Editorial: Chinese Electroacoustic Music Today

Abstract

The editors of the issue have, for many years, studied the vertiginous development of electroacoustic music in China. By residing in the country, organising conferences and symposia and creating personal connections, deep relations were established with the musical community. This led not only to the publications of articles, but also to the book Electroacoustic Music in East Asia (Battier and Fields 2020), which had the originality of gathering only contributions by local composers and scholars from East Asia. Much of this was realised as an outcome of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Asia Network (EMSAN), as does this present issue, on the theme of electroacoustic music in China today. Difficulties of translation were expected and encountered for our issue. Another hurdle was that the conception of a scholarly article in electroacoustic musicological research in China follows quite different habits. This led to a substantial amount of discussion between authors and editors. It was of course our premise that the issue would present a portrait of current views on electroacoustic music in China today, mostly from the prism of local composers and scholars who, in the end, have been responsible for the majority of articles. The others came from Western authors who have had a sustained relation with China. Otherwise, the local authors affirm here a Chineseness that is sometimes difficult to grasp for outsiders, no matter how familiar they may be with the culture. The issue opens with two articles by co-editors. Annie Yen-Ling Liu, a scholar who has previously published on Chinese electroacoustic music, investigates the ubiquitous postulation in much of the early literature of a unique compositional language that can be referred to as a ‘Chinese model’. She retraces the concept from the earliest works in the 1980s, up to today. In so doing, she provides a solid conceptual foundation, and the reader will find a superb list of bibliographical references. The second article by coeditor Marc Battier delves into the question of finding stylistic gradients in Chinese electroacoustic music, as he observes that, in China, many composers have crossed boundaries in a fashion rarely observed in other cultures. That consideration resonates deeply with several contributions from Chinese authors in the issue, although Battier discusses the categorisations provided by interculturalism studies. The following contribution written by Zhou Qian, a Shanghai composer and teacher, studies the work of several composers from the perspective of compositional techniques, including sound spatialisation. What is of importance is that the selected composers have studied abroad (Zhou herself having studied at CNMAT, UC Berkeley, and CCRMA, Stanford University). With a foreign advanced education, how these composers address the notion of Chineseness in their work is a theme that emerges in the article. Discussing the state of electroacoustic music in China involved the perspective of foreign composers who are attracted by working with traditional Chinese instrument performers. Anthony De Ritis, an American composer, has had a long experience with such an approach in his own work. He also alludes to the question of Chineseness in electroacoustic music through a number of pieces from Chinese and foreign composers. That very theme is then looked at from different perspectives. Li Qiuxiao is particularly intrigued by how three composers dealt with Chinese plucked strings instruments. Two of them used the guqin, a seven-string zithar often accompanying the recitation of poems, and one wrote for the pipa, a four-string instrument. In her article, Li studies how noise, inherent in plucked strings, is integrated in the electroacoustic materials. This led the author to considerations of how Western and Chinese composers handle noise in their work. The juxtaposition of a Chinese instrument and electroacoustic sounds was also addressed by Yang Ting and Zhou Ran, from Shenzhen University. In their contribution, however, they analyse a piece for pipa and tape with electroacoustic sounds, Mist on a Hill, written by a French composer for a Beijing performer. In so doing, the authors bring a fresh and original framework inspired by a Chinese approach to musical analysis, something that would be most unexpected in the Western tradition. Following is a number of articles from Chinese authors who discuss specific aspects of composing in China. Each is a vivid account of the questions and solutions encountered in working on the edge of