A new kind of music: Chen Xiaoyong.

On Saturday night, I attended my second HKPO concert of the season. It was full of surprises. But they were all pleasant surprises. I discovered a new Chinese composer and ...a new Chinese pianist! The "new" Chinese composer was Chen Xiaoyong. The "new" Chinese pianist was Chen Jie. The evening's programme consisted of two lighter pieces and two bigger works. And there was an encore piece. For the first half of the evening, we had Interlaced Landscapes by Chen Xiaoyong and Reflection of the Moon on Erquan and then the Yellow River Piano Concerto by Hua Yan-Jun and arranged by Yin Cheng-zong, Liu Zhuang, Chu Wang-hua, Sheng Li-hong, Shi Shu-cheng and Xu Fei-xing. For the second half, we had Symphony No. 9 in E mior , Op 95 by Dvorak.

Chen Xiaoyong (b 1955) first studied violin and then composition at the Central Conservatory in 1980 to 1985, then debuted in Europe with  his 1st String Quartet in 1987 at the Donaueschingen Music Day and the same year started to work as a music instructor at the Asia-Africa Institute of the Hamburgh University.In 1989, furthered  his studies with György Ligeti at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Hamburg and is now a freelance composer there. In 2005, he became a member of the Freie Akademie der Kunste and the following year became a professor at the Shanghai Consevatory. He taught from time to time in Hong Kong ,Taiwan and China. In 1992 he premiered his orchestral work DYEH commissioned by the Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden and in the same year, won the prize for composition  of West German Radio's Young Composers' Forum for his composition "YÜN" for soprano and 11 instrumentalists, perfromed by Peter Eötvös' Ensemble Modern first in Cologne, then in Leipzig and Dresden. He wrote three more commissioned work Warp (1994), Evapora (1996) and Invisible Landscapes (1998) for the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in Amsterdam and Vienna. The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie produced the portrait CD entitled Invisible Landscapes in 1999 in cooperation with Radio Bremen which won the highest honour in all five quality categories in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The work which the HKPO performed Interlaced Landscapes was composed by him in 1999, commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the following year, he wrote Fusion for the cellist Yo-Yo Ma for his Silk Road Project. The composition XI-FUSION III for ensemble was given its world premiere as a commission from the Asia-Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg in June 2002. Chen has worked with numerous orchestras and ensembles including the Southwest Radio Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, the KBS Symphony Orchestra Seoul, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, State Philharmonic Orchestra Hamburg, National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, Gulbenkian Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble 2e2m Paris, Ensemble,Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam, Silk Road Ensemble New York, Auryn Quartet, Arditti String Quartet, Kairos Quartet, etc. He is now working on several commissioned works for the ensemble acht (Hamburg), Art Point/ensemble Musica Temporale (Dresden), Norrkörrping Symphony Orchestra (Sweden), RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, etc. He received the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Prize in Munich in 1993 and the Bach Prize Stipend of the Hansestadt Hamburg in 1995. Since 2006, he was a professor of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory and a composer in residence of Danube U of Austria since 2009.

According to the programme notes, he has some very special views about composition: "What esepcially fascinates me about a sound body's vibrations is the natural development of its individuals partials. This pehnomenon becomes even more interesting when the sound body produces not one, but several fundamental tones, the partials of which vibrate in asymetrical proportion and melting into each other. Starting from here, through the new ordering of the individual tones, I try to form a sound texture that had previously existed only in my imagination. For me, listening to music is not limited to the audible tones. Inaudible elements can change in certain relationships to each other, thus gaining even more meaning than audible ones. By reducing the mateiral, I would like to enable the listener to contact and sense his own imagination, thereby experiencing the sound in an individual way." If he were not a composer, I could easily have thought that he was a hi fi nut. He is concerned more with the quality and texture of sound than the quality of music, understood in the conventional sense, just like some of my hi fi friends.

Interlaced Landscapes was inspired the scenery described by a Tsing poet  Chen TaiCheung in his s poem Mounting Little Solo Hill 登小孤山

蜀江萬里浮鴻濛  洞庭勢挾彭蠡雄 小孤突起插天半 百川泜柱為之東 磴道虛無動寒色 漁舟一葉傍絕壁

蛟鼉正畫吼風霾 泱漭孤雲天地白 參差樓觀麗朝霞 鏽鞶珠箔顏如花 隱岩咫尺蓄雷雨 怪樹千歲盤龍蛇

吳楚雄關此第一 析戟沉沙莾蕭瑟 凴欄决眥倚半酣 盡卷乾坤入詩筆 隔江清霞有彭郎 銀河帶水遙相望

急趁南風過馬當。

Mammoth mist drifting over ten thousand miles of the Szechuan River

The Tung Ting Lake appearing magnificent with the Peng Yung

Little Solo rising abruptly to stab half the sky

A hundred rivers dashing against rock pillars going east

the mountain paths silently stirring cold colors 

A fishing boat coasting close to a cliff

Sea serpents drawing roaring storm clouds

Beads of the embroidered sequined belt blooming like flowers

A thunderstorm brewing beneath shadowy rocks close by

Snakes and dragons entangling a queer thousand-year-old tree

The first amongst the giant gates of Wu and Chor

Buried sand speared by waves into shivering confusion 

Leaning by the bannister with half drunken eyes

Rolling everything onto the paper with a poetic brush

A fisherman opposite the river in the clear morning cloud

The Milky Way guiding the waters to gaze at each other in the distance

Hearing the boatman's vanishing voice whilst waving hands

Horse crossing as quickly as the South wind.

In line with his composition philosophy, the piece was written using contemporary techniques, a bit cold, abrupt, distant, alienated, with isolated notes which only come together in unison from time to time and then quickly withdrawing each into themselves again. It is no longer the concerted sound of the 19th or early 20th century music which despite occasional or even deliberate dissonance were still joined by themes and motifs which were introduced, developed, repeated with slight variations by different sections of the orchestra in turn, interwoven into overall patterns, with some of the motifs repeated in different movements or joined by refrains. The dissonance were there only to emphasize, by acting as contrast, only to add to the dramatic tension of the music. Here, the notes come together too, but only sporadically but each section of the orchestra are merely concerned about their own fundamental tones of the slow and long notes which they are producing and their harmonics or what Chen calls the "partials", It almost sounded as if the winds, the strings are the music servants of the master percussive instruments, putting in appearances only for the purposes of providing a background either to break the monotony of the single but long notes produced at rhythmic intervals by the drums, timanis and to provide a bit of color to the principal actors of the piece, the different kinds of Chinese drums, bass drums, tams tams, timpanis, tom toms, kettle drums, the triangles, suspended cymbals, wood blocks, temple blocks etc.  The "music" is carried mainly by the different rhythms of the percussion, sometimes big and heavy, sometimes light and fast, sometimes long and hesitant, sometimes quick and decisive, with ample time for the harmonics of the fundamental tones of each individual heavy hit to linger in the air and to blend into the fundamental notes of the next hit etc. I did not actually count. There must have been more than 10 percussive instruments used in the piece. It sounded to my ears more an experiment or exploration of the blending of the harmonics of the various tones of the percussive insruments than a coherent piece of music in the traditional sense. The "music" is not propelled by melody, only certain "motifs". I am not sure what exactly the composer is trying to do. Whatever it is that he is attempting to achieve in this piece, I think one of the motifs must be the thundering sound of the waves as they pour through the steep gorges, hitting against the sharper edges of various rocks, creating sprays (depicted perhaps by the partials) sparkling at dawn, as seen through the half drunken eyes of the poet,  as they plunge forward downstream, with the strings depicting the clouds and the sky described in the poem, the force of the waves contrasted with the serenity of the lone boat which the poet saw on the opposite bank, depicted by quiet sounds or even silence.There were bigger waves and smaller waves and those in between, hence the use of different types of drums. I can never forget my shock when the piece opened. There were two huge bangs of the drums  I nearly fell out from my seat! My friends said they did not know what the composer was doing. I said I was not sure either. But I thought I had some inkling. So I found the piece slightly more meaningful than they did. But the above are merely my personal impressions.

When I was listening to the piece, my mind was searching constantly for comparisons. I can recall the way Arvo Pärt wrote his music, building up the sound from massed strings, using them to produce one note at a time and then piling up the sound into layers, as if the whole orchestra were a giant organ. Pärt, too would produce some repeated steady notes which he would seek to vary by adding more and more sound to them. I suppose that's what happens when you hear a completely new piece of music composed in an unfamiliar style. You got to rely upon the store of your own past listening experience and try your best to make sense of what you are listening for the first time by matching  it against the patterns of sounds you have in your musical memory godown  It forces you to think instead of sitting there like a couch potato, completely unlike listening to music which you may have heard dozens of times. To me, it is always interesting to hear something new or something old done in a new way. I shall have to leave the second type of novelty to my next blog. This blog is getting too long already.