Hearing pentatonicism through serialism: integrating different traditions in Chinese contemporary music.

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington

FOR CHINESE COMPOSERS of the late twentieth century, deciding which musical traditions to integrate has been and continues to be an intricate process. Although it is common to this day to find contemporary Chinese music described as the meeting of East and West, the Western and Chinese music traditions have not been two completely separable entities for over a century. The diffusion of Western music in China began significantly in the late nineteenth century, primarily through missionaries and the military Since the early twentieth Century, Western music has been a part of Chinese urban musical life, constituting a central element of musical entertainment and the standard music education. One example of how the twentieth-century hybrid form of Chinese music took root quickly and deeply is the Chinese art song, which has been popular among urban Chinese since 1920 and uses the tonal harmony of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music. For example, generations of educated Chinese people have enjoyed ar t songs such as Zhao Yuanren's "Jiao wo ruhe buxiang ta (How Can I Not Think of Her)," composed in 1926; and to this day, school children in Taiwan still sing Huang Zhe's "Xi fong de hua (Words of the Western Wind)," written in 1935 for use in elementary school. (1) In the 1920s, such art songs were used to accompany Chinese films. Since then, songs in the tonal idiom have been embraced by a wide audience, and most popular songs have been written in the Western tonal idioms. (2) On the other hand, various types of traditional Chinese music still constitute an important part of people's daily life, from entertainment to ritual offerings. Despite the incursion of Western music, traditional Chinese music continues to develop and thrive, be it tradition associated with the literati culture such as qin, or tradition deeply linked to larger masses such as folk songs. In addition, the golden period for Peking opera and Cantonese opera in the 1920s and 1930s was in no small part due to intense contact with Western mu sical traditions. As a result of continuing cultural interaction such as this, musical culture for an urban Chinese--be it in Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, or Taiwan--includes at least the following three elements: traditional Chinese music, twentieth-century Chinese music, and Western European music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The balance among these three traditions is inevitably unstable and malleable at various historical moments and geographical locations. Together they constitute the immense complexity of Chinese musical life.

An awareness of this context is important to the topic of this essay--an examination of Chinese composers' integration of pentatonic sonority and serialism. Most Chinese contemporary composers are as well-versed in European tonal music of the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century as they are in twentieth-century Chinese music and the various strands of traditional Chinese music. (3) Their creative processes have always been deeply entangled with sonorities from all three traditions. Thus, for these composers to merge different traditions in compelling ways becomes as much a conscious as a subconscious endeavor. In such an environment, their encounter with serialism has complicated layers of meaning that go far beyond the binary East-meets-West model that often frames discussions of Chinese new music. It is thus important to ground any analysis of contemporary Chinese music in rigorously transnational frames. Rather than simply retreating to existing reductive models that perpetuate the us/them divide and continue to fetishize the composers and their work--and therefore sidestep the inextricable complexity of issues in such syntheses--we need to look at the temporal simultaneity of these traditions and the ways in which they have been and continue to be bound up in an inextricable and complex whole. This essay is an exploration of one facet of such a nexus of traditions.

What is the impact of serialism on Chinese new music? On the one hand, Chinese composers' reactions to serialism are as varied as those of their Western counterparts. Many Chinese composers were skeptical, while others turned to serialism enthusiastically. (4) Serialism came in vogue as a novelty in some composer circles. While some adopted it as a means of creating melodies, others delved deeply into its structural implications. On the other hand, Chinese composers' approaches to serialism inevitably differ from those of their Western counterparts, because the diatonic system was never their only primary musical system. Furthermore, serialism provides a somewhat more open way to integrate with traditional Chinese music. For many Chinese composers, serialism's emphasis on the individual notes or interval relations rather than on the functionality of the notes is similar to certain aspects of traditional Chinese music. In fact, some composers believe that serialism allows them to associate more freely with tra ditional Chinese elements. Many developed unique systems that connect concepts of serialism with Chinese philosophical, religious, and cosmological concepts. The most notable examples are Chou Wen-chung's Yijing system and Zhao Xiaosheng's Taiji system. For example, in Chou's Metaphors (1960), the trigrams in Yijing are interpreted as scale segments and eight modes are formed according to the structure of eight trigrams. Zhao, on the other hand, formatted a Taiji composition system in 1987 where all sixty-four hexagrams in Yijing are translated into pitch sets and their permutations.5 Other such work includes Zhou Long's connection of twelve-tone series with a Buddhist state of mind in Ding (1990), and Pang Huanglong's connection of cosmology with a permutation of five elements in Wandlungsphasen (Wu Xing Sheng Ke, 1979-80). (6)

While the ways that Chinese composers have chosen to incorporate twelve-tone technique or serialism vary widely, many move in a similar way into the realm of pentatonicism. By adopting serialism or its underlying concept, they reinterpret the Chinese pentatonic traditions in the light of serialism, illuminating one of the most prominent dilemmas for the twentieth-century Chinese composers--the harmonization of pentatonic melody. In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese composers embraced the harmonic language of diatonic system to accompany pentatonic musical ideas, an approach with which many in the second half of the century grew dissatisfied. Serialism, with its emphasis on intervals, invariance, and ordering, shed significant light on the matter for many composers.

I will sketch and contrast three different modes of integration by examining how three contemporary Chinese composers-Luo Zhongrong, Chen Qigang, and Lu Yen, varied in their experiences and backgrounds--integrate the essential qualities of the realms of penratonicism and serialism. I am interested particularly in the theoretical underpinning of the three composers' choices of paths through chromaticism and pentatonicism. I am also concerned with the aesthetics of these different modes of integration and ask: what drew these composers, positioned as they are among a particularly rich array of musical traditions, to serialism? How, during this process of integration, are the meanings of different musical systems transformed?

LUO ZHONGRONG

The first mode of integration seeks to elevate pentatonic sonority to structural and sometimes abstract levels. Many composers rely on this mode of integration, including Chen Mingzhi, Lu Shiling, Wang Zhenya, and Peng Zhimin. (7) Luo Zhongrong's approach, however, remains the most systematic, revealing a keen sense of the structural implications of twelve-tone pitch space.

In mainland China Luo Zhongrong, a composer in residence at the Central Symphony Orchestra and a composition teacher for the Central Conservatory and Chinese Music Conservatory in Beijing since the 1970s, is regarded as the father of Chinese modern music. (8) Luo is indeed unusual among his contemporaries. He has definitely followed his own modernist path, based on a solid understanding of Hindemith's composition technique, one that he started in the late 1940s while studying under Tang Xiaolin, a student of Hindemith. As a translator of Paul Hindemith's The Craft of Musical Composition and A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony, Allen Forte's The Structure of Atonal Music, and George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality, he developed a keen interest in the structural interrelations of pitch-class space and collection classes. (9) Through his teaching, compositions, translations and articles, Luo's serial thinking has influenced and will continue to influence many generations of Chinese composers. ( 10)

Luo's use of the twelve-tone row is deeply intertwined with pentatonic thinking. From the beginning of his serialism, Luo has incorporated pentatonicism in structural and abstract rather than foreground and literal ways. His song of 1979, "She jiang cai-furong (Picking Lotus Flowers Along the Riverside)," is based on a tone row containing exclusively pentatonic intervals: major second, major and minor thirds, perfect fourth and fifth, major and minor sixth, and minor seventh. (Example la) That this row contains two penratonic scales was known to the composer only at a later date and affects the musical surface very little.

With each subsequent design Luo becomes more abstract. In the twelve-tone row for his Second String Quartet (1985), he retains the pentatonic intervallic relation yet prevents any completion of a pentatonic scale in consecutive notes. The resulting tone row allows at most four successive notes from the same pentatonic scale, avoiding any indulgence in obvious pentatonic melodies (Example 1b). As it turns out, this row is comprised of three consecutive 0257 tetrachords. With his next design for the Third String Quartet (1996), Luo's main criteria were to maximize the variety of segmental pentatonic trichords and tetrachords in a tone row. In constructing the row, Luo tries to maximize the use of different pentatonic pitch-class sets--i.e., the three pentatonic tetrachords [0247], [0257], and [0358] and four pentatonic trichords [024], [025], [027], and [037] (shown at the top of Ex. 1c). However, it is not possible to use all three pentatonic tetrachords as segmental tetrachords in a twelve-tone row. Nor is it possible to use all four pentatonic trichords. Consequently, Luo designed tone rows that...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.