China and the West Saffle, Michael, Yang, Hon-Lun Published by University of Michigan Press Saffle, Michael & Yang, Hon-Lun. China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/50522 Access provided at 11 Apr 2019 23:57 GMT with no institutional affiliation Revised Pages Spanning the Timbral Divide Insiders, Outsiders, and Novelty in Chinese- Western Fusion Concertos John Winzenburg The same timbral orgy that transports this listener with a rush of ecstasy strikes another as a painful attack on the ears.1 —Alfred Kauders, 1907 When Chinese composer GAO Weijie wrote Dreams of Meeting in 1993, it was not by coincidence that he scored the work for solo dizi (Chinese bam- boo flute), Western flute, and orchestra or that he quoted extensively from Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun from a century earlier. Gao had received separate requests from soloists in China and France for new com- positions, and he decided to use their contrasting national identities to cre- ate a metaphor of superimposed sonic worlds contained within the concerto framework. The composer de- emphasized Debussy’s programmatic setting of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem and focused, instead, on the transnational im- portance of tone colors as a structural element. In this process, he created a dialogue of timbres among the solo instruments and between soloists and orchestra. In Gao’s conception, these timbres could only interact within “a dreamy experience of the cultural encounter between China and the West”2 (see example 1). Gao’s mystical description reveals both illusory and real elements in his cross- cultural timbral encounter. The interplay of Western flute and Chinese dizi in a solo concerto is only “fantastic” when one insists on perpetuating older— and, in many ways, obsolete— cultural markers in creating musical imagery.3 Gao’s piece exemplifies the growing body of compositions in which Chinese and Western musical elements overlap. Within this repertory, an 186 Revised Pages Spanning the Timbral Divide 187 Example 1: Gao Weijie, Dreams of Meeting (缘梦), measures 18– 22 emerging subgenre of over four hundred “fusion concertos” for Chinese solo instrument and Western orchestra is noteworthy because it highlights tim- bral combinations rarely, if ever, heard during Debussy’s lifetime.4 Theodor Adorno has shown how newness of timbral events in musical compositions can reflect the social milieu of an era.5 Adorno concentrated on the orchestral works of Gustav Mahler, a contemporary of Debussy’s, in whose music novel timbral scoring assumes a deeper structural significance and reflects notions of the cultural “outsider” within fin de siècle Europe. Adorno also identified a dialectical balance between surface and depth, in which, as recounted by John Sheinbaum, “timbre retains something of its outsider status, marked as different, even as it functions as an insider.”6 Ac- cording to Sheinbaum, this dialectic has wider sociocultural implications. Sheinbaum states that “Adorno’s discussions of timbre and structure easily Revised Pages 188 china and the west map onto (and represent a critique of ) important aspects of the fin de siècle, namely the notion that a formerly pure and whole society was threatened by intrusions of sinister, suspect cultural outsiders.”7 Timbral exploration in more recent works, including Gao’s, exhibits similar metaphorical implications in the form of Chinese- Western cultural interplay. An entire subgenre of late twentieth- century Chinese- Western fu- sion concertos embodies an increasing tension between insiders and outsid- ers in terms of cultural- timbral novelty. This occurs metaphorically when the Western concerto is infused with Eastern elements, seemingly reflecting a new sociohistorical reality. The present essay begins by summarizing the evolution of the Western orchestra through the late nineteenth century. It continues with an examination of nonstandardized orchestral tone colors explored by both Easterners and Westerners, in order to show how an aes- thetic tension between timbral insiders and outsiders has been established and managed. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of ways in which once merely “novel” Chinese timbres have become cross- cultural markers in fu- sion concertos, specifically in terms of the redistribution of orchestral fami- lies, greater instrumental diversity, and novel combinations of individual and ensemble sounds. By strengthening its position as “timbral outsider” in the Western concerto tradition, the collective body of Chinese instruments has claimed an insider’s position within the repertory of fusion concertos. This transformation of timbral possibilities represents an important step toward a new Chinese- Western cultural balance. Timbre and the Orchestral Trajectory: Galvanizing the Inside- Outside Polarity In the physical sense, timbre refers to the distinguishing character of a sound, apart from, but in relation to, its pitch, volume or intensity, and du- ration, as perceived in terms of the relative strengths of its harmonics, the rise and decay times of its component partials, and the possible presence within it of inharmonic components. However, there is an increasing aware- ness of the perceptual shaping of timbres, in terms of either the physical properties of individual instruments or other, nonphysical properties that somehow mold our timbral cognition. “The brain’s auditory mechanisms,” Harold Fiske maintains, Revised Pages Spanning the Timbral Divide 189 convert sound vibrations into chemic- electrical signals and analyze these for interpretable cues. How the brain identifies these cues is both ge- netically determined (e.g., pitch extraction) and culturally determined (e.g., deciding whether the signal is speech-i ntended, music- intended, or noise). An auditory signal is necessary, but not sufficient, for directing musical understanding.8 In relation to this cognitive process, Cornelia Fales argues that “perceived timbre exists in a very real sense only in the mind of the listener, not in the objective world.”9 At one level, humans perceive timbre in relation to pitch, intensity, and duration as these factors interact with other sonic elements— content (individual notes), harmony, melody, rhythm, texture, and so on. This mode of perception has been fundamental to the musical practices in every civilization. Among the various world traditions, Western instrumental music has exhibited a marked trajectory of timbral preferences over the past four centuries.10 This has involved standardization with a view toward greater range and projection, regulated tuning, and homogeneous yet flexible func- tionality. Out of this general development, the Western orchestra emerged in the late seventeenth century as a preeminent ensemble built around the violin family. Perhaps the most distinctive of the violin’s attributes was its perceived versatility, especially in view of its sustainable tone, immediately adjustable pitch, and strong sonority— a combination that enables it both to blend with and to stand apart from other instruments.11 All this made the violin suitable for large theatrical ensembles and concert performance as both a solo and sectional instrument; it also formed the basis for the Italian “singing allegro,” which became the ideal orchestral sound precisely because of the perception that “no other instrument [than the violin] could imitate the expressive nuances of the human voice so closely.”12 As the orchestra expanded during the eighteenth century and incorpo- rated its divisions into string, woodwind, brass, and percussion sections, orchestral timbres acquired a greater variety of musical roles. This variety was influenced by seventeenth- century and early eighteenth- century prac- tices in which nonstringed instruments were primarily employed to color and punctuate string sounds.13 During the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the increasingly expressive character of musical ideas called for timbral as well as melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic representations. By the Revised Pages 190 china and the west late Romantic era, the orchestra had grown to its maximum “standard” size: it featured large string sections; winds and brasses in threes and fours; a percussion battery that included cymbals, chimes, and xylophones; harps; and, very occasionally, pianos or organs. This instrumental template became sacrosanct— save, perhaps, for occasional noisemakers (the wind machine identified in the score for Richard Strauss’sDon Quixote is one example). As the Romantic era gave way to modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the exploration of orchestral tone colors became a musi- cal goal unto itself. Mahler and Debussy, for example, incited controversy when they employed timbre as a structural device in orchestral composi- tions. At the same time, Western musicians after Mahler came gradually to resent instrumental standardization. They searched for new sounds, including those produced by unusual percussion instruments, and they occasionally employed prerecorded natural sounds (e.g., the nightingale in Respighi’s Pines of Rome). These explorations also involved “extensions outward to other cultures and backwards in time.”14 By the mid- twentieth century, the “standard” orchestra had experienced a “reopening,” and outsider instruments included exotic, ancient, and electronic sources of previously