BY ELI SIMIC-PROSIC
On November 12, Eli’s work Festivities of Fragment was premiered in Shanghai by Zhang Liang, pipa soloist Xu Jiaxin and the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra alongside new compositions by four other international composers and three local Chinese composers.
The concert marked the culmination of the 2017 Hearing China festival, which comprised six days of workshops, cultural events, and rehearsals in Shanghai. An initiative of Professor Ye Guohui, head of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Australian composer Eli describes the festival as an “international platform for composers of the Western art music tradition to learn about and engage with Chinese culture”. Before arriving at the festival in November, each participant was tasked with integrating a traditional Chinese music theme into an original composition for orchestra and one or two Chinese traditional instruments.
- Festivities of Fragment by Eli Simic-Prosic
One of the things I found most attractive about the Hearing China festival was the unique nature of the program it offered: a compositional opportunity to work with elements of Chinese traditional musical culture within the medium of orchestral music. As many composers can attest to, it is rare to get a chance to work on orchestral projects, let alone ones with such interesting requirements. At the time, I certainly only had a very vague and basic understanding of what is meant by Chinese music, so the prospect of learning more about this musical world in a very practical way and on such a large scale was both exciting and scary at the same time.
As became apparent in the many discussions I had with the other composers participating at the festival, this sensation of simultaneous excitement and trepidation was a feeling shared by all of us and one that was reflected in the particular challenges raised by the project. For us international composers, these challenges lay in approaching a largely unfamiliar musical culture and finding a successful rapprochement with our own writing styles. For the local composers, these challenges lay in defamiliarising their own understanding of traditional Chinese music to be able to approach it in new ways.
Here are some thoughts on how I went about tackling these issues and the writing of my piece in general.
For me, the first part of the creative process lay in a careful reading and listening of the Chinese music theme I had been assigned: an aria from the local Yu Opera Hua Mulan called Brother Liu is Prejudiced Against Women. From the recording and transcription I was sent, the aria presented itself as a wonderfully ecstatic two-minute display of subtle vocal virtuosity, accompanied by a joyous clamouring of Chinese percussion and string instruments which rhythmically declaimed and reinforced the singer’s part.
Harmonically, the aria operated within a single diatonic scale, treated modally rather than being propelled by the traditionally Western consonance-dissonance relations of common-practice harmony. This relatively static but open harmonic space meant the dramatic development of the aria was being driven by the melody, which seemed to consist of motivic fragments combined in various ways to create different musical phrases and cadences.
This musical syntax based around the combination and recombination of motifs would prove to be the key towards my solution of tackling possibly the single greatest foundational challenge of this composition: the theme I had to integrate was too long and too self-similar to base my piece around any one section of it without essentially subjecting it to a destructive form of appropriation. But it was also too short to simply elaborately orchestrate it, if the composition was to be somewhere in the range of 10 minutes.
Additionally, I did not want to craft a purely original composition and then merely use the aria as a generic quotation somewhere within it. Instead, I decided to take the combinatorial syntax indigenous to the aria and use it as a method of extending the original music, mixing in wholly original elements along the way. This process allows the entire aria to be present in my work, but it is expanded, elaborated, fragmented, motifs being taken from various places in the aria and then recombined to form a new melodic, harmonic and dramatic logic.
The sum of this is that the aria becomes a kind of musical stream running beneath my work, whose waters sometime surface in a very clear way, and at other times shape and flow over the musical material in a more mysterious manner (not entirely dissimilar from Berio’s famous treatment of Mahler in the third movement of his Sinfonia).
In this sense, the aria from Hua Mulan is almost the entire DNA of my work, and the exterior musical landscape is the expression of my creative processing of and rumination on the aria, complete with all the strange machinations of memory that form part of this.
After coming to this point in the planning process, it became necessary to decide which Chinese instrument to use as the soloistic element in the composition. I chose the pipa for both technical and thematic reasons. While researching many of the most common instruments such as the guqin, guzheng, erhu, yangqin and the dizi, it quickly became apparent that I would probably encounter problems if I wanted to use a fully chromatic idiom of writing.
While the construction and performance conventions of these instruments favoured a large variety of glissandi and bends around fixed scale tunings, they did not seem to lend themselves well to rapid, chromatic scale patterns. Because of this, a lot of these instruments also seemed to operate primarily in a monophonic manner, with a rather limited capacity for polyphony; a challenge I would usually tackle through a wider palette of extended techniques.
I am, of course, ultimately doubtful regarding my own assessment of these things. But especially without direct access to a performer or an instrument or detailed English-language technique guides, I thought it would be too risky to write for these instruments in a way that could very well turn out to be unplayable. And yet, despite these misgivings, I still wanted to write virtuosically for my chosen instrument as a way of channelling the brilliance of the aria into a domain of greater ecstatic fervour.
In meeting these technical demands, the pipa, a four-string Chinese lute with chromatic frets, proved to be a perfect match, with significant scholarly literature out there to allay any doubts I had over aspects of playability and to help translate my knowledge of writing for guitar into an extended gestural language for the pipa.
Although I spent a lot of time researching the instrument and miming out passages on a retuned guitar to arrive at a point where I was satisfied with my pipa writing, inevitably I made a few mistakes. Thankfully, these were minor enough that my soloist Jiaxin Xu and I were able to quickly find solutions for them once I had arrived in Shanghai for the festival.
The other aspect that really drew me to the pipa is that the instrument has a performance tradition that encompasses both lyrical, gentle styles of music as well as really exciting martial ones, exemplified respectively by pieces like Spring Blossoms on a Moonlit River and Ambush from Ten Sides. This specific duality of the instrument was really important to me, as one of the goals of my composition was to create and communicate the story of the opera’s protagonist, Hua Mulan, who is better known to Western audiences as simply Mulan.
In the classical story of the character as she exists in the 5th or 6th Century CE poem The Ballad of Hua Mulan, Mulan takes her ageing father’s place to serve her country on the battlefield but never, as happens in the Disney version of the story, deliberately seeks to hide or conceal her gender. It happens merely as a by-product of her role as a soldier. Across 10 years, she achieves great military success and when the fighting is done she refuses all awards and promotions, and instead goes back home to civilian life. When she arrives, she takes off her military garb and all her comrades are surprised to find out she is a woman, to which she replies in an absolutely singular expression of support for the notion of gender equality:
The he-hare’s feet go hop and skip,
The she-hare’s eyes are muddled and fuddled.
Two hares running side by side close to the ground,
How can they tell if I am he or she?
I found the poem, and this ending in particular, utterly stunning when I first came across them. The character of Mulan presented here could not be more at odds with the character presented in the Disney rendition, nor could the general thrust of the whole story be any more different, either. The poem emphasises an ontology of the individual actualised through their relations with the collective, be that at the local level through Mulan’s sense of duty to her family; or at the general level with her sense of duty toward her people. She is both singular and part of the whole. Both aspects are inseparable sources of her identity.
By contrast, the Disney film rarely, if ever, strays away from (over)emphasising Mulan’s incommensurability with her context: she is almost always beset by the people or situations around her who will not let her be herself. In presenting the character this way, the film locates the soft egoism of uniqueness and exceptionalism as the sine qua non of the individual, an otherwise alien sentiment from the poem’s story of Hua Mulan*.
My conception of the soloist’s role in my composition, then, has been framed by the kind of ideas discussed regarding Mulan. After an explosive orchestral opening, prefigured possibly as an outbreak of war, the pipa enters alone onto the musical stage with a solo which already contains within it the dual qualities of Hua Mulan as someone who is both humble, in search of a peaceful life, and someone who is also a fierce and accomplished warrior fighting for her people. This duality is replicated throughout the piece via an alternation of relative activity and inactivity in the pipa’s material, while in a direct allusion to her story, the music cycles through a number of pitch centres back to the one present at the beginning in the same way that Hua Mulan herself returns home after many years at war. The identity of Mulan as being mutually constituted between the individual and the collective whole finds expression in the structuring of my orchestration for the piece. The soloist exists not as a separate player who is always above the rest of the orchestra, but as a performer who dances between various roles within the orchestra. Sometimes she is on her own, sometimes she is equally paired with a string quartet or a percussion and harp quintet drawn from inside the orchestra, and sometimes she plays with the whole mass of the orchestra itself. So the multiple identities of Hua Mulan have become the multiple identities of the pipa soloist.
I hope that in reading all of this, the reader has been able to take away with them an appreciation for the variety of concerns and issues that came up for me in writing Festivities of Fragment, from finding an appropriate strategy for incorporating the theme to dealing with an unfamiliar musical instrument and the task of translating the Chinese conception of Hua Mulan into compositional parameters.
Finally, even after having immersed myself in listening to Chinese music for this project, I would say I still have only rudimentary knowledge about it. I have just scratched the surface of the immense variety and types of musics that are out there in a tradition that encompasses everything from haozi labour songs filled with their exuberant antiphonal exchanges to the speech-like melodies of narrative songs and the exquisite timbral worlds of scholarly guqin music.
While I have learnt about and can identify certain fundamental elements that underlie most of the music I have encountered – the use of five and seven-tone scales, a highly refined and nuanced approach to timbre and ornamentation, Taoist aesthetics of simplicity, balance and harmony along with Confucian principles of order and moral nobility, and a predominance of homophonic and heterophonic textures – there is still so much else to discover and I look forward to a more detailed engagement with this compelling and rich musical culture.
In all, I am grateful for the opportunities and challenges provided to me by this project and I strongly encourage any young composers out there to apply for the festival in the coming years and push themselves outside the relative comfort zone of the Western art music tradition for a truly rewarding experience.
*For more information on this perspective regarding the differences between the Disney and Chinese conceptions of Mulan, see Mingwu Xu and Chuanmao Tian, ‘Cultural Deformations and Reformulations: A Case Study of Disney’s Mulan in English and Chinese’, Critical Arts 27, no. 2 (April 2013): 182-210; Zhang Renjie, ‘Ode to Mulan’, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 32, no. 2 (1999): 30-32.
Images supplied.
