Performance Review | The Intersection of Avant-Garde Music and Eastern Aesthetics

On May 18th, as twilight painted the early summer night sky of Beijing, within the concert hall of the Central Conservatory of Music, the Chamber Orchestra of the School of Music, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), etched a unique cultural imprint on the Beijing Modern Music Festival with an ingeniously crafted concert.

With the rigorous academic lineage of the conservatory as its warp and the unbridled creativity of avant-garde artists as its weft, the pioneering nature of contemporary music and the poetic essence of Eastern aesthetics converged, weaving a refreshingly new tapestry of sound across the fault lines of tradition and modernity.

I. Creation Myth: Intertextuality and Rebirth of Eastern and Western Civilizations

When Joseph Haydn's score for "The Creation" transformed in the composer's ear into the clear ring of Pangu's world-creating axe, the folds of time and space were suddenly torn asunder by sound waves. The solemn chords of Western oratorios and the majestic spirit of Eastern mythology intermingled and fused in Ye Xiaogang's 2008 "Piano Trio," like yin and yang fish swirling and ascending in a stream of music. This was no mere cultural grafting, but a forging of new stars using musical notes as a crucible, refining the five-colored stones of Nüwa, who mended the heavens, with the fire of Prometheus, allowing the genetic codes of two civilizations to erupt in a creation-like roar upon the staff lines.

The cello, with its fixed-rhythm pizzicato, resembled the earth's rumble at the dawn of chaos, while the violin countered with a sharp, chromatic dance. The piano then embedded itself into the string texture with irregular accents, and the trio, through tearing and mending, reached the critical point of primordial chaos. At the piece's conclusion, the strings wove fierce tone clusters upon a D-flat foundation, the piano's dissonant notes like meteorites striking a sea of music. The three performers, in an unspoken understanding, abruptly cut off the final note—a decisiveness devoid of any sustain, akin to the thunderous collapse of Pangu's giant axe as he fell.

Unlike the epic reconstruction of Ye Xiaogang's work at the opening ceremony, this concert pierced the fabric of civilization with a more avant-garde touch. Yet, whether it was the grandeur of the opening or the modern interpretation of creation myths in this piece, its roots were deeply embedded in this ancient land beneath our feet. When the harmonics of the strings and the clusters of the piano resonated in the void, we finally understood: civilization, it turns out, consists of similar flowers blooming in different soils. They share a yearning for eternity, a questioning of existence, and an eternal gaze upon fleeting beauty. At this moment, applause thundered across the concert hall's dome, but the true creation myth had already been quietly completed in the fission of musical notes.

II. Dance of the Flying Deities: A Parable of Peace from the Dunhuang Murals

The Apsaras (Feitian) of the Dunhuang Grottoes, holding ancient konghou harps, seem to break through the walls, their robes scattering not only the vermilion and azurite of the High Tang Dynasty but also humanity's prayer for eternal peace. Chan Wing-wah's string quartet "Dunhuang Flying Apsaras" reconstructs the vibrant murals of the Mogao Caves through pitch, resurrecting on strings the prophecies penned by artists a millennium ago—only art can allow the wings of different civilizations to dance together under a peaceful sky. This work uses the form of the Apsaras to subtly allude to peace as a hidden sorrow of the modern world, and the texture of the string quartet is like a prism, refracting the composer's eternal questions about the world, peace, and other such themes.

The piece opens with the violin and viola intertwining on A and B-flat, creating a sharp sound like tearing silk. The cello strikes with sustained low-pitched accents, like war drums echoing from the depths of time and space. Ascending glissandi climb repeatedly, dozens of times, like the Apsaras struggling to break free from gravity. The "Ha!" shouted in unison by the four performers is both an explosion of musical sound and a cry from the soul.

Notably, the composer himself conducted, his style as clean and sharp as a blade, creating a subtle resonance with the peaceful order sought by the work. While metaphors of war rumbled continuously in the lower register, the Apsaras' prayers transformed into flowing clouds in the higher register, the two achieving a kind of poignant balance in the gaps between intervals.

III. Light of the Mayfly: The Poetics of Life in Ephemeral Eternity

The clarinet, like a firefly, flits through the twilight of the string quartet, Su Shi's sigh, "to entrust the mayfly to heaven and earth," reborn in contemporary musical rhythms. Gao Ping's "Mayfly" transforms the clarinet into the trajectory of a mayfly's beating wings, using string glissandi to sketch the shape of morning dew, making every note a fleeting imprint of life.

In the live performance, the violin initiated with a pizzicato tearing like silk. The clarinet suddenly shed its Western instrument guise, transforming into the plaintive cry of a Chinese xiao flute, its sound like a solitary orchid in a secluded valley, engaging in a millennium-spanning dialogue with the string quartet: at times intertwining like a dance of fate, at times soliloquizing like a soul's inquiry. The violin and viola players swayed with the rise and fall of the melody, a physical embodiment of the musical ideas and an allusion to the "mayfly" theme. Briefly holding their instruments horizontally, as if a mayfly briefly alighting between heaven and earth, they used their bodies as brushes to interpret the philosophical proposition of "born in the morning, dead by dusk." True eternity lies not in the length of life, but in the brilliance that erupts in an instant—just like music itself, which, though destined to dissipate into the void, once illuminated the spiritual firmament of humanity for a moment.

IV. Shadow of Mozart: Contemporary Echoes in the Folds of History

Jin Zhuocheng's "Amadior" acts like a prism, deconstructing and reorganizing motifs from Mozart's Sonata K.332, allowing its shadow to wander through the intervals of the 21st century. With a deconstructionist touch, he slices classical themes into memory fragments, then reassembles these familiar-sounding melodies with modern harmonies, akin to history being refracted and transformed in contemporary memory.

Rapid passages played by the flute and clarinet, like sharp blades, cut open the folds of time and space, demanding almost ruthless breath control. The percussionist, in an unconventional maneuver, used a bow on their instruments, causing wood and metal to vibrate together, creating unique sound effects. After the swift deconstructive passages retreated, the blues DNA of jazz subtly permeated the texture—cymbal rolls, double bass pizzicato, and jazz chords on the piano formed a cross-dimensional dialogue, with occasional accents tearing open improvisational rifts within the counterpoint.

V. Rite of Souls: A Paean to Life in the Rhythms of Chu Ci

"Li Hun" (Rite of Souls) awakens in contemporary rhythms, as Qu Yuan's hymn for sending off spirits traverses time and space, transforming into a mystical dialogue between instruments. Shen Yiwen's work of the same name takes the rhythms of primitive shamanistic music as its skeleton and the cadences of the Chu Ci (Songs of Chu) as its soul, reconstructing this sacrificial movement that spans millennia.

The piece begins with pizzicato from the violin and cello. The clarinet joins in due course, its tremolo outlining the eerie contours of shamanistic practices. The piano, with dance-like rhythms, seems to tread upon a sacrificial altar, the percussive effect of mallets striking strings evoking the "raising the drumstick and beating the drum" recorded in ancient texts of sacrificial scenes. Dissonant intervals roam through the texture, yet strangely erupt with the unique magnificent joy found in the "Nine Songs"—this is the dialectic of Eastern aesthetics, achieving harmony through conflict, glimpsing completeness in rupture. Following this, the piano embarked on a twenty-second solo statement, characterized by a strong sense of structure alternating with continually revolving and ascending melodies.

The five instruments then engage in a chase: the violin's chant, the cello's murmurs, the flute and clarinet's incantations, and the piano's chiming (like bells and qing stone chimes) sometimes stand apart as fragments of time and space, and at other times coalesce in counterpoint to form a complete altar. At the climax of the ensemble, we seem to see shamans from a thousand years ago dancing under the moonlight. Those ancient rituals, long sealed by the dust of historical records, are now, using the musical staff as their vessel, completing a lineage transmission through the resonance of sound waves.

VI. Autumn Water's Rippling Echo: A Modern Variation on Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly

In Yu Pengfei's "Autumn Water's Rippling Echo," composed in 2025, instrumental music serves as ink and brush to reconstruct the philosophical landscape of Zhuangzi's "Autumn Floods" (Qiu Shui). The flute is like a gentle breeze sweeping through reeds, the piano like autumn waters overflowing riverbanks, and the violin like a pale moon hanging in the sky; together, they weave a spatio-temporal resonance of "Tao follows Nature." The flutist and violinist performed standing, beginning synchronously in pitch but gradually unfolding independent melodic lines—the former outlining the mists of heaven and earth with long, flowing bows, the latter simulating the gathering and dispersing of mountain mists with agile, breathy tones, embodying the image of "all rivers flow into the sea" as described in Zhuangzi.

The piano, based on pentatonic melodies, exudes a strong Chinese character, outlining the imagery of rippling water through cyclical arpeggios that rise and fall, creating an intertextual link with the work's theme. When the movement reached its cadenza-like passage, the three instruments interwove in polyphony to create undulating waves of sound: the piano, with guqin-like harmonics, simulated the clear sound of a spring flowing over stones among pine trees; the violin, with wandering glissandi, sketched the contours of layered mountain ranges; and the flute, using breathy vibrato (qizhen yin), recreated the swaying dance of a bamboo forest.

This interweaving of classical instrumentation and contemporary metaphor is like a projection of Zhuangzi's state of "Heaven and Earth and I are born together." The seemingly gentle flow of music can carry the profound thoughts of "Tao follows Nature," reflect the essence of life understood by scholars amidst landscapes, and evoke an eternal quest for the realm of "Autumn Water."

VII. Colorful White: An Auditory Revolution of Color Minimalism

Li Ziao's "Colorful White" uses the string quartet as its canvas, deconstructing the image of "white" into a spectrum of light. The composer subverts visual dominance, allowing hearing to become the guide in exploring colorless color—opening a secret path to minimalist aesthetics beyond the aggressive interpretations of color in popular aesthetics.

The four string instruments constantly chase each other with subtly differing melodies. The violin produces harmonics by bowing near the end of the fingerboard, the viola creates rhythmic accents by striking the bridge with the frog of the bow, and the cello presents with canonic imitation. The four parts continuously vary within a seemingly similar framework, delivering a delicate and rich sonic experience, akin to the "five shades of ink" in Chinese ink wash painting. The four instruments consistently maintain a metaphysical restraint, yet through minute differences in bow pressure, contact point, and bowing speed, they construct an auditory field of intersecting light and shadow. Only then does one realize that "white" is never nothingness, but the primordial chaos that accommodates all existence. The most extreme minimalism is precisely a dialectical art that uses detail as its cutting edge.

From the Apsaras of Dunhuang to the shamanistic dances of Chu Ci, from Zhuangzi's Autumn Water to the mayfly's faint light, these seven works prove that true modernity is never an abandonment of tradition, but a repositioning of civilization's coordinates within the warp and weft of time and space. When the final note dissipated into the night sky, what we heard was not merely the end of the music, but the eternal march of the human spirit—a march that traverses time and space, crosses civilizations, and in the depths of every listener's soul, plays out their own creation myth.

This musical dialogue spanning Beijing and Hong Kong has transcended mere artistic performance to become a spiritual event of cultural reorganization. The rigorous academic foundation of the School of Music, CUHK-Shenzhen, and the avant-garde experimental spirit of the Beijing Modern Music Festival resonated perfectly in contemporary music. Their joint presentation is not only a tale of two cities in China's contemporary music landscape but also like a sonic key penetrating cultural barriers, painting a magnificent scroll of music that transcends time and space. As the stage lights dimmed, what lingered in the air was not just the reverberation of sound, but a glimpse into how this institution is reshaping the aesthetic boundaries of Chinese chamber music with irresistible momentum.

Executive Director | Guo Hai'ou 

Executive Assistants | Zhang Shuhao, Yin Nan 

Article Written by | Xu Yaqi 

Photography by | Zhang Yaxuan