Conference Agenda

This paper compares meter in Western practice with that of Mandarin Chinese mountain songs, a major vocal genre still widely performed in modern China. I introduce the phenomenon of metrical flexibility (in which meter does not entail a regular pattern of downbeats) and highlight differences between music cultures to show how musical intuitions are often culturally contingent. In so doing, I describe a new approach to perceiving metric syntax and diversify methods of listening by incorporating Chinese music theory and performance practice.

Most research on post-tonal pieces by Chinese contemporary composers has focused on exploration of Chinese melodic and rhythmic elements, and Chinese aesthetics. One Yun Sharing Three-Gong Systems is the only piece known to me that reflects a music theory concept well known in China. This piece combines Luo’s long-term research and practice of the Chinese modal system with the 12-tone method. In this paper, I combine analytical methodology from Chinese and Western music theory to offer a perspective on contemporary Chinese musical works.

In 1986, the concept of One Yun Sharing Three Gong-Systems was proposed by Xiangpeng Huang. According to this concept, the Chinese modal system can be divided into a three-leveled hierarchy. The first level is Yun, which is a septachord structure resulting from stacking fifths or fourths. The second level is the Gong system, which is an interval structure, similar to the Western notion of key. There are three Gong systems in a Yun. The third level is Diao, similar to the Western notion of pentatonic, six-note, or diatonic scale.

Luo applied the concept of complementary set-classes in this ensemble piece together with the concept of One Yun Sharing three Gong Systems. He divided the 12 tones into two set-classes 5-35 (02479) and 7-35 (013568T). 5-35 is mainly used as a pentatonic scale in the harp to provide a rhythmic background, while 7-35 is mainly used as a seven-tone scale in flute and viola voices. The seven-tone scale 7-35 can be treated as belonging to C, G, and F gong systems, making this 12-tone piece a multi-tonal piece from the Chinese modal system perspective.

Chinese elements in this piece are not just superficial imitations of rhythmic patterns and tunes in Chinese folk songs whose structures are based on Western music theory. Instead, Zhongrong Luo illustrated Chinese elements from a deeper perspective. Studying Luo’s piece as a blending of Chinese traditional and Western 12-tone strategies provides us a new way to analyze Chinese contemporary work, and a way to understand Zhongrong Luo’s style more completely.

YAO Chen’s Pipa Plays Opera (2015) presents a staged chamber work alternating sections between traditional Chinese Kunqü opera stage-speech and a plucked instrument pipa. The piece contains two scenes set on acts from the Chinese classic play The Romance of the Western Chamber. Each scene is a self-standing monologue assigned to one of the two Kunqü singers. YAO asserts a unique twist on our perception of how the singers deliver their texts. Instead of singing, they declaim the lyrics adapted from the play, an important Kunqü technique called 念白 (stage-speech) similar to the Western recitative but without accompaniment and prescriptive notation.

To realize the stage-speech, the singer begins by analyzing the sound of each Chinese character according to the regulations of vocalization based on an artificial language invented for Kunqü. They define the pitch level and linguistic tonal inflection of a character. Considering textual syntax and structure, the singer combines a few characters to form a word, whose lexical tone presents a conjugated contour joined by several tones, forming a melodious shape. Then, a complete spoken verse, which is composed of words, is morphed musically into a speech melody chained by a succession of tuneful contours. Thus, the Kunqü stage-speech is a highly stylized, sophisticated, and tasteful interpretation of declamation.

Yet, as part of a composition, how do we expand our literacy to appreciate the speech melodies in YAO’s work? Since they are defined by their constituent contours outlined by lexical tones, we can consider them contextually as: How do the speech contours transform from one to another along a continuum, rather than leaps among different plateaus? And how is this gradual transforming process in lockstep with the narrative of the play? I employ Wu 2019’s contour network to examine the nested relationships among the stage-speech contours in Scene II “The Sentiment of the Zither.” My analysis finds that the speech contours gradually change their guises along a continuum within the network to closely reflect the zither’s various sounds depicted in the text. This framework serves as a means for binding contours into families of affinity moving the narrative forward.