Partch and Cantonese opera

 Cantonese opera, San Francisco, H. Partch, these three things may sound irrelevant at the first glance. However, these three things documented the very first scene of Chinese music exported to America.

In California, where Partch was born, living and dead, Gold Rush first lured them in 1848, Chinese immigrants had come to the United States to work. About 175,000 Chinese immigrants who entered San Francisco through Angel Island between the great earthquake in 1906 and the Exclusion Act's repeal of many Chinese in 1943 by the Magnuson Act. The immigrants also brought with them a desire for entertainment from home, a desire musicians and touring companies eagerly filled as Chinatown prospered.  Chinese opera was regaining its foothold in Chinatown in the 1920s; Cantonese opera flourished from this early start until the 1890s and reached its peak in 1920’s. Mei Lanfang and Ma Shizeng toured the United States in 1930 and 1931–32, respectively.

Chinese music kept resurfacing throughout Partch's life and career by pointing to his parents and the atmosphere of his childhood home. Partch grew up with Chinese lullabies sung by his parents and mentioned that he attended Cantonese opera concerts as a teenager. His parents had lived in China and knew Chinese (see more). He placed the music and performance styles of Chinese opera at the heart of his aesthetic, particularly in his large-scale music-theater works of the 1950s and 1960s.  China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. 

The exposure of Chinese opera opened a door for Partch of broadly Eastern music theater and was used to show opposition to the West. Through this door, he wanted to trace back the original integrity of music. The evolution of Partch's use of Chinese music and its impact on his aesthetic therefore mirrors his movement from Monophony to Corporeality. The Monophony refers to the song practice since ancient times, speech, intonation, rhythm in speaking, as the origin. As the song extended, Corporeality, the theatrical works like Cantonese opera, integrate all sorts of performing arts, with concrete meaning, with emotionally "tactile". While in the West had music became a means of communication without reliance on any other art form. Music was kept separate from painting, which was kept separate from dance, which was kept separate from drama, which in Partch's Genesis of Music describes the "abstract" developed.


GRANADE, S. (2010) “Rekindling Ancient Values: The Influence of Chinese Music and Aesthetics on Harry Partch,” Journal of the Society for American Music. Cambridge University Press, 4(1), pp. 1–32. doi: 10.1017/S1752196309990812.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post-spectralism influence on tuning

According to Helmholtz (2011), a musical note is due to the fundamental frequency and the quality of a musical sound is due to the presence of upper partials. For traditional western music, pitch perception is mainly fundamental, rather than the frequencies in the spectrum which Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) describes as a “note proper” tradition. The spectralism composers shifted the domain from absolute pitches, intervals and chords to the spectrum. Spectral music is a complex approach to timbre, Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) classified 9 tendencies and their possibilities in spectral music. To conclude the techniques, tuning the frequencies according to the harmonic series is the major approach; while working with noise, generated digitally and/or extended techniques on instruments, is a sort of timbral dissonance which dilutes the pitch perception of a musical sound. Teodorescu-Ciocanea describes inharmonicity as the combination of frequencies that are not integral multiples of the funda
Read more

Haba's field shifting - and the expansion of traditional functional harmony

Image
Hába characterizes the quarter-tone gamut as separated into two fields, one half comprising the twelve conventional pitches, and the other half, shifting all the twelve notes by a quarter-tone, the twelve quarter-tone pitches. In harmony, Passages occur in which chords composed purely of conventional pitches alternate with chords composed purely of quarter-tone pitches. Two fields are not always rejecting each other when he equally divided a perfect 4th (5 semitones)into 2 equal intervals, equal 2.5 for each, the 0.5 quartertones always step into the other field. Sometimes, this fourth interval can be further divided into 2.5+2+0.5 or other permutations. This kind of splitting a fourth can be traced to ancient greek tetrachord, a scale of four notes, bounded by the interval of a perfect fourth. A chord across both fields, the chord spell like a flatter dominant 7th chord. the 7th harmonic on harmonic series is quite flat (-31cents). This chord combines both fields sounds better accordi
Read more

Temperament, Tuning, and Timbre -- the underrated trinity in music

 The trinity here is not about the Christianity faith, but similar to the idea of the Christian doctrine of it defines God as being one God existing in three coequal, the core and fundamental definition, temperament, tuning, and timbre (TTT) are the basic building blocks of music, yet, underrated and even neglected in our music education system. TTT correlates with each other. A note is played, it carries out a series of frequencies, the harmonic series. The series multiples from the fundamental frequency with a series of integers (1f 2f 3f 4f 5f 6f 7f 8f 9f 10f 11f 12f 13f...). The loudness of individual particles, and different patterns, creates different timbres. View the series in a different way, the combination of the integers creates intervals. The combination of the beginning of the series sounds more harmonious and vice versa; simple ratios sound pure and vice versa. The pure perfect 5th interval is based on the ratio of 2:3 (2nd and 3rd harmonics at the same time), Pytheogoro
Read more