Musical Patois
As musicians, we are often confronted with music from cultures and epochs other than our own. Apart from personal idiosyncracies and individual thought, cultural idioms we carry around with us add to the color of our musical communications, and lead to the plethora of interpretations that exist for each musical work. What happens when a non-Polish person plays a Mazurka? What happens when an erhu piece is re-written for violin? What happens when a pipa piece is transcribed for piano, then performed by a non-Chinese musician? In a project with doctoral student Luwei Yang, we are studying such questions with a focus on vibrato styles in erhu vs. violin playing. This paper reports on some of our exploratory work.
Musical ekphrasis, a term coined by Siglind Bruhn, refers to inter-artistic modes of expression where the end medium is music, such as a composer responding to art or poetry. Impressions, the concert, is built on such allegories, and in this piece of writing, I analyze Wang Lisan's poetic and musical responses to the landscape paintings of Higashiyama Kaii. The paper was presented at the 7th International Congress on Musical Signification, Imatra, Finland (July, 2001) and the 17th International Musicological Society Conference, Leuven, Belgium (Aug, 2002), and appears in a special issue of Acta Semiotica Fennica. Reference: Chew, E. (2001). The PPP Connection: Paintings, Poems, Pieces—an Essay on Wang Lisan's "Impressions of Paintings by Higashiyama Kaii. In Proceedings of the 7th International Congress on Musical Signification, Imatra, Finland. This paper analyses Wang Lisan's poetic and musical responses to the landscape paintings of Higashiyama Kaii.
MISTI-funded Field Study in Beijing
Dissatisfied with the limited access to quality contemporary Chinese music compositions, in the summer of 1997, I undertook a field study on contemporary Chinese piano music funded by a grant from the MIT Science and Technology Initiative. For three week, 21 May 1997 - 10 June 1997, I searched in Beijing music bookstores for new music scores, and interviewed musicologists, and musicians who could lead me to resources on the topic. A copy of all scores obtained now sits in the Lewis Music Library of MIT, and numerous recitals have resulted from this trip. This is the report that was submitted to the funding agency.