Chou wrote for a variety of media. His works have been performed by the orchestras of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. He received grants from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Koussevitsky Foundations, from the National Institute of the Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. He was the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University (where he was also Director of the Center for US-China Arts Exchange), and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.