A Recording Project and Performance Guide of Five Award-Winning Chinese Piano Works Composed After 2020

The purpose of this study is to support and promote piano compositions by emerging Chinese composers. The status of Chinese piano compositions will also be discussed and two prestigious composition competitions, “The First HsingHai Cup Composition Competition 2022” and “The WanYe Cup Composition Competition — New Piano Works in Chinese Style 2021” will be used as references.Five contemporary composers, all born after 1990 and hereby referred to as the “new generation”, and their prizewinning piano works have been selected for this research. All five pieces share a common characteristic in that they utilize Western tonal systems or compositional methods of developing musical material, but still maintain Chinese cultural elements. They were selected because each work conveys representative characteristics of Chinese life in distinct ways. This paper contains information about each composer, as well as a discussion about the value of cultural fusion contained in each work. My goal is to fill a void in recorded resources while also providing a descriptive analysis of each work in terms of form, musical style, and material derived from Chinese culture. Performance guides of the selected piano works cover musical expression of borrowed Chinese traditional materials, technical points, and explanations of articulations and notations derived from other musical vocabularies.