Shi, Propensity of Things, Landscape, and Musical Gesture in Contemporary Chinese Composition

• In Event: Musical Crossings: Tradition and Rupture in Asian Identity Formation

Abstract

François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi (勢)—propensity of things—as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture from war strategy to aesthetics, and to uncover the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking. This paper examines musical gesture that reflects this unique Chinese concept, shi, i.e., disposition or circumstance, power or potential. In discussing Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, scholars of Western music theory such as Robert Hatten has described musical gesture as “energetic shaping of sound through time,” with a focus on the way it conveys affective motion, emotion, and continuities of shape and force. Shi in Chinese music can be described in similar ways. Yet it is at the same time different in the dynamism produced, and the tension that animated various elements to create a single gesture. Especially, I contend that in Chinese music such as guqin, the aesthetics is defined by the potential, the energy, and shi that generate musical gestures.
This paper will show how exploration of such “propensity of things” in Chinese music aesthetics can offer the expressive interpretation of significant musical gestures shared in major contemporary Chinese compositions by Guo Wenjing (Beijing), Chen Qigang (Paris), Ma Shui-long (Taipei) and Chou Wen-Chung (New York). Two types of gestures will be the focus of this study: (1) the musical gestures derived from Chinese percussion music and how they work together to produce an expressive dynamic process; (2) the musical gestures derived from the art of landscape painting and calligraphy.

Author

• Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Rutgers University