Chou is credited by Nicolas Slonimsky as one of the first Chinese composers who attempted to translate authentic East Asian melo-rhythms into the terms of modern Western music.
Chou attended Guangxi University during 1942–44 and managed to find time to compose music on his own and to educate himself about Western culture through reading library books despite the nightly air raids and the demands of his studies in civil engineering.
In 1946, Chou turned down a scholarship in architecture at Yale University in order to pursue music, studying with Nicolas Slonimsky at the New England Conservatory and with Edgard Varèse and Otto Luening in New York.
[5] Chou studied composition with Otto Luening at Columbia University and from 1949–1954, took lessons privately with Edgard Varèse who became a lifelong mentor and friend.
Peter Chang described this incident in details: On one occasion, Chou showed his Chinese-flavored fugues to Bohuslav Martinů, who started to read them on the piano and suddenly stopped after a few measures.
To re-learn and to interpret his own tradition, in 1955, Chou spent two years researching classical Chinese music and drama with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
This research reinforced his own aesthetic convictions and led him to synthesize theories of calligraphy, qin, single tones and I Ching, all of which represented new ground in his compositional thinking.
As chairman of the Music Division at Columbia University, he was instrumental in providing its composition program with a clear sense of artistic vision.
Chou also distinguished himself as vice-dean of the School of the Arts and director of the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music at Columbia University.
His notable students include Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Tan Dun, Chinary Ung, David Froom, Ge Gan-ru, Bright Sheng, James Tenney, Talib Rasul Hakim, Jing Jing Luo, Michael Rosenzweig, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Jacques-Louis Monod, and Hsiung-Zee Wong.
In 1978, Chou Wen-chung established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University to promote mutual understanding between the two countries through the channel of culture.
It was the first organization to address the need to re-connect leaders in the arts in China and the United States after diplomatic ties had been severed for thirty years.
In the 1990s the Center's purview expanded to include programs focused on the arts of ethnic nationalities in Yunnan province and relevant issues of environmental preservation.
As a protégé of the composer Edgard Varèse, Chou chose not to simply to propagate Varèsian concepts in his music, but to move beyond his teacher's shadow.
From Varèse's purely Western perspectives, Chou's music represented cross-cultural pollination, by integrating the East and the West with a requisite understanding of both cultures.
Chou's revolutionary insights brought about a broader and more integrated perception of Chinese music by scholars and laymen from East and West.
By emulating Western achievement in formal design, he employed these nuances not as mere decoration, but as a clear structural element.
A controlled spontaneity and quiet intensity derived from an intimate knowledge of his art and his culture, together with a growth process as organic and inevitable as that of nature, remain requisite stylistic elements.
Ultimately, he sought not so much to amalgamate the divergent Eastern and Western traditions as to internalize and transcend contemporary idioms and techniques to create an intimately personal style that reflects a genuine, modern sensibility.
These poems “Under the Cliff, in the Bay,” “The Sorrow of Parting” and “One Streak of Dying Light” are used as subtitles to indicate the moods of different sections in Landscape.
Peter Chang commented that through these early works, Chou developed a mode of musical thinking in terms of Chinese visual and literary artistic principles such as the emphasis on the control of ink flow in calligraphy, brevity in landscape paintings, poetry in musical form, and pictorial depiction of the qin playing gestures.
Chou wrote, “The cursive script represents the essence in the art of Chinese calligraphy as its expressiveness depends solely upon the spontaneous but controlled flow of ink which, through the brush – strokes, projects not only fluid lines in interaction but also density, texture and poise....
[17] Some notable compositions are Beijing in the Mist (1986), Echoes from the Gorge (1996), Windswept Peaks (1994), Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (1991), and Clouds (1998).
Chou Wen-chung was born into a literati family with ancestral roots in the ancient cultural center of Changzhou in Jiangsu province.
His older brother, Wen Tsing Chow pioneered the use of digital computers in missile, satellite and spacecraft guidance systems for the United States Air Force and NASA.