Music From the Mountain For Di and Orchestra
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Abstract
After studying abroad, I have started my research on the comparison between the western and the traditional Chinese orchestras. The idea of forming the traditional Chinese orchestra came from the influence of the "Total Westernization" at the beginning of the 20ᵗʰ century in China. Some musicians and composers who had studied abroad tried to put Chinese instruments together to imitate the structure of western orchestra, and started to adopt its instrumental and compositional techniques in new works. The traditional Chinese orchestra has been developing for more than eighty years to become the one we can see nowadays. There are four main sections in the traditional Chinese orchestra - winds, percussion, plucked, and bowed instruments. I started composing works for the traditional Chinese orchestra since 2003 and have finished four concertos for Chinese instrument and the Chinese orcehstra. After coming to the US, I had an opportunity to learn more about western orchestra and thought about the differences between the Chinese and the western orchestras. Although the techniques of orchestration for the Chinese orchestra are adopted from the western, the component of the sonority is quite different. For example: there is only one plucked instrument - the harp in the western orchestra, but a whole section of plucked instruments in the Chinese orchestra.There is a full brass section in the western orchestra, but there is no such powerful and solid sound in the Chinese orchestra. The western string section covers almost 6 octaves, but the whole bowed-string section only covers 5 octaves. Moreover, the sonority of the string section is coherent, but the sound of the bowed instruments is relatively distinctive. Music from the Mountain was composed for Di and traditional Chinese orchestra in 2005. I attempted to preserve the original concept and structure of this piece, and re-orchestrated it for the western orchestra. Instead of making a simple arrangement, I tried to find the characters of all instruments in the western orcehstra, and use the effectively and idiomatically. The western-orchestral version of Music from the Mountain is not simply moving note-by-note from the original version, but a new hybrid between the two.
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Abstract -- Instrumentation -- Notation -- Score -- Vita
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D.M.A.