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Never in Western music has there been so much concern with faithfulness to the written score as in the last twenty years. There is a feeling current in many conductors that dynamic markings and tempo indications must be as carefully observed as the notes themselves. Chen considers this kind of "honesty" the most basic part of a conductor's obligation. "You can build the most fancy skyscrapers, modern, artistic looking buildings, but you can't forget to put in the toilet. There is no illusion about all these dreamy, misty-eyed things. You put that crap-house in."

For all his reliance on analogies and poetic images to express his meaning. Chen is surprisingly tough-minded about musical interpretation. He is unmoved by "19th century poetic crap" and condemns those romantics who "use all that perfume and stuff just to cover them up because they don't bathe."

Chen knows that it becomes boring to swoon over each phrase of a piece without giving a strong sense of direction to the whole. So in his conducting, he takes extreme care to shape and mold the large sections. Last summer he did some work on Beethoven's Eighth Syphony with the Summer School Orchestra. The first movement of this piece is a big shout of excitement, energetic and very loud for the most part, with many fortissimo markings. However, at the beginning of the recapitulation, there is the only fortississimo marked, a distinction that is not easy to make and is usually left unobserved. But Chen made sure to gradate the whole movement so that that triple forte would be the supreme climactic moment. The result was a performance that clarified the structure of the movement while giving it a sense of slow and controlled growth that most performances lack.

"You construct the whole thing like planning a war. You can't win every battle. Even the best army has their weakness so make sure that weakness is used strategically so that the big battles you win."

Chen has a weakness for these military analogies. Perhaps the correspondence between war, with its manipulation of armies, and music, with its manipulation of tones, suggests itself to him through his study of Tai Chi, one of the Chinese martial arts. Through these exercises, which teach a stylized and highly disciplined form of self-defense. Chen claims to have acquired the self-control and profound concentration that he brings to his conducting. The bare hands are the weapons both for self-defense and for conducting, and Chen has trained his to function "with their own mind, and yet without mind."

The Tai Chi is one of the few conscious ties that Chen maintains with China. Although he still has relatives there, he has little desire to return to a country fundamentally different from he one he left. His musical training is thoroughly Western and he has very little knowledge of or curiosity about Chinese music.

Still, he does bear the mark of his 19 years there. While in Boston, he eats many of his meals in Chinatown, an opportunity for home-style cooking he doesn't often get in Geneva. And, on a somewhat more profound level, his thought pattern and artistic aims are clearly Eastern in origin.

He claims to have derived his acute sense of rhythm from Chinese literature, its uniform stresses making him sensitive to slight variations in meter. And his desire to immerse himself in the moment without guilt about the past or ambition for the future, is no less Chinese. "The most beautiful thing is the concentration. When children see an object like an insect, a butterfly or a fruit, they have complete absorption in that object. And if you can capture that, that is beautiful."

In Chen's description of his creativity, there is a sense of man as a vessel, a medium for a higher creative energy. "A person is expressive regardless of whether it's music or not music. I don't speak good English, but I know I am expressive. That's all, I get the idea across, because the idea is there. It's very much there and it gets across in spite of all the grammar you can talk."

And finally, there is an almost mystical quality that suffuses his relationship to music. Through it, Chen has found moments of seemingly transcendent illumination. "It's like when you are trying to focus a camera. So you strive to have that moment again, but you can't make it every time."

Chen is not shy in his bearing or self-conscious in his responses to questions. Nor is he at all condescending, yet he leaves the impression of a man aloof from others, immersed in his art, pursuing a solitary vision.

Amid the profusion of images and graceful movements, one still feels removed from the deepest concerns of this man. Perhaps this is because the thing he strives for cannot really be talked about at all. "It is spontaneous and inevitable, this feeling. It's a feeling: It is so. It is so."