(b Songjiang, Jiangsu, 17 Jan 1923). Chinese composer. In the 1940s he was a Red Army officer and an activist in underground Communist Party circles. In Shanghai he became a music student of W. Fraenkel and J. Schloss, two former students of Schoenberg and Berg who had fled Nazi Germany. Under their guidance Sang developed a firm command of compositional techniques and a passion for Western atonal music. His piano piece From Far Away (1947) and his Night Scenery (1948) for violin and piano were the first and for several decades the only atonal works produced by a Chinese composer in the People’s Republic. Under severe political pressure, he was forced to modify his idiom considerably. His Mongolian Folk Songs (1953) are reminiscent of Bartók’s piano pieces for children, while Caprice (1959) for piano displays a Prokofievian brutality. Sang tried to resist the growing pressure of politics on musical life in Shanghai, but eventually lost his job as a music teacher at the conservatory (1955). During the Cultural Revolution he was tortured by Red Guards, resulting in partial deafness. By the 1980s, when it finally became possible for composers in China to pursue new directions in music, Sang had lost his creative powers. He was elected Director of the Shanghai Conservatory (1984–91) and became an influential writer on harmony and contemporary compositional theory. (KdG, Naixiong Liao)
FRANK KOUWENHOVEN