Born in Jilin Province in 1961 into a family of musicians (his father was a composer and the director of the Opera of Jilin Province; his mother was a singer), Xu Shuya undertook studies of cello, music theory, and composition at the Shanghai Conservatory with Zhu Jianer and Ding Shande. “I was an avid collector of modern music; I tried to get everything: books, tapes, records. I met Takemitsu at a conference in Shanghai, and asked him to listen to my Violin Concerto. In return, Takemitsu allowed me to hear his own Violin Concerto. I was struck by the way in which he had integrated elements of Western music, with which he was nonetheless able to articulate his own musical identity. Takemitsu’s music, through the use of these Western elements, was accessible to a much broader audience. This really got me thinking.”

In 1983, Xu Shuya became an assistant, and later a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory. Upon receiving a grant from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1988, he moved to Paris where he studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP) in the classes of Alain Bancquart, Gérard Grisey, Betsy Jolas, and Ivo Malec. He also met York Höller and Bernard Parmegiani at that time.

A member of the Artistic Committee of Ensemble l’Itinéraire, Xu Shuya has been awarded numerous international prizes (Bourges, Besançon, Shangai). His works have been performed in international festivals in Münster, Brussels, Amsterdam, Venice, Bourges, Stockholm, Rome, Budapest, and Paris. He has worked with orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestre National du Capitole (Toulouse), China Central Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, l’Itinéraire, 2E2M, Nieuw Ensemble, etc. Xu Shuya has composed works for orchestra, concertos, electro-acoustic works, chamber works, and film scores.

Xu Shuya’s early works, e.g., Chant de Miao (1982), combine the influence of composers such as Debussy, Ligeti, Stravinsky, and Takemitsu with popular songs from Hunan Province (which he studied in the early 1980s); this vocal tradition is characterised by distinct intervallic patterns and microtonal pitch inflections. While the Tao, which he first encountered in Shanghai in the early 1980s, remains a source of inspiration, Xu Shuya’s works have become increasingly dramatic and energetic in style. In his music, Taoist concepts are often transcribed into a contemporary Western musical style. His work at the GRM and IRCAM was pivotal in the evolution of his aesthetic, which often applies electronic/electro-acoustic processes to traditional music. Taiyi (1990) for tape, for example, transforms the attack transients of the xiao, a flute which is played vertically (on which the composer is himself proficient), resulting in a work of surprising complexity. The microtonality of which the xiao is capable is juxtaposed with the key-clicks of a Western flute in Taiyi II (1991). Chute en automne (1991) may be counted among Xu Shuya’s first mature works: “the space of the sound structure”, the sense of falling, and the title itself are manifested in an explosion of rhythmic complexity alongside slowly-evolving pizzicatti sounds which spiral downwards, held notes of varying intensity, percussive timbres, all in a sea of abrupt changes of tempo.

Since then, Xu Shuya’s music is ever-shifting, favouring a style nourished by colour and timbre rather than serialist or harmonic calculations, as well a blend of Chinese culture and tightly unified, tranquil, and slow-moving forms, with only rare textural contrasts. In works such as Cristal au Soleil Couchant (1993), Changement/Constance (1994), and Dense/Clairsemé (1994), sound, stable or moving, breath and voice inside an instrument, embody the unity of opposing elements to which these titles allude.