| Abstract Western Compositional Techniques in Chen Yi’s Duo Ye:
A Performer’s Perspective
During the past fifty years, many Chinese and other Asian composers have incorporated Western compositional techniques along with their own musical heritages in their works. As non-Western elements become increasingly important in contemporary music, performers are faced with greater challenges of interpretation. Although there is nothing new about music containing a wealth of diverse cultural influences, learning such a piece imposes a responsibility upon the performer to acquaint himself with a variety of historical and sociological issues. The existing scholarship on such works is often too technical or too superficial to provide a performer with practical interpretive information. To aid in the dissemination of these compositions, there is a need for methods of analysis which are performer-friendly yet will also reveal the core musical elements in the amalgamation of Western compositional techniques and Chinese or other Asian aesthetics. Duo Ye by Chen Yi clearly demonstrates this combination of influences. A lecture-recital will examine the Western compositional techniques of Duo Ye, including the motivic development, non-functional harmonies, and twelve-tone procedures that Chen Yi has used to capture the characteristics of a Chinese traditional folk song and dance form. In particular, the ways these devices unfold on the piano—an emblematically Western instrument—will be correlated with Chinese performance traditions. While the main objective of the presentation is to address the particularities of Chen Yi‘s work in Duo Ye, the approaches taken can be extended in a variety of ways to aid in the performance of music deriving from multiple cultural backgrounds. |
