(b Kunshan, Jiangsu, 12 Nov 1911; d Shanghai, 8 Dec 1995). Chinese composer. He studied the piano with Boris Zakharov and composition with Huang Zi then Wolfgang Frankel at the Shanghai Conservatory. After studying with Noël Gallon, Aubin and Boulanger at the Paris Conservatoire, he returned to Shanghai in 1949 to work as a music teacher and eventually became deputy director of the Conservatory. Ding was an eminent composer, pianist, teacher and theorist in China; his Romantic piano miniatures, particularly those for children, are popular with the Chinese urban middle-class. One of his orchestral works, The Long March Symphony (1959–62), which depicts the pursuit of the Communist Army by Nationalist Army units in the mid-1930s, won him a gold record in Hong Kong. He wrote mainly for Western instruments in an idiom inspired by 19th-century and particularly Russian Romantic music; some of his late piano works are reminiscent of Skryabin. Though his career was interrupted in the early 1960s by political upheavals and the ensuing Cultural Revolution (1966–76), he resumed composing in 1978. His style was barely affected by the influx of contemporary Western music into China in the later years of his life.
KdG (Naixiong Liao)
Mao Yurun and Zhao Jiagui: Dongfang de xuanlü: Zhongguo zhuming zuoqujia Ding Shande de yinyue shengya [Oriental melody: the musical career of China’s famous composer Ding] (Hong Kong, 1983)
Zheng Biying, ed.: Ding Shande de yinyue chuangzuo: huiyi yu fenxi [The music of Ding: recollections and analyses] (Shanghai, 1986)
FRANK KOUWENHOVEN