. After his death, however, his work has started to gain new recognition in East Asia as well as in the West. Biography Chiang was born in 1910 to Chinese parents in Tamsui, Taiwan – a Japanese territory at the time, and so his nationality was Japanese from birth. He is of Yongding, Fujian Hakka ancestry. In 1923, he went to Ueda, a small town in the prefecture of Nagano, Japan, to attend secondary school. He later proceeded to the Tokyo Engineering and Commerce Advanced School (