| Secluded Orchid in Jieshi Mode |
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| Culture | |
| Saturday, 04 June 2011 | |
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Photo: Professor Li Xiangting playing the guqin Chinese music instruments have always approved fascinating for a Western audience, but for the 38 year old London-based composer Raymond Yiu, Chinese music is distinguished by its self-reflective quality of performance.
Yiu’s ten minute piece Jieshi (based on ‘Secluded Orchid in Jieshi Mode’), which premiered in The British Museum last month, was a prime example of communicating the essence of Chinese aestheticism and philosophy in a way a Western audience can engage with.
Professor Li Xiangting, the world-class guqin master, played ‘Secluded Orchid’ (or commonly known as 'Youlan’) on his guqin in the foreground, and the English Chamber Orchestra Ensemble (Stephanie Gonley, Annabelle Meare, Jonathan Barritt & Caroline Dearnley) responded to his improvisation with their own as commentaries.
'The music sheets had no bar lines,” explained Yiu as he showed me the 12 page composition. Notes for the string quartet were matched to notes for the guqin with long dotted lines, indicating how the string players should time themselves according to the guqin music they hear.
'I heard that Master Li is a great improviser, so it doesn’t make sense to give the string music precise timing,” Yiu explained. He said that whereas Western music focuses more on the end result, Chinese music focuses more on the process of performance as a method of self-reflection and self-examination. “By not having a conductor, the string players will have to listen to the guqin very carefully, which allows them to experience this mental reflection process.”
The original transcript of‘Youlan’ is the earliest guqin manuscript in existence. This scroll is now exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum as a piece of art. Yiu has happily followed this metaphor himself, “The guqin player plays this music without alteration, because I see it as an art piece and I don’t see myself as having a license to take it apart. Each string player independently responds to the guqin, like framing a precious painting.”
Yiu performed spectral analysis on the guqin music using the computer software SPEAR.SPEAR breaks each moment of the music into its frequency components. “I found the results fascinating. Whereas some sounds decay quickly, others sustain in the background for a long time, but are not detectable by the human ear easily. I used those sounds to construct the music for the string quartet, to give them an amplifying effect.”
The performance was greatly appreciated by an audience of about 250 in The British Museum. But success always comes with hard work. When Yiu was invited to work on this project, he felt it an impossible task. “I had only two months to work on it and I hardly knew the instrument guqin at all. But I did it and the experience allowed me to understand Chinese aestheticism and philosophy in a different light.”
The original music of Jieshi is associated with Confucius’ self-examination of his philosophy. It reflects his sadness and loneliness that his doctrine and ethics could not be understood by people, like an orchid growing among weeds.
I asked Yiu if he can personally relate to Confucius’ loneliness. He answered after thinking deeply, “I think loneliness is a common condition of all times, and especially for artists because they feel that their work is not being understood by their audience.
'But I believe an artist’s role is to communicate with his society, and his artwork is important because it creates personal significance for his audience. A lady said to me that she thought Jieshi was ‘modernist noise’, which I am happy to hear, although I would not call it that myself. The worst thing is for the audience to be indifferent,” he said, and joked about his comments being arrogant.
Although having being educated in the UK and is mentored by several western composers, notably Lukas Foss and Julian Anderson, Yiu has become increasingly fascinated by Chinese music as his music career developed. In 2008 he was commissioned by London Symphony Orchestra to write a piece for the internationally famous pianist Lang Lang and the Silk String Quartet. Last year his piece Northwest Wind, which commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, won the chamber category of the BASCA British Composer Awards.
'I did not know much about Chinese music while growing up, as that Hong Kong is quite westernized and the syllabus focuses mainly on western instruments. But I personally think it should include instruments like the guqin.”
This fascination made him glad to take on cross-cultural projects like Jieshi. “They are a channel for me to discover things that I have missed.”
Words by Cecily Liu
Photography by Malcolm Crowthers
Additional links:
Yiu’s project is a part of The Chinese Four Arts summer school programme
Sponsored by:
The British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/default.aspx
Prince’s Charities Foundation (China)
http://princescharities.org/
The London Youlan Qin Society (LYQS)
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