After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the family fled St. Petersburg and settled for some time in Tbilisi, Georgia. In young Tcherepnin's luggage were some two hundred short piano pieces, quite a number of which eventually reached print (notably in his Bagatelles, Op. 5). In Tbilisi he continued his studies at the conservatory, gave concerts as both pianist and conductor and wrote music for the Kamerny Theatre (Palmer 1980, 18:637; Korabelnikova 2008, pp. 16–40). Because of the political environment in Tbilisi after Georgia was sovietized, the Tcherepnins chose to leave Russia permanently in 1921. They settled in Paris, where Alexander completed his studies with Paul Vidal and Isidor Philipp, who was the head of the piano department at the Paris Conservatory, and became associated with a group of composers that included Bohuslav Martinů, Marcel Mihalovici and Conrad Beck. Philipp secured the publication of several groups of short piano pieces that Tcherepnin had composed in Russia. From Paris Tcherepnin launched an international career as a pianist and composer. In 1925 he won the Schott Prize with his Concerto da Camera, Op. 33. He began yearly visits to the United States in 1926 and later went to the Far East, making several extended visits to China and Japan between 1934 and 1937. He promoted composers in Japan (Akira Ifukube, Fumio Hayasaka, Bunya Koh, and others) and China (He Luting and others), even founding his own publishing house in Tokyo for the purpose. While in China, he met the young Chinese pianist Lee Hsien Ming (1915-1991), and the two later married in Europe. They had three sons together: Peter, Serge and Ivan.