2025
for
Cello and Piano
Lei Liang
Leland Ko
2024 International Cello Competition
December 11, 2025
Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer and Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at UC San Diego. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams won the Grawemeyer Award. A Rome Prize and Guggenheim recipient, he also researches and preserves traditional Asian music.
Inspired by Inner Mongolian long song, the music follows the image of a kite drifting and turning in the wind.
Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose music engages with Asian musical traditions, contemporary instrumental writing, and sound research. He studied at the New England Conservatory and Harvard University, with teachers including Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, Mario Davidovsky, and Harrison Birtwistle. Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and his saxophone concerto Xiaoxiang was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His honors also include the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Alongside composition, he researches and preserves traditional Asian music. His scores are published by Schott Music.
The title of this composition, A Kite over the Grassland, might seem like a surreal image.
Full disclosure: I have never actually seen a kite in the Mongolian grassland. But the title is not meant to be silly.
In the musical cultures of the world, there are many ways to describe the beauty of melodies - using words that capture their contours, motion, or expressivity.
My teacher, the great Mongolian scholar Wulalji, uses the image of a kite to describe how Mongolian long song melodies unfold.
Just picture this image for a moment: the kite drifts and sustains itself in the sky, turning and dipping with the unpredictable winds and sudden disturbances.
This composition was inspired by the music of Inner Mongolia.
I think of the cello as an instrument embodying the vocal traditions of the grasslands, and when the piano and cello play together, it feels as if one is watching a kite and its own shadow.
