Content area
Full text
A comparative study of three commemorative compositions-Tai-Bong Chung's Requiem II (2014), Toshio Hosokawa's Threnody (2011), and Bright Sheng's Nanking! Nanking! (1999/2000)-reveals important aspects of interculturality, the complex and dynamic interaction between different cultures, in music of the twenty-first century. In these works, Chung (Korean), Hosokawa (Japanese), and Sheng (Chinese) connect Western and East Asian musical styles to deliver social and historical messages criticizing the irrationality and lack of responsibility leading to the accidents. This method involves both the "internal" relationship between East and West, and the "external" relationship between music and social issues. At the same time, each piece displays highly specific funerary cultures and concepts of death, all within the context of the composers' personal aesthetics. I argue that viewing these compositions through the lens of interculturality reveals possibilities for transcending cultural boundaries; by finding the connections between the fundamentals of multiple cultures as refracted through unique compositional voices, complex elements of music and society are better understood as closely connected with those of the community and the individual.
Keywords: aesthetics, commemorative music, funerary ritual, interculturality, East Asia
Western classical musical styles and idioms have fortified the works of composers in Korea, Japan, and China since the inception of contemporary compositional practice in East Asia. Despite a dominance of musical idioms and styles from the European artistic tradition, many East Asian composers have long desired to balance Western classical references with local aesthetics. While some mid-twentieth-century East Asian compositions sought such a balance within compositional paradigms positioning "The West" as a center and "The East" as cultural flavor, time has revealed an increasing emphasis on juncture and fusion, rather than on assimilation to the European artistic tradition, in the name of interculturality. The development of "a special form of musical intercultural dialogue" has become critical in East Asian composition, taking on a variety of forms depending on compositional style and methodology, as well as on the identities and cultural traditions of individual composers.1 Composers such as Isang Yun (Korea, 1917-1992), WenChung Chou (China, born 1923), and Toru Takemitsu (Japan, 1930-1996) paved the way for succeeding generations to consider further issues of fusion and balance.2 Drawing on vivid cultural metaphors, such as calligraphic pen strokes, and expressive idioms, Yun, Chou, and Takemitsu led the...