He was stimulated in this activity by the atmosphere at home, which—thanks to his family's Benois-Diaghilev connection—was a meeting place for many well-known musicians and artists of the day.
By the time he began formal theory and composition studies in his late teens, he had already composed hundreds of pieces, including more than a dozen piano sonatas.
Among his teachers in Russia were composer Victor Belyayev (pupil of Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Glazunov), who prepared Tcherepnin for Saint Petersburg Conservatory; Leokadiya Kashperova (renowned pianist, protégée of Anton Rubinstein); and his professor at the Conservatory Nikolay Sokolov (pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov).
In young Tcherepnin's luggage were some two hundred short piano pieces, quite a number of which eventually reached print (notably in his Bagatelles, Op.
In Tbilisi he continued his studies at the conservatory, gave concerts as both pianist and conductor and wrote music for the Kamerny Theatre.
He promoted composers in Japan (Akira Ifukube, Fumio Hayasaka, Bunya Koh, and others) and China (He Luting and others), even founding his own publishing house in Tokyo for the purpose.
The immediate postwar period, however, brought a resurgence of creative energies; the result was a number of important works, beginning with Symphony No.
3 was written while in Chicago during this time, commissioned in 1951 by Patricia and M. Martin Gordon, who were the founders of Princess Pat, a Chicago-based cosmetic company.
In 2008, these recordings were reissued together with Singapore Symphony performances of his six piano concertos (Noriko Ogawa, pianist), along with the Symphonic Prayer, Op.
1 (1927) is remarkable for including the first symphonic movement ever written completely for unpitched percussion; this preceded by four years Edgard Varèse's Ionisation of 1931.
The most famous of his synthetic scales, derived by combining minor and major hexachords, has nine notes and consists of three conjunct semitone-tone-semitone tetrachords.