Lei Liang
Lei Liang (born November 28, 1972, in Tianjin) is a Chinese-born American composer and Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
As the son of musicologists, he started piano as a child and began composing at age six. His early piano pieces are used in teaching in China and have been part of national competition repertoires.
He moved to the United States in 1990 to study at the New England Conservatory, where he earned BM and MM degrees with honors, and he later received a PhD from Harvard University. His many honors include the Rome Prize (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship.
His concerto Xiaoxiang for alto saxophone and orchestra was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams won the 2021 Grawemeyer Award. He was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series.
Liang studied at NEC with teachers such as Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and he credits Harvard ethnomusicologist Rulan Chao Pian as a key mentor. He has released many recordings and published more than fifty articles, editing eight books and editions.
A biography of him was published in 2020 by Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press. From 2013 to 2016, he was composer-in-residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and in 2018 he returned as its first research artist-in-residence. In 2023, Lei Lab was created to explore creative listening with engineers and scientists.
His recent works address social issues such as sex trafficking (Cuatro Corridos), gun violence (Inheritance), and environmental topics through sound, including the sonification of coral reefs. He has held visiting and honorary posts at several Chinese universities and has taught at UC San Diego since 2009, serving in leadership roles in the music department. He became Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music in 2020. He chairs the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou, named for the influential composer. Liang’s catalog includes more than 100 works published by Schott Music. He lives in San Diego with his son Albert.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 01:23 (CET).