Imitating the Vivacity of the Human Voice

TITLE: Imitating the Vivacity of the Human Voice
CAT# (YEAR COMPOSED): 99 (2017)
INSTRUMENTATION: erhu
PAGES: 6
DURATION (APPROX): 6’20
PREMIERE: Premiered by Hu Liu during the 2017 China-ASEAN Music Week at the Guangxi University of the Arts on May 28th.
NOTE:
Imitating the Vivacity of the Human Voice, is a meditation on diversity and the roiling of coexistence. In this piece disparate components from east and west do not suggest a transcendent unification. Rather, rhetorical devices such as “Tiaogong” [跳弓] or “Schleifer” become something else – no longer artefacts presuming cultural retention, but rather discourse to a risky modernism

Technically, Imitating… presents incomplete (and embedded) tuplets on multiple strata that are to be interpreted flexibly in relation to a temporal grid laid out above the notation.

Imitating … continues work with ornamentation as presented by Silvestro Ganassi, in his treatise dal Fontego Opera intitulata Fontegara (Venice, 1535). These ornaments are not to be treated in a historical manner, but rather the performer is asked to simulate non-diatonic contours and gestures, often in competition with an already abundant notation. Such prolongation offered through archetypal symbols provides a fleeting logos that is demonstrably risky.