Edgard Varèse’s Protégé Chou Wen-chung, Going Strong at 91

From NYTimes.com:

In his youth, Chou Wen-chung, the 91-year-old subject of a Composer Portrait at the Columbia University Miller Theater on Thursday, had many strict teachers. One was Edgard Varèse, the temperamental French-born Modernist and godfather of electronic music, who once showed his displeasure by throwing a score of Mr. Chou’s on the floor and ordering him to urinate on it. Then there was Bohuslav Martinu, the Czech symphonist, who reacted to a fugue Mr. Chou had written using Chinese melodic material with a single, withering, “Why?”