China and the West—The Birth of a New Music

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Notes

[1] Act II, sc.1; lines 253 – 254.

[2] Not that there were no earlier forays. For example, Debussy and Messiaen were affected by gamelan. Yet no sustained new genre of music emerged from their encounter with Java and Bali. One can also question the historical viability of the encounter (in the 1960s) of Indian music and Western music—both ‘pop’ and ‘classical’. Did an unbroken river of musical expression arise from the experiments of Ravi Shankar, and others? It seems not. Lovely things, but more like isolated lakes in a musical landscape than a surging river. Many would argue this has not been the case for the interplay of Japan and the West; this will be a matter for future historians to evaluate. And were this a different kind of volume, it could easily be titled East Asia and the West—The Birth of a New Music, or even, considering a master like Chinary Ung of Cambodia, Asia and the West (etc.). Still, disliking cowardly musicology, I will put my cards on the table and say that it appears that at this moment in history (and by ‘this moment’, I mean the last twenty years or so) there is far more vibrant energy, more creative momentum, more ‘life’ in the intersection of Chinese and Western musical principles than in the junction of any other aspect of Asia and the West. Moreover, it appears to be growing in significance. Where a composer like Chou Wen-chung was (more or less) alone in the 1960s as an advocate for the conjunction of traditional Chinese musical values and the experimental modernism of the West, there are now at least a dozen composers of worldwide reputation working in that territory. In the 1960s, by contrast, Tōru Takemitsu had many colleagues exploring the parallel relation from a Japanese perspective. The situation today seems very different. It is hard to think of composers now dedicated to the junction of Japan and the avant-garde West who possess an international stature similar to that held by Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi or Bright Sheng—to present only the most obvious names.

[3] In Sheldon Kranz (Ed.), Aesthetic Realism: We have been there – Six artists on the Siegel theory of opposites (p. 111). New York: Definition Press, 1969.

[4] Zhifou is the ancient name of modern-day Yantai ().