more on Chou Wen-Chung (was: Monz : not off-topic !)

I wrote:

/tuning/topicId_21382.html#21396

> Good point, Bob. In response to this, I've already started
> writing a post on Chou and his work, but it's still growing
> and so I'll have to send it later.
>
> This man's personality and ideas made a very deep impression
> on me.

Here I make good on that promise. Hope it's not off-topic.

--- In tuning@y..., Robert C Valentine <BVAL@I...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_21382.html#21382

>
> [me, monz]
>
> > The concert was great, but the real stand-out was the
> > 2-hour talk by Chou Wen-Cung, who dazzled us with his
> > unbelievably comprehensive vision of how to bring together
> > various different world cultures while retaining ancient
> > legacies in the onslaught of the world-wide adoption of
> > modern Western culture.
> >
> > But enough of that... it's off-topic.
>
> I doubt that maintaining ANYthing "in the
> onslaught of the world-wide adoption of modern Western
> culture." is off topic for the members of this list!

Good point, Bob. I perhaps should mention some interesting
points about Chou and his work (sprinkled with uncited quotes
from the UCSD program notes and Eric Lai's lecture).

Chou was born in China into a family that placed equal value
on Chinese and Western cultures. He received an education as
a civil engineer in China.

Chou came to America on an architecture scholarship from Yale,
but shifted his major to music and attended New England
Conservatory.

He moved to New York in 1949, receiving a Masters in Composition
from Columbia in 1954. Remaining in America, he lives in New York
today.

It was interesting to me to learn that he knew Partch at U. of
Illinois in Urbana, and even more interesting that he is a good
friend of my own teacher in New York, Elias Tanenabaum. He also
taught Charles Dodge, another one of my teachers.

He was a student of Varèse, in fact apparently Varèse's favorite
student, since he was entrusted with much of Varèse's legacy and
now serves as Varèse's primary musical executor.

His goal in composition has been to fuse the Chinese tradition
with Western styles. To a large extent, his compositional
gestures are meant to be a sonic analogy to Chinese calligraphy.
As might be expected of a student of Varèse, a great deal of
emphasis is placed on the manipulations of register, timbre,
articulation, intensity, tempo, and rhythm.

That said, here's a little more elaboration on his use of the
I-Ching in relation to pitch:

In the late 1950s, Chou developed a compositional system from
the I-Ching which informs all of his later work. This might
seem to give him an affinity to John Cage, who also used the
I-Ching (but I can't comment on Cage here because I really
haven't studied this aspect of *his* work), but Chou's use of
it is much more systematic and sophisticated.

He recognizes the I-Ching as a binary system, made up of _yin_
(= 0) and _yang_ (= 1).

The 8 trigrams form the series:

000 = 0 earth
001 = 1 mountain
010 = 2 rain
011 = 3 wind
100 = 4 thunder
101 = 5 sun
110 = 6 lake
111 = 7 heaven

The names also bring in a relation to poetry, which is also
a background aspect of Chou's compositions.

So at first these yin/yang were rendered musically as:

yin = a trichord composed of two consecutive whole-steps
yang = an interval of a minor 3rd. For example, one yin
could be F-G-A and one yang could be C#-E.

Musically, the trigrams originally represented conjunct
combinations of the yin and yang musical elements, yielding
scales of 5, 6, or 7 pitch-classes. For example:

- the 000 trigram would be F-G-A_A-B-C#_C#-D#-F
- the 001 trigram would be F-G-A_A-B-C#_C#-E
- the 010 trigram would be F-G-A_A-C_C-D-E

and so on.

Each hexagram is made of two trigrams, the first one ascending
in pitch, the second descending. These hexagrams form what Chou
calls "Aggregates".

During the first stage of using these, Aggregates I (1960s),
Chou changed the way the system worked, so that yin = a trichord
composed of an ascending whole-tone then semitone, and the
trigrams became *disjunct* (separated by a semitone) combinations
of the yin and yang elements. For example (' means descending):

earth-heaven' = 000/111 = F-G-Ab A-B-C C#-D#-E F-D C#-A# A-F#
mountain-wind' = 001/011 = F-G-Ab A-B-C C#-E F-Eb-D C#-A# A-F#

etc.

The complete hexagram or aggregate formed scales of 15 pitch-classes,
with some repetitions.

Later he again changed yin so that it meant simply an interval
of a whole-tone. He did this so that the Aggregates would produce
a 12-tone series with no repetitions of pitch-classes. This is
the Aggregates II period of Chou's work, from 1970 to the present.
Here the first part of the row is outlined by an F augmented
triad ascending, and the second part by a Bb augmented triad
descending. The pitch-classes following each of these depends
on the yin-yang structure. For example:

earth-earth' = 000/000 = F-G A-B C#-D# F#-E D-C Bb-Ab
mountain-thunder' = 001/100 = F-G A-B C#-E F#-D# D-C Bb-Ab

etc.

Now for more on his ideas about culture:

Chou's preferred term for the blending or "confluence" of
cultures is "re-merger". Why he uses this term instead of
just plain "merger" really hit home to me at the very end
of this last speech, when he played a song he recorded in
a remote village in Yunan province.

I was stunned - because of the distance and (apparent, alleged)
cultural separation - at how closely it resembled a song I'm
familiar with which was recorded in the 1950s in a remote
Bulgarian village.

When I mentioned this in the Q&A after the talk, Chou related
a similar experience where he and his wife had heard music
in Brittany (France) which was nearly identical to a Yunan song.

The point: that there are underlying aspects of music (and other
arts, and other domains of life) which show that divergent
instances of it share a common basis - in the case of music, in
intonation, phrasing, contrapuntal technique, relation to the
text, etc. The divergencies have often been later occurrences,
due to population movement, war, etc. An so the apparent modern
"merger" of cultures is in many cases really only a "re-merger",
bringing to light similarities that are not new but were always
there and were merely buried for a long time.

The multifacted levels on which Chou's intellect inspire me are
comparable to those of Mahler and Schoneberg. It's perhaps an even
stronger feeling for me, not only because I saw him speak live,
but even moreso because I met and talked with him face-to-face.
It makes me begin to understand the kind of fanatical devotion
that Mahler's disciples (including Schoenberg and his students)
and Schoenberg's students (especially Berg and Webern) had to *them*.

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"