Conference Agenda

Studies by Kawabata (2023), Kok (2023, 2006), Wang (2009), Yoshihara (2007), Yang (2007), Melvin and Cai (2004), Hwang (2001), and Kraus (1989) have shed light on historical, social and political reasons underlying East, South and Southeast Asian [hereafter “Asian”] engagement with western classical music, emphasizing the roles of imperialism, modernization/ westernization, familial structure, the rise of affluent urban middle classes, and immigration. While this body of work illuminates the socio-cultural reasons underlying Asians’ pursuit of western classical music, it remains largely silent about their approaches to musical interpretation. Addressing this lacuna may help to mitigate a persistent stereotype. As Kawabata (2023), Kok (2023), Yoshihara (2007) and Yang (2007) have shown, many Asian musicians – including professionals – often face charges of having mastered only the technical skills of western classical performance while lacking “expressivity” in musical interpretation.

This paper offers a case study in how Asian musicians conceptualize interpreting music by focusing on Fou Ts’ong, who made history as the first Chinese (and non-white) to win prizes at the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in 1955. Fou went on to forge a long and distinguished international career. Based on a personal interview with Fou (2010), his comments in published media, and Fu Lei’s Family Letters – his extensive correspondence with his father, a noted literary scholar – I argue that the pianist’s sources of interpretive and aesthetic inspiration stemmed primarily from Chinese history and literature, as well as from ideals in Confucian philosophy. Fou spoke of affects in Chinese poetry that paralleled those in music by Mozart and Chopin, and of how Confucian maxims deepened and vivified his musical understanding. The transcultural quality evident in Fou’s ideas has also been found by those studying other Asian practitioners of western classical music. For example, many successful opera singers born and raised in South Korea are practicing Christians with ideals of vocality motivated by the notion of addressing God (Harkness 2014). I apply theories of transcultural performance (cf. Back 2015, Casey 2015, Sandoval -Sánchez 2001) to the above findings, to fuel a discourse of classical musical performance and interpretation beyond Eurocentric models.

Recent scholarship has confronted a tendency, stemming from the nineteenth century, to associate Haydn with a lack of emotional depth (Botstein 1997, Botstein 1998, Garratt 2005, Proksch 2015, Friedman 2021). Many pianists have also pushed for renewed recognition of Haydn’s keyboard music. András Schiff considers Haydn a composer who deserves more appreciation, lamenting that he has become “one of the worst clichés in classical music”, since many piano students tend to play Haydn’s piano sonatas as mere “introductions to piano recitals” (1999). More recently, Alfred Brendel urges us to step away from a view of Haydn, propagated by Hanslick and Adorno, as “a stepping stone for Mozart and Beethoven” (2010). Paul Lewis, too, declares that the time has come for Haydn’s music to be “as widely programmed as that of [Mozart and Beethoven]” (2021).

This paper contributes to the increasing interest in Haydn’s reception history, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century and onwards, and performance practice (Beghin 2015) by highlighting the approach taken by Chinese-British pianist and pedagogue Fou Ts’ong, who was among the earliest pianists to develop a deep interest in the composer’s keyboard music in the early 2000s. Fou performed all-Haydn recitals in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Taipei in 2009 (the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death), then recorded “Haydn: Piano Sonatas” (Meridian, 2011). I explore Fou’s understanding and interpretation of Haydn, and argue that Fou’s views strongly echoed eighteenth-century understandings. Fou perceived Haydn as a composer of (Kantian) genius – an idea espoused by Haydn’s biographer Georg August Griesinger in particular – and regarded the composer as a man of both sensibility and humour, as perceived by many of Haydn’s contemporaries, composers and critics alike. In contending that performing Haydn’s keyboard sonatas demands (intellectual) understanding and (sympathetic) imagination, qualities prioritized by eighteenth-century philosophers, Fou even suggested that a student’s musical instincts may be most effectively evaluated through their playing of Haydn’s sonatas.

There are many ways to contextualize Debussy. One can place him in a French musical lineage originating in Rameau, in impressionism alongside Ravel, in the fin-de-siècle world of symbolism alongside Maeterlinck, in the shadow of Wagnerism, or in the orientalism/exoticism prevalent at his time. This paper introduces a contrasting view offered by Fou Ts'ong, who placed Debussy in the realm of Chinese aesthetics.

While many Asian musicians have become prominent in western classical music, few tend to link their cultural backgrounds to matters of interpretation. Unusual in this regard, Fou consistently articulated a musical approach inspired by Chinese art and philosophy. He even went so far as to consider Debussy essentially a “Chinese" composer. This paper traces a complex chain of transculturative thought underlying Fou’s understanding of Debussy, which he summed up with the term Wuwo zhijing, a poetics of nature where the perspective of the subject seems to be completely absent. Remarkably, Fou came to it through the Chinese aesthetician Wang Guowei (1910), who was strongly influenced by the German philosopher Schopenhauer (1818), who was in turn indebted to the Buddhist doctrine of anattā or “no-self." A further point of this paper involves Fou’s recording of Debussy’s 12 Études (Meridian, 2002), which represents his most mature mastery of the latter's music and inspired admiration from fellow pianists such as Peter Frankl and François-Frédéric Guy. According to Fou (1996), the composer went from providing specific literary titles (Estampes and Images) to placing suggestive ones at the end (Préludes), to no title at all (Études). In Fou’s view (1996), this change echoes the hierarchy embedded in Chinese aesthetic thought that progresses from mimesis to evocative painting to the total abstraction of calligraphy.

This paper argues that, while fully aware of Debussy's immersion in European musical traditions, Fou’s approach opened up interpretive possibilities that were rooted in cross-cultural dialogues and revealed vistas formerly invisible in their respective Chinese and French contexts.

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