Lei Liang

Lei Liang (Chinese: 梁雷; pinyin: Liáng Léi; born November 28, 1972, in Tianjin, China) is a Chinese-born American composer who was a winner of the Grawemeyer Award and a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. He is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. Early life and education Liang is the son of musicologists Liang Mao-chun (b. 1940) and Cai Liang-yu (b. 1940) and studied piano as a child. He started composing at age six. His works written before he was thirteen are widely used for piano pedagogy and included among the required repertoire for national piano competitions in China. Liang came to the United States in 1990 for further studies, receiving BM and MM degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music, both with academic honors and distinction in performance, and a Junior Fellowship and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Career Liang was the winner of the 2011 Rome Prize and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for alto saxoph