jwilzewske: ying quartet

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Recombinant Urbanism of Chou Wen-Chung

O ne must search beyond the procedures of a musical practice, discern its original aesthetic commitments, and trace how its tradition has evolved. If one is blessed with a cross-cultural heritage, one must then regard it as a privilege and obligation to commit oneself to the search in both practices.”
— Chou Wen-chung.

The Olympics-related immersion in all things Chinese has been welcome. While commuting to and from work this week I have continued to listen and re-listen to the pieces on the Ying Quartet’s new Dim Sum CD. While the acoustics of a car’s interior are far from ideal for listening to such delicate music, there is a certain poetic rightness in hearing deeply ‘architectural’ compositions while driving through urban spaces, amongst urban traffic and urban pedestrians.

Especially the Chou pieces. With divisi violins and viola on an inner part and cello on a bass line, the balance is critical. The textures imply enclosedness of human spaces, proximity to other individuals, pathways between individuals, purposeful busy-ness of individuals, storeys of office buildings filled with people interacting and not interacting, and contrasts with the non-enclosedness of natural spaces upon which the human spaces abut.

Chou has ‘wiggling’ pitch-bending figures that have a psychological effect of drawing attention to the large amount of pitch-space (or, conversely, the lack of it) that’s available for the part(s) to move in. Some parts wiggle more, and arrogate more space to themselves. Other parts wiggle less, either by choice or because of constraints that arise because of the other wiggling selves.

The voice-leading in the Chou pieces sometimes produces overlapping ascents and descents. There is a consequent ambiguity to the ear, as each voice progresses into and amongst the other voices. What time and what culture, exactly, is this ‘Larghetto nostalgico’ nostalgic for? Is it a hindsighted nostalgia, or was this composition instead premonitory (‘future nostalgia’) for a time and culture that has now arrived?

Voice-leading, overlapping and non-overlapping

The process for Chou’s ‘fusion’ or, as he calls it, ‘re-merger’ of the musics of the East and the West is one of transformation and recombination—a recombinant urbanism. The orchestration and pitch organization of Chou’s string quartet writing involve recombinant Chinese pentatonic and modal structures and Western chromaticism.

We get segmentations of the octave into polysemous ‘cells’, juxtaposed intervals evoking the ‘yin-yang’ dualism that some of Chou’s essays and scholarly articles refer to.

Chou’s melodic phrases are less melodies than a kind of ambience... Are these really characteristic of traditional Chinese music, or are they Chou confabulating a world that never was? I stop at a stop-light and a crowd of people walks in front of my car in the cross-walk. From the harried looks on their faces, they look like they badly need the excellent story-telling of Chou Wen-chung. The ambience of melodies-that-are-not-melodies would do them good.

In order to convey the sonic and instrumental impressions he intends to create, sometimes Chou appends a number of terms such as ‘crystal,’ ‘liquid,’ ‘water burbling,’ ‘leaves rustling,’ ‘whistling’, and ‘air moving’ to his scores. Atoms form molecules, molecules condense into bulk phases of matter, like liquids or solids or gases. Clumps of matter merge and re-merge. People likewise. This is the collectivistic, sonic, social-natural world according to Chou Wen-chung.

Chou-esque ‘re-merging’ of droplet individuals into collective pool

I am concerned with single tones as musical entities, each endowed with nature by its own acoustic attributes and expressive potential. It is these microcosmic entities in a continual and multi-leveled transformation and interaction that produce the coherent flow of sonic events that we call a composition.”
— Chou Wen-chung.

Chou creates a mysterious atmosphere that depicts the “veiled and fractured impression of an ancient city.” Here is a clip, to illustrate the texture and atmospherics that I am describing above:

[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Chou Wen-Chung, Larghetto Nostalgico, 1.4MB MP3]

And here is another clip:

[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Chou Wen-Chung, Leggeriezza, 1.4MB MP3]

What we get is Chou’s essay on recombinant cultural patterns: reinterpretations of traditional living and of new ways of living in the new China. The voice-leading suggests an ‘anthroposphere’ in which people now live in extensively 3-dimensional spaces, almost like fish or birds have done since time immemorial. The ‘architecture’ of his music evokes a ‘hyperarchitecture’ of public and private space—revealing simultaneous increases in the density of the urban fabric by allowing bigger and higher structures and decreases in the density by enforced public (common) space. Chou carves holes in the existing urban fabrics, by digging underground or swooping to above-ground elevations. He extends the conventional boundaries of the built fabrics. The public plane is extended both above-ground and below-ground—creating a public piano nobile (ground-floor atrium or mall or commons) bringing the public into these spaces by operations on the z-axis (pitch excursions)—he creates new qualitative spatial ‘volumes’.

As I have listened and listened to these pieces, I begin to recognize the importance of spaces that are indeterminate—in-between spaces; left-behind previous motifs and developments; anticipated new motifs and developments only hinted at; unintentional motifs whose future or endorsement (by Chou) is unclear. I think of myself as residing in the virtual spaces that Chou creates (and the Yings re-create); these are beautiful places I would want to live. This is an ethical, thoughtful, recombinant urban society in which anyone would like to be a member, no matter how tenuous or indeterminate our status and rights and future might be. To say our future is indeterminate is, after all, only to confess what has been true for humans always. Please give this Ying Quartet CD a listen if you have not already done so. I am sure you will like it.

Chou Wen-chung was born in Yantai and emigrated in 1946 to the U.S. to train with Edgard Varèse. Chou is noted especially for his trans-cultural East-West idioms, with respect for both cultures. His admiration for the art of calligraphy parallels his sense of music’s textual and architectural aspects. He is Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, where he is also Director of the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange. Over the years Chou’s engaging teaching style, combined with his brilliant and infectious enthusiasm, have given impetus to many, many students. For example, composers Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Tan Dun, Chinary Ung, Ge Gan-ru, Bright Sheng, and Jing Jing Luo all received part of their training under Chou.

T he architectural approach offered by Jencks’s postmodernism did indeed seduce many architects, as it provided a sense of liberation against modernism’s over-coded design process, its formalism, austerity, and rationality... However, most postmodern projects deteriorated into theme-parkism... The demise of Jencks’s postmodernism has provided new intellectual space for the repositioning of [architectural] theories, particularly those generated with Europe—such as second-modernism, hyper-modernism, and super-modernism. These can now be viewed in the context of the emergence of increasingly important discourses... particularly in the dynamic cities of the East Asian region.”
— William Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism, pp. 69-70.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

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.