Conference Agenda

“Picking Lotus Flowers at the Riverside” (Shejiang cai furong), composed in 1979, is celebrated as the first twelve-tone piece published in China, the initial attempt after the Cultural Revolution to communicate in a modernist musical language that had been explicitly banned. Nancy Rao (2002 and 2023), among others, discusses how the song’s tone row incorporates pentatonic intervals and chords, while Jin Xue (2004) and the composer himself (1982) illustrate its use of harmonic fluctuation patterns and tension designs according to Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition (1984).

While the serial/pentatonic perspective illuminates the melodic and harmonic structures of “Picking Lotus Flowers” and fluctuation patterns bring together its verticals into recognizable shapes, a third approach shows another way that the song’s pentatonic elements fit into arch shapes that delimit sections of the song’s form, the kinds of shapes for which Hindemith advocated in Craft. My presentation will be based on a set-class analysis of Luo’s song, grouping the SCs into referential collections and showing how the collections create arches that move from the most consonant, pentatonic, to more dissonant collections such as octatonic and chromatic, and back again at the cadence.

The first line of the song, mm. 5b-9, is emblematic. The prime form, P6, is presented in the voice, accompanied by its discrete hexachords as well as one complete row in m. 8. With respect to the first line's pitch-class sets and referential collections, it progresses from pentatonic subsets in mm. 5-7 to octatonic subsets in m. 8, and then back to mostly pentatonic at the cadence in m. 9. This arch parallels an arch-like Hindemithian tension design in the first line, and I will compare them in the paper, as well as discussing other shapes in the song created by collection progressions and tension designs.

“Picking Lotus Flowers” is well known for bringing together Chinese and Western theoretical approaches, but I will show that it also depends on referential collection progressions, a technique well known in Stravinsky’s music but also used in the music of Schoenberg and other early 20^th-century composers, to create its form and sense of harmonic succession.

This paper readdresses how musicians view sonata form: pitch-based parameters define the traditional functionally-tonal phenomenon, but examining non-pitched (or secondary) parameters creates space for other voices. An analytical approach based on secondary parameters offers the opportunity to triangulate analysis, genre, and Western and Eastern influences in the first movement of Isang Yun’s First Symphony and provide more equitable analytical space for each culture. To answer Rao’s 2023 call for analysis to sit at the juncture of multiple cultural discourses, I argue that secondary parameters reveal this movement’s participation in the sonata genre and allow space for Yun’s Korean influences to come to the fore.

Secondary parameters reveal this movement’s participation in the sonata genre. Wennerstrom 1967 and Howland 2015 offer precedents in parametric approaches to post-tonal music. The present approach privileges Western classical concerns because it focuses on changes that are consistently found in this repertoire: changes of instrumentation, time signature, dynamics, etc. It does not do justice to Yun’s Eastern influences, which been well established in prior scholarship (Feliciano 1983; Jung 2023; Kim 2004; McCredie, 2002; Rao 2023; Yun 1987/2008). The next task involves exploring the contents of each of these sonata zones for Korean musical aspects. Yun’s Hauptton technique, which imports this ornamented style into the Western classical culture, is vital for this purpose. Rao states that “vitality of tone is central to [the] concept of Hauptton," which reinforces my argument of a more culturally sensitive reading of Yun’s First Symphony.

Genre mediates the relationship between cultural categories and musical features in two primary ways: it gives the terms in which cultural discourse occurs while also illuminating the interaction between his Eastern and Western influence. The sonata genre dictates the context in which cultural overlap occurs between musical features by providing the movement’s form. Locating the first movement of Yun’s First Symphony within the sonata genre puts his use of Eastern compositional techniques into stark relief. Yun’s Hauptton and Hauptklang techniques and use of Korean musical styles account for key features of this’s movement sound. Addressing their presence more accurately reflects Yun’s musical priorities and persona.

The European circle of fifths has been traced back to the late seventeenth century, but something a lot like it has a much older history in East Asia. Dating back at least to the Yueshu yaolu of the seventh century, there is a long tradition in Chinese and Chinese-influenced music theories of representing the nearly-twelve fifths of an octave on circle diagrams. Because there were a great many other important “twelves” in Chinese cosmology, the twelve fifths became immediately associated with the so-called “Twelve Earthly Branches,” drawing them into a vast network of other meanings, connecting them to the nearly-twelve months of the year, the twelve double-hours of the day, the twelve primary directional compass points, and the traditional Five Elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water).

When Chinese language and culture were exported to other East Asian lands, this dense network of associations went along with it. In seventeenth-century Japan, a new period of peace and unity brought a new amount of leisure time to an expanding middle class, and this meant, for the first time, a profusion of written musical materials oriented towards people who were not elite court musicians. One such material was the Shichiku shoshin-shū (literally “collection for string and wind amateurs”), which features a diagram rather like the Yueshu’s: it too maps the twelve pitches to the Branches alongside a dense network of associations, much like that described above, relating each pitch to months, elements, etc.—but what is striking is that the associations do not match those in the Yueshu whatsoever. Its authors seem to have “reinvented the wheel” almost literally.

In this paper, by illustrating the process of this reinvention, I demonstrate both the strength of metaphorical axes like the Twelve Earthly Branches for creating such associative networks, as well as their fragility, which allows them to be broken down and overwritten easily when socioeconomic situations change: even as the surface of their classical symbolism remains strong, they can take on entirely new meanings divorced from their ancient ones, given a situation in which it makes sense for them to do so.