Ming Yue, University of York

On the Stylistic Formation of the 'Individual Voice' of Contemporary Chinese Composers—Rethinking of the Cultural Collision in Music Writing Based on Chen Qigang’s Stylistic Declaration

As a Contemporary Chinese composer, I often find our musical works being labelled “exotic" by Westerners, despite the fact that the widely appreciated works deliver music that is both metaphysically and technically individualistic. In especial in the backdrop of thriving globalisation since the late 1970s, increasing worldwide commissions facilitate international recognitions of Contemporary Chinese work, yet often unmask external expectations that music is obliged to underpin nationalist identity or minority to Western art music, revealing that ingrained concepts based on binarisations remain tenacious in a way amongst scholars inside China and overseas. As an insider, I was regularly blamed for "lacking Chinese tastes" in my music during the years of study in my motherland, especially considering the Chinese state in a way increasingly polices its own citizens’ expressions of Chineseness. Overseas, it often seems to be the local population who are fixated on Chinese composers needing to sound “Chinese”. Introduced by French-Chinese composer Chen Qigang's artistic declaration that: "The soul of a real artist is initially humanistic, then cultural, and finally it can be turned into an ethnicity or a nation," this paper extends analysis of the compositional factors and music demands shaping the individual voices of three "Western-cultivated" Chinese composers (fourth generation composer Wang Xilin; and fifth generation composers Chen Qigang and Tan Dun) in the context of the Westernised music education system since the early twentieth century, outlining the individual upbringings and encounters that impacted the metaphysical pursuits underpinning their own music vocabularies. By introducing specific writing backgrounds of their representative pieces and analysing their respective approaches to Westernise the motifs that are applied from indigenous musics, hence eventually closing from my approaches to “mediate” the frictions between “Western mainstreams” and the “Chinese minority languages”, as a then-young insider. I hope this will condense a potential angle of view for international scholars and music critics alike to estimate the stylistic components of today’s Chinese works.

明樂 (Ming Yue, Family Name: Ming) is an award winning UK-based Chinese composer and (ethno)musicologist specilised in Sino-Western Studies; Chinese Scholarship Council funded PhD at Univeristy of York; Principal Inverstigator and composer of Young Artistic Creative Talent Funding Project (China Art Fund, 2019) and Revitalisation of SiHui folk Song (2023). Her doctoral outcome consists of complementary components of a 89,000-word thesis and ten compositions sharing her views on ‘regrounding’ Chinese

traditions in new means, which covers extensive ethnomusicology of Tianjin folk music, Tianjin narrative arts, and Chinese Sanxian music.  Winner of First Prize at the Bruno Maderna Competition Composers (2023), her recent works have also been utilised in major projects in China such as The Excavation and Protection of Folk Dance in the Tianjin Area; The Application and Innovation of ‘Jingu Yanko’; Tianjin's First-class Undergraduate Course ‘Jingu Yangko’ and has been awarded third prize at The 3rd International Competition of Composers "New Music Generation (2021)", as well as other prizes relating to music composition and to the integration of music teaching with dance. Her running project "Revitalisation of Sihui Folk Songs" combining Chinese folk musics, Western Contemporary classical (and rock) musics, and immersive technology (Virtual reality), will be presented to the public by the end of this year.

Olha Myronenko-Mikheishyna

Time across place: an exploration of W.Lutoslawski’s world of musical time

This presentation delves into thinking on musicology as a path of comprehension, which is very different in its traditions and its inner essence in different parts of the world. Through the lens of this idea I would like to share some achievements of my doctoral research, devoted to the innovative features of temporal organization in the works by Lutoslawski of the 1960s to 1990s. While I was inside my path into the Lutoslawski's music and his composer's world, the diving into the field of rhythm theory gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with the achievements of the Ukrainian musicologists, as well as the Polish, German, French, Canadian, USA. This made it possible to realise, on the one hand, how far away innovations in the temporal organization of musical works of the 20th century are from being covered, and secondly how different are the approaches of various schools of musicology.

Even such a detail as the impossibility of exact translation the terms "down-beat'' and "up-beat", and just ‘’beat’’, created a particular intriguing twist  in the search for the answers to: how the flow of time is organized in the almost completely non-metric musical compositions by Lutoslawski?  What replaces the bar as a time unit in his polychronic works of the 60s-90s? What "rhythmic lexicon" can apply to works of the XX-XXI centuries to explain the peculiarities of the flow of time in both the music of Lutoslawski, and in the works of his contemporaries and followers? Most importantly, how to research the time parameter in  Lutoslawski's music, what methodology to choose, what approaches to its analysis to apply?

Olha Myronenko-Mikheishyna is laureate of the Jerzy Hedroyc Research Competition on Polish-Ukrainian topics at the Embassy of Poland in Kyiv.  Olha  graduated from the Glière Music College, and The Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music. After the war started she became a visiting doctoral student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.   The main field of Olha's research is the W.Lutosławski's  creative works of the 60s-90s in the aspect of temporal organization, as well as the development of the new analytical approaches to the non-metric stylistic systems of rhythm. The ideas of her studies are reflected in the articles and the doctoral thesis ''Temporal organization of Witold Lutosławski’s works in the sixties — nineties of the XX century: innovtive solutions and their theoretical comprehension''.

Ming Yue