teach himself how to play musical instruments and learn music theory to play, Qinghai folk music became and continues to be a strong inspiration in his compositions today. He used Tibetan folk music from Qinghai as a basis for his opera The Song of Majnun. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he got admitted into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music where he learned both Chinese classical and traditional music. There, Sheng earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in music composition. Sheng left China in 1982 and joined his family in the United States, where he had to re-learn different elements of music to adjust to the Western style of music. In New York, he attended Queens College to earn his Master of Arts degree in 1984 and Columbia University to earn his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1993. Some of his teachers included George Perle and Hugo Weisgall at Queens College and Chou Wen-chung, Jack Beeson, and Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University, as well as Leonard Bernstein. Career Sheng served as a composer-in-residence for the Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1989 to 1992, the Seattle Symphony from 1992 to 1995, and as an artistic director for the Wet Ink Festival hosted by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1993. He also taught at the University of Washington for a year and joined the composition department at the University of Michigan in 1995, as associate professor of music. He was involved in the Silk Road Project, a music project that stretches across different nations and cultures. It was named after the silk trade because the Silk Road is the oldest trade route between ancient Rome and China. To prepare, he went on a field research trip along the Silk Road regions in China, tracing their musical culture to collect folk songs and historical materials. Sheng had also wanted to write a research article to document the composition, gain the help from a graduate student, as well as lecturing on American music. In October 2021, Sheng stepped down from teaching an undergraduate class, where he says he had intended to show how Giuseppe Verdi adapted William Shakespeare's play Othello into his opera Otello. On September 10, 2021, he showed the class John Dexter's Othello, where Laurence Olivier played Othello in blackface. Sheng allegedly failed to give students any warning that the film contained blackface. Evan Chambers, a fellow professor of