Ying String Quartet: Zhou Long and Globalization of the Ineffable

T  he standard three-work structure of most quartet recitals normally limits the performance of contemporary pieces to just one quartet. In our programming of contemporary Chinese-American works, we have decided to include shorter works. This enables our audiences to sample a broader range of living Chinese-American composers in a single concert, in the same way that the style of eating Chinese food called ‘dim sum’ involves a wide variety of bite-sized delicacies.”
  —  Phillip Ying.

The CD, ‘Dim Sum’, released on Telarc by the Ying String Quartet earlier this year is a wonderful collection of new Chinese-American chamber music miniatures.


The disc has twelve tracks:

• Zhou Long: Song of the Ch'in
  
• Chen Yi: Shuo
  
• Bright Sheng: Silent Temple II; Silent Temple IV
  
• Ge Gan-ru: Fu
  
• Vivian Fung: Pizzicato for String Quartet
  
• Lei Liang: Gobi Gloria
  
• Chou Wen-chung: Leggeriezza; Larghetto nostalgico
  
• Tan Dun: Drum and Gong; Cloudiness; Red Sona

Of these, ‘Song of the Ch'in’ is by far my favorite. Song of the Ch'in employs string quartet to emulate the seven-stringed Ch'in. As such, the four voices are immersed in a sort of intimate collectivism, a ‘post-deconstructionist’ realism, rather than conventional quartet-like inter-part dialogues. The effect is not symphonically ‘sectional’ as much as cohesive or unified; expressing ‘interior’ views of a collective voice consisting of the four individual voices that comprise the one collective ‘self’. Through its 8’30’’ length, it’s predominantly contemplative and meditative, but its middle section does have louder dynamics and a more emphatic pulse and deconstructionist parrying among the parts, still with a pervading sense of unity and interiority.


Zhou Long, born in Beijing in 1953, is renowned for pioneering the fusion of idiomatic sounds and techniques of traditional Chinese music to modern Western instruments and ensembles. Dr. Zhou’s compositions span many different genres, from solo instrumental and chamber ensemble pieces, to orchestral works. His orchestrations combine traditional Chinese instruments with western instrumentation. In 2003 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A United States citizen since 1999, Zhou Long is married to composer-violinist Chen Yi. Both are faculty members at the UMKC Conservatory.


The Ch'in (guqin) has naturally quiet dynamics. It has a range of about four octaves, with its lowest pitch two octaves below middle C, the same as the lowest note on the cello’s open C string. Sounds are produced by plucking open strings, stopped strings, and harmonics.


Here’s the opening section:

    [50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Zhou Long, Song of the Ch'in, 1.4MB MP3]

And another clip here, at the end of the piece:

    [50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Zhou Long, Song of the Ch'in, 1.4MB MP3]

The gliss, pizzicato and snap pizzicato, tremolando, battuto, and other effects in the Zhou Long piece are beautiful and effective. Glisses on ch'in evoke cello effects in the low register with plenty of harmonics up in to the nether regions of the violin’s range. But here, in the Ying Quartet’s performance, violinistic technic is not some pale emulation of ch'in coloration and textures; the quartet’s execution instead conveys a consistent, unquestionable naturalness. The Yings are entirely at-home and at-ease in the material they are performing. They inhabit the pieces convincingly—they hungrily appropriate them and intently express the ‘interiority’ of the perspective they share in ensemble, from inside the work. This excellent recording must become an icon for how this can be done—an example that others can follow.

The pieces on this CD are innovative in testing the extent to which the string quartet idiom is malleable. With the long history and extensive literature that exists for it, string quartet orchestration does come with more expectations or interpretive ‘baggage’ than most other forms.

But these composers’ pieces all succeed as honest, fresh and forthright expressions, and the Yings perform them without a ‘safety net’. What I mean to say is that it is not so much an embodiment of programming bravery as a thorough-going demonstration of genuine, honest emotion. And an invitation to wonderment—honest wonderment at the world and the beauty that’s in it—this is vividly conveyed, especially in the Zhou piece. Through music, Zhou shows that the world is intelligible—not benevolent or hostile or necessarily value-laden, or conclusory, or deistic; but intelligible and meaning-ful—yet there arises the ineffable, eternal question how this could be so.

G  ifting appropriation is the positive dimension of the event, in which the thing itself always escapes [‘La chose même se dérobe toujours’], leaving in its wake, behind itself (and, hence, around us) a trail of what might constitute our environing world. This fugal movement, the flight of the thing itself, could be interpreted, in the first place, as its flight from itself (‘La chose’ flees from ‘le même’; it subtracts itself from its sameness, self-coincidence, or identity with itself) and, equally, as an instant of the thing’s self-appropriation and self-realization. More interestingly still, when it is most itself in the interior unfolding of its otherness and différance.”
  —  Michael Marder, Derrida and Différance of the Real.

This is just one piece on this beautiful CD, the Zhou Long ch'in piece. It is transcendent and accessible, and in the Yings’ hands it does these amazing, lasting, beautiful things. That’s something that any audience—even an unprepared one—can understand and enjoy and find meaningful.

Like a dim sum meal, I recommend that you savor each piece, with a gap in between. The textures and styles and meanings of these 12 tracks are widely varied, and proceeding through them pell mell would be the wrong thing to do. Any of these would make a congenial element of a chamber music concert program. I hope that more quartets choose to incorporate these into their performance repertoire.

• Ying String Quartet
  
• Zhou Long page at UMKC Conservatory
  
• Zhou Long page at Oxford University Press
  
• Strange P, Strange A. The Contemporary Violin: Extended Performance Techniques. Scarecrow, 2001.
  
• DSM. Trio Con Brio: Individualism-Collectivism in Ensemble. CMT blog, 04-FEB-2008.
  
• North American Ch'in Association
  
• London Ch'in Society
  
• New York Ch'in Society
  
• Ying Quartet. Zhou: Song of the Ch'in. (Telarc, 2008.)
  
• Olkowski D, Morley J, eds Merleau-Ponty: Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World. SUNY, 1999.
  
• Beijing Olympics website