by Professor Edward Green
Music From China
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New York, NY 10038
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I learned from Eli Siegel, the great American poet and critic who foundedhe philosophy of Aesthetic Realism in 1941, that there is a criterionor beauty completely free of cultural bias, true for every culture, forvery century. He stated this principle:
All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of oppositess what we are going after in ourselves. [Lecture, 1949: Aesthetic Realismnd Beauty]
I have been a teacher of world music for over twenty years, and as a personho loves music and wants people to have great emotion through it, I sayith passion: the world needs to study what Eli Siegel taught. Throughesthetic Realism, for the first time in history, people can learn fromhe technique of art how to have lives that are honestly beautiful.
In this article, I will be speaking about Mr. Siegel’s philosophic thoughtn relation to contemporary Chinese music, specifically to a concert Ittended in New York City on October 25, 1998: the eighth annual “Premiereorks” concert given by the ensemble Music From China. It was one of theost engaging concerts of new music–West or East–I have ever heard.
Music Brings Together Logic and Emotion
I learned that successful art shows mind working at its best–its happiestnd most complete–because in every instance of true music, drama, cinema,ance, poetry, logic and feeling work as one.
Right from the start of the concert by Music From China, in Liu Limin’somposition, “Gou Gu Xian,” one could hear, through the actual organizationf the sounds, evidence for how this is so. The title, “Trigonometry,”s plainly mathematical, and reading the composer’s program notes, whichtate that his ideas “are based on trigonometric formulae,” one is awareow “new” this is from a Chinese point of view. It is so abstract, whileraditional Chinese music has been concrete and programmatic: not “Trigonometry,”ut “Snow on a Sunny Spring Day;” not “Fugue in G minor,” but “Ambush onen Sides!”
So Liu Limin, resident composer with the Qianjin Song and Dance Ensemblef the Shenyang Military Commission, is a modernist, with a liking forhe cool, logical purity of math. But, and this is the crucial point, nott the expense of feeling! His composition is filled with passionate colornd melody, and depends upon musical ideas derived from Beijing opera,hose characteristic, dramatic strokes of percussion are how “Gou Gu Xian”egins. This piece is, in fact, an “operatic scene,” with the erhu standingn for the human voice; most obviously so in the quiet, sustained dorianaria” which dominates the middle section of the work.
“Gou Gu Xian” is scored for traditional Chinese instruments: erhu, zheng,nd percussion. And the most striking moment comes in its closing sections the composer does something remarkable with his instrumentation. Suddenlyoth the zheng, and that passionate, singing erhu–with its soulful, humanuality–are transformed into noisy members of the percussion! Both arelayed with sharp strokes to the body, by the knuckles of the hand.
What just a moment before was gently lyric, now has become thrustingnd angularly rhythmic. Sound which stirred us deeply as bow met stringith trembling vibrato, now is sharp and decisive, having the crisp claritye associate with logic.
What does this mean? Is it just a matter of musical technique, of aomposer’s finesse with acoustics? Or does it say something important abouthat every individual human mind is after? I learned from Aesthetic Realism,t is the second. Every person wants to have both large emotion and clearhought, and in this music that is what the sounds express.
While I cannot say that “Gou Gu Xian” is a great composition–that itas beauty equal to that of the anonymous pipa masterpiece I mentionedefore, “Ambush on Ten Sides”– it is, nevertheless, music that matters.hough likely it was not fully conscious, I believe the composer’s purposen this music was kind; he was attempting to satisfy the whole self of person: our desire to see the world as having mathematically preciserder, and our equally great need to have passionate feeling–large, deep,nd surprising.
The Oneness of Sameness and Difference
The second composition in the Merkin Hall concert, “Three Voices,”y Dartmouth composer Kui Dong, was inspired, she told me, by the beautyf traditional Chinese heterophony. It is for erhu, zheng, and xiao. Especiallyn its opening and closing sections, we hear overlapping melodies in aonderful drama of sameness and difference. These melodies are variationsf each other, following the same general tonal path, lingering on theame pitches, but each doing so at its own pace and with its own rhythmicrofile.
Every technical accomplishment in music solves, in outline, a questioneople have in life. “There is not one thing music does,” Eli Siegel statedn his 1951 lecture, Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Music, which does notay something about how [a person] should organize himself too.” And whatui Dong has done with these instruments–through her fresh approach toeterophony–is, for example, what members of a family so much are hopingor: to agree and disagree in an honest, friendly manner; to get alongeeply with each other, and yet, at the very same time, be utterly individualnd free.
To give a sense of her technique: on page one of the score the xiaowiftly slides up a second from “G” to “A.” Meanwhile the zheng, with sharplyontrasting plucked sounds, likewise moves from “G” to “A,” but takes 15eparate notes to do so. It boldly sweeps through two octaves–down andp–before it finally meets the xiao at pitch.
They meet, but how different they are! The xiao continues by calmlyolding that “A” while the zheng makes the “A” pulsing drama of 32 rhythmicallyccelerating strokes!
In this work of Kui Dong, opposites which often are painfully at warn people’s lives–the desire for quiet and the desire for excitement–areoined. Moreover, the composer has brought together a sense of realitys spacious, through the open, vowel-like flute timbre of the xiao, andeality as sharply definite and specific, through the edgy timbre of theheng.
I have heard few composers use heterophony as sensitively and powerfullys does Kui Dong in “Three Voices.” And it is something new in music toear this venerable technique, so much associated with the open resonancef Chinese pentatonicism, joined to the more conflicted tonalities of modernestern chromaticism. It is an experience!
When I asked Susan Cheng, Executive Director of Music From China howhe thought Western and Chinese music most could add to each other, sheaid that Western music had already brought “a new dimension of form andf rhythm” to Chinese music and, she added, Western chromaticism is “verytimulating.”
Meanwhile, the “emphasis on melody” in China, and the “rich traditionf timbral variety in the instrumentation,” she said, had “a great beautynd a charm” which she believed Western musicians could benefit from. Isked her, did she think these new Chinese composers were trying to putpposites together? “Yes,” she said, “traditionally there is a separationf styles: the wu or martial style, and the wen or civil style. You canear in this concert how the composers are joining them. “Often,” she continued,you can hear wen and wu in the same measure.”
We spoke about how Daoism, with its thought about opposites, had affectedhinese music very much, including the composers on this concert, and alsoow Aesthetic Realism sees the opposites in a new and different way. Onearge reason for this is that no philosophy before has shown how a personan learn from the technique of art how to answer the immediate, urgentuestions of his or her life. A central text of Aesthetic Realism is Eliiegel’s book Self and World (Definition Press, New York, 1981).
Strength and Gentleness
I was very much taken by what Susan Cheng said about wen and wu. Asoth Mozart and Verdi show in Western music, when sounds which stand forhe gentle possibility of self, and sounds which are angry or militant,ind composition, it meets a great hope of every listener. People everywhere–ineijing and New York, in Taipei and San Francisco–need to learn from theeauty of music that they can be strong and kind, thoughtful and assertive,t the same time.
And these opposites do come together, at least at first, in Fang Man’sTo One Unnamed.” The music, written for a septet of traditional Chinesenstruments, began with a very taking interplay of gentle and ferociousounds. A subtle blending and shifting of highly varied timbres (somewhatike Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 orchestral piece “Summer Morning by the Lake”)s suddenly interrupted by thrusting shouts of “Ha!” in a manner far moreharacteristic of Japanese music than Chinese.
Fang Man is a student composer currently attending Beijing’s Centralonservatory. And he plainly is a talent who should be encouraged. However,s often happens when a composer is learning his craft, the early sectionsf a work–which frequently are the initial inspiration–are more successfulhan the later development. As this work goes on, it unfortunately loseshe very lovely finesse of its opening and becomes too insistently drum-like.o this listener’s ears, its extreme fortissimo conclusion was neitherdequately prepared for nor proportionate. Power was too separate fromentleness; assertiveness was not at one with thoughtfulness.
More About Wen and Wu, Quiet and Activity
Whenever we hear authentic music we are meeting honesty–philosophicruth–about the world itself. “In reality opposites are one,” Mr. Siegeltated, “art shows this.” In his essay which appeared in 1975 in an issuef The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known–the journal of the Aestheticealism Foundation–he wrote further: “What music has to say now, in aanner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structureersons could like; be stronger by…Music (like the other arts) is thisontinuous statement: the makeup, the structure of the world, while beingosmology or science, is also the structure of beauty itself; and of pastrt and contemporary art.”
A large desire to show reality as likeable because it is the onenessf opposites, I believe impelled Ruan Kunshen as he composed “Hoping forreams.” This lovely, atmospheric work–scored for xiao, pipa, and zheng–washe most traditional of all the music on the program. It was essentiallyn the wen style, and was soothingly pentatonic, with a sustained approacho melody very much in the Southern (Yunnan) manner. However, the compositionlso had edge. There were, throughout, unexpected shifts of meter and tempo,nd surprisingly angular displacements in the melody.
Hearing this music, with its honest relation of quiet and activity,f gentleness and sharpness, I thought of a section from Mr. Siegel’s great951 lecture, Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Painting, in which hepoke deeply about Chinese painting from ancient times to the Yuan anding Dynasties. He said this:
“Chinese artists felt that…one of the purposes of painting is to supply repose that ordinarily we don’t get. The human being is a very agitatednimal; some of his agitation he knows, some of it just gets him down.ut most of it he doesn’t know. The greatest agitation that he has whiche doesn’t know is, he isn’t doing exactly as he likes. So he’s after aepose that is based on truth, is based on what is so; and not a cheapepose. The Chinese artists felt that if they looked at things completely,hey would find some meaning that would bring about this factual quietude.”
That quality of “factual quietude” was very much present in Ruan Kunshen’somposition. And it stands for what Aesthetic Realism says people are mostearning for.
In 1977 Eli Siegel gave this three-part description of Aesthetic Realism:
One, man’s greatest, deepest desire is to like the world honestly.wo, the one way to like the world honestly, not as a conquest of one’swn, is to see the world as the aesthetic oneness of opposites. Three,he greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance orlory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is contempt.
Art Versus Contempt
Contempt is the feeling that if something or someone is different fromneself, it or he is an enemy one has to scorn, fight, and defeat; andhe fact that people hope to have that feeling of contempt has to be understood.ontempt must be criticized, if there is ever to be a firm foundation inhis world for peace, and enduring friendship between nations.
I speak now about two musical compositions, each of which, valuably,hows the friendliness of East and West. There is, I believe, a messageere of great importance to leaders and citizens both in my country, thenited States, and China.
Of the six composers represented on this concert, only Jason Kao Hwangs American-born. He is an improvisational violinist, with a backgroundn jazz. His quartet “Interior Migrations” is scored for erhu, pipa, violand bass clarinet, and was consciously designed to bring together Chinand America. There are even passages marked “blues.” In his moving programotes, he said he wanted to honor his parents’ experience as they arrivedn America in the 1940’s, to find a musical form which could make “tangible,uminous” the “energy of their thoughts” as they tried to relate theirirst culture to their new culture.
In its own way, “Interior Migrations,” whose title is a very takingelation of internal and external, thought and activity, was at once theost “advanced” composition of this concert and the most “traditional.”t had a very wide range of rhythms and modern harmonies; and yet it waslainly programmatic, with sections marked “hopeful,” “resolute, like aroad banner,” “plaintive,” and “murmuring peacefully.” Such section headingsould have made perfect sense to a pipa master of the Ming dynasty, evenf the actual music would have astonished him!
The concert concluded with a work by the Music Director of Music Fromhina, Zhou Long. It is his “Tales from the Cave,” a one-movement concertocored for percussion quartet of mixed Chinese and Western instrumentation,played by PULSE, the percussion component of the New Music Consort), andolo erhu, (doubling on banhu, pitched an octave higher.) Performing theolo part, with gusto and commanding technical precision, was the notedirtuoso, Wang Guowei, who is also Artistic Director of Music From China.
Zhou Long’s “Tales from the Cave” is a very fine piece of work. Likeany of his other works, “Tales from the Cave” reflects his interest inuddhism. Here, specifically, certain religious images are drawn from cavesear the ancient town of Dunhuang, situated along the Silk Road in westernhina. These images are pre-Tang dynasty, around the year 500.
To summarize a full concerto in a paragraph is something I am very reluctanto do. Let it suffice to say there are dance sections; of floating andhostly timbre; passages of lyrical folk song like melody; sudden, angular/8 patterns derived from Beijing opera (the renowned “horse’s leg” rhythm);riving, machine gun-like 16th note outbursts from the percussion; andn extended cadenza for erhu solo. And–with the exception of a coda withoesn’t seem to belong–it all holds together! Much diversity, but alsoonvincing unity. That is something people everywhere in the world lookor from a musical composition. It is also, as Eli Siegel explained–and am so happy as a man, a composer, and a teacher of music to have learned–whateople want from life: rich variety of experience, and a purpose in everythinge do that makes for integrity.
Now in their 15th year of existence, Music From China continues theirxciting, important work. They deserve, in my opinion, the interest andhe support of the entire “new music” community.Edward Green is on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundationnd is a professor at Manhattan School of Music.