The son of Nikolay Tcherepnin, the Russian-born pianist, conductor and composer Alexander Tcherepnin moved with his father to Tbilisi in 1918 and in 1921 to Paris. His subsequent career took him to China and Japan; then, in the years after the war, he spent a period in America.

Orchestral Music
Tcherepnin was always open to experiment in composition. Although he remained fundamentally Russian in his writing, he devised a new synthetic scale and made use of the Chinese scale. Married to a Chinese pianist, he wrote six piano concertos and four symphonies, returning to Russian themes in his final Russian Sketches of 1971.