Experiencing Chen Yi’s Music: Local and Cosmopolitan Reciprocities in Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002)

Abstract

Chen Yi’s music, particularly her Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002), constructs reciprocities in compositional and aesthetic practice, and in the social-relational dynamics of musical contrast, performative and commemorative impulses. One aim of my paper is to suggest how Chen’s music offers multiple affiliations for music listeners, such that the local emerges in the cosmopolitan and vice versa. Events and textures emerge from, and become emblematic in emotional (affective) characters, in multiple orientations and receptions. Chen counterpoints and integrates the durational pa erning suggestive of irregular Chinese “Ba Ban” tunes and more regular melodic models extending from popular song (e.g., the “Mo Li Hua” tune in Ning). Moving between, displacing and traversing—these emerging associations, narratives, encounters and migrations, entangle listening experiences of self and community, borderland and nation, and trauma and place. Volume 26, Number 3, September 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory [1.1] In experiencing the music of Chinese-born American composer Chen Yi, my a ention was gradually drawn to the depth of her contact with Chinese folk materials and their play of durational pa erning. From these angles one enters a sonic world of multiple affiliations and reciprocities between musical ideas both cosmopolitan and local, processive and articulated. [1.2] Moving between, displacing and traversing—Chen Yi’s music, its dispositions, narratives, encounters and migrations, entangle listening experiences of self and community, borderland and nation, exile and place. In this article, I offer an experiential study of Chen’s 2002 mixed trio Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello. I consider how this music shapes and challenges aesthetic distance, memory, and future promise, describe aspects of it through a variety of music-experiential lenses, and offer observations on processes of sensing and negotiating these differences in changing dynamics of affiliation, both cosmopolitan and local. Part I. Challenging contradictions and aesthetic distance [E]ach experience that we composers come across can become the source and exciting medium of our creation. That’s why I don’t have a fixed scope, a frame of styles to expect to hear when someone says “American music.” (Chen 1999) Questions of priority in research cannot be answered outside the purview of ideology, however—what we believe the enterprise to be about, what we get out of it as practicing analysts or theorists, and how what we do facilitates or impedes intellectual (or other forms of) domination. (Agawu 2006, 42) [1.3] Why are constructing or denying categorizations of difference and identity so fraught in our contemporary landscape? How can one escape claims of fla ening and homogenizing difference— for example, “rootless internationalism”—on one hand, and isolationist or elitist restrictiveness, on the other?(1) “Border thinking” crosses between and within to unse le “silo” mentalities in contexts of identity (national, ethnic, gender, sexual practices), rework stereotypical images (peach blossoms, geishas), and encourage reciprocities, encounters, overlaps, and contagions in layers of history, culture, and affiliation (Kielian-Gilbert 2011, 200).(2) The agricultural reference of “silo” is familiar; in a broad sense, disciplines and musical canons tend to store (as in, keep to oneself, hoard) or limit the flow of knowledge to closed containers. Writers such as Kofi Agawu (2003, 2006), Martin Scherzinger (2003), and Anna R. Alonso-Minu i, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid (2018) have called a ention to implicit disciplinary biases that may exclude or preempt practices of regional and vernacular musics so that their voices do not, or cannot speak back. Degrees of inclusion and exclusion go hand in hand with deterritorializing and territorializing gestures (Kielian-Gilbert 2010, 207 and 214–15). [1.4] Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker describes one of the central tenets of ethnomusicology as the endeavor to understand “behaviors and belief systems from within . . . and artistic expressions from the perspectives of their owners” (2010, 127). Striving to unse le the apparent dichotomy between scientific universalism and humanistic particularity, Becker stresses the importance of conjoining approaches to address both cultural difference and “some level of commonality and universality in relation to both music and emotion” (127 and 132). [1.5] Crucial ingredients of crossing borders and such “cosmopolitan” exchange include both allowing ourselves to be affected by the potential of an encounter, and in turn allowing the music we engage with to be influenced and changed by these encounters. According to Sarah Collins and Dana Gooley, the critical function of cosmopolitanism—“a empting to make the self other”—is to construe “the cosmopolitan as a figure who does not pursue a wider connectivity for its own sake, but rather seeks to disrupt conventional models of affiliation, and make a achments less given and more voluntary” (2016, 155).(3) In this sense, composer Chen Yi’s “American music” is more than music made in America.(4) It becomes cosmopolitan in the kinds of conversations and reciprocities it evokes. [1.6] Born in 1953 in the city of Guangzhou, China,(5) Chen Yi experienced the effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as her father and sister were taken away, and two years later, and for two more years, she endured compulsory hard labor (see Example 1 for a brief biographical outline).(6) After this period of intense physical work, she embarked on extensive research in Chinese musical instruments from 1970–1978 while serving as concertmistress and composer for the Beijing Opera Troupe Orchestra. [1.7] Layers of history and culture subsequent to China’s Cultural Revolution expose not only the intense suffering but also the experimentation that created communities of musicians and listeners, a point that has been elaborated by Nancy Rao (2016a, 215) and other scholars.(7) As noted by the editors of the collection Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution, these musical expressions shaped a dynamic historical and cultural memory constructed through “Chinese folk songs, local operas, instrumental music, and Western instrumental music,” and cannot be conceived “as simply a product of political maneuvering” (Clark, Pang, and Tsai 2016, 2–5). In this sense the conflicting meanings of the Cultural Revolution encompassed “a historical project . . . meant to change the ‘soul’ of the people, through drastic destructions and constructions” (2).(8) With the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. Performance by Jin Sun (pipa), Alexandra Greffin-Klein (violin), and Alexis Descharmes (cello), at the Beijing International Composition Workshop 2015 in the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China, 7/23/2015. h ps://youtu.be/XgaS6mvxFoo. Used with permission here and for all subsequent examples [1.8] From 1978–1986, Chen Yi studied at the Beijing Central Conservatory, becoming the first woman to receive an MA in composition. Doctoral study with Chou Wen-Chung at Columbia University followed. After receiving her DMA degree in 1993 and undertaking several composition and teaching residencies, she accepted a faculty position at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music in 1998. Part 2. Experiencing Chen Yi’s mixed trio Ning: “Calling the soul back to a resting place” and looking forward [2.1] A series of works shown in Example 2, beginning with Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello, develop musical images and experiences of memory and remembering—“calling the soul back to a resting place” and looking forward “to the peace of the world in the future.” Wri en in May 2001 before the global tragedy of 9/11/2001 and published in 2002, Ning was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota for the concert Hun Qiao (Bridge of Souls––A Concert of Remembrance and Reconciliation), to commemorate the li le-known Asian Pacific Conflict of World War II. Young-Nam Kim (violin), Yo-Yo Ma (cello), and Wu Man (pipa) premiered the work in May 2001 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Strikingly “Ning” is a both a Chinese character meaning peace (serene and peaceful), and another name for the city Nanjing (also called Nanking), the Chinese capital during World War II. [2.2] The Nanjing (Nanking) Massacre 1937–1938 marked the brutal mass rape and murder of Chinese citizens by Japanese troops during the second Sino-Japanese War. Historians and witnesses estimate that 250,000 to 300,000 Chinese people were killed by Japanese soldiers let loose on the city during a six-week period from December 1937 to January 1938. The sculptures by Chinese artists in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum and the famous canvas of ChineseAmerican oil painting master Li Zijian, Nanjing Massacre (1992), confront the problem of manipulating the perceiver in aestheticizing, idealizing, or simplifying the ways that memorials achieve their affects.(9) [2.3] Chen’s Ning subverts a listener’s impulse to sentimentalize and consume, and therefore implicitly to aestheticize violence or sanction the conditions that produce it.(10) Striking and jarring in its qualities, the work projects an aural spectrum of visceral physicality and moments of quiet intensity, emotion, and being in silence (Audio Example 1). In her notes to the score of this sixteen-minute work (see Appendix), Chen Yi writes: Remembering so many horrible true stories told by my parents repeatedly with anger and passion, who experienced the Japanese invasion in China, I sincerely accepted the invitation . . . to compose a piece of music for “calling the soul back to a resting place,” to remember the Asian Holocaust—1937 Nanjing Massacre, and to look forward to the peace of the world in the future. The music is composed in a dramatic shape, symbolizing the sound of atrocious violence and tragic scenes, hy