Eight Pieces for Piano

Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) was a cosmopolitan composer and concert pianist.  Important cities in his life were St. Petersburg (to 1918), Tbilisi, then known as Tiflis (1918-1921), Paris (1921-1949), Chicago (1949-1964), and New York (from 1964).  Tcherepnin's father, Nikolai, was a composer and conductor, and Alexander landed in Paris because of his father's moves. 

Tcherepnin made extended trips to China and Japan between 1934 and 1937.  He met his wife, Lee Hsien Ming Tcherepnin (1915-1991) in China.  They were living in Paris at the time of the Nazi Occupation and he had to write music under assumed names to disguise his Russian identity.  He taught at DePaul University in Chicago from 1949 to 1964.  He and Ming became American citizens in 1958.  In 1967, Tcherepnin was the second Russian emigre composer after Stravinsky (1962) to tour the Soviet Union as guest of the Soviet government.

Tcherepnin was considered an original modernist composer, who employed a nine-step scale of "chromatic tetrachords" and a principle of note relations that he called "Interpoint."

Tcherepnin composed Eight Pieces for Piano in 1954-55.  Theodore Presser published the music in 1957, at which time Tcherepnin inscribed the work to the memory of Felix Borowski, who had died in 1956.  Borowski, a composer, had been director of Chicago Musical College from 1896 to 1925 and program annotator for the Chicago Symphony from 1908 to 1956.  The Chicago Musical College is now called Chicago College of Performing Arts of Roosevelt University.