Wang Jian Min's masterclass

What a coincidence that JR had just analyzed mainland Chinese composer Wang Jian Min's 1st Erhu Rhapsody （王建民 之 第一二胡狂想曲）this semester and the composer came to Singapore to judge the Singapore National Chinese Music Competition and gave a composition masterclass. I went to the session with much eagerness, wanting to hear him talk about composing first-hand. What great initial disappointment it was when he announced that he didn't think it would be appropriate to conduct a composition masterclass in the context of this competition, instead, he would offer some guidance to performers playing his pieces. Fortunately, I did not then walked out, for his ensuing comments for the three performers revealed much about his thinking as a composer and how he hears music.

The first thing that struck a strong resonance in me was when he essentially echoed what Perahia had recently emphasized--the importance of expressing and shaping the music based on an understanding of the imagery or emotions evoked by the music. As he commented on different sections of the music, he was relating emotions to visual imageries, at times pointing to specific folk elements (e.g. the call-and-response of lovers in Mountain Songs 山歌, the sentiments 情怀of a peasant girl, particular tribal dances, etc). The overall shaping of the music was also important to him, especially when (as he said) he deliberately avoided the stereotypical ABA form and opted for multisectional organization. In particular, he called on the performers to give more thoughts on how to shape the many 散板 (metrically freer) passages that he uses in the introduction (引子) or transitions (衔接处).

The second thing which naturally caught my attention was his emphasis that the performer should at least know something about the composer's basic compositional materials. On his 1st Erhu Rhapsody, he revealed that its basic material is drawn from a very specific folk sources (he was not satisfied with the Erhu player's general reference to Yunnan)--the 飞歌 of the 苗族, a minority tribe in Yunnan (for other folk inspiration, see JR's blog). In this case, it is not a particular folk tune but a general musical feature: as manifested in this piece, it is D-F sharp-A with F-natural as a kind of altered note (变音). As JR had discovered, this four-note motive permeates the entire piece in different guises. What dawned on me was a subtle but important music-cultural difference in perspective: in set-theoretic terms, it is an (0347) where the two notes that form the maj/min third are implicitly equal and may be heard as evoking mixture; but Wang's explanation was more along the lines of Chinese traditional concepts of scale, writing on the board D-F sharp -A first, then speaking of the F-natural as a 变音. I should find out more about the Chinese concept here to see how it compares with the western concept of chromatic note. Certainly, it is his frequent melodic pairing of the two notes that distinguishes it from Western practices and gives this piece its characteristic colouring.

In wrapping up his masterclass, he reiterated that for him, there is no one definitive interpretation of his music: he sees the possibility of other viewpoints, different from his own, as long as these interpretations are logical and coherent (and, I suppose, musical engaging--since throughout the masterclass, his concern for the performer engaging the listener came across very strongly). For him, the space 空间 for creativity even in interpretation is very important. I think he would probably extend this space to analytical interpretation; I'm sure he'd be happy to see performers and analysts alike making sense of his multisectional organization (i.e. going beyond mere labelling and identifying of key/pitch centres)

Finally, I was much impressed by his depth of musical thinking AND hearing, which were at the same time anchored by a down-to-earth awareness of and ability to speak to the young music learners he was addressing. He knew when to elicit immediate changes from the performers and when to simply sow the seed. This was certainly great pedagogy in action--reaching down without talking down.

Oh yes, I almost forgot a profound observation he left with the audience: our Chinese music performance standard was very impressive, very promising, however, our performers were perhaps generally too prim and proper, t0o well brought up (太乖了), that's not good for performance and creativity (it's good to break a string sometimes, he told the guzheng player at one point).Well, it's good to be wild sometimes. :)