Yayue Project with Nanhua Ethnomusicology Dept. (Dec. 2021) 跟南華大學民族音樂學系的雅樂團合作：雅樂現代創作研究（21年12月起）

I’ve been working with the Yayue ensemble in the Ethnomusicology department at Nanhua University to compose some new works for this ancient and very special group of instruments.  The Chinese name for this music, Yayue (雅樂), literally translates as “elegant music”. the most common English translation is Gagaku, but this is not completely adequate, as Gagaku refers to the Japanese manifestation of this genre.  Whereas Gagaku was the music and dance of the imperial court of tenth century Kyoto, Yayue seems to be much more ancient (by an entire millennium).  This whole picture is complicated by the fact that the type of Yayue that has been preserved dates to the Tang dynasty, and in that form it even seems to have been preserved better by the Japanese than the Chinese, with the renaissance of research into Yayue in the Chinese world really only dating to recent decades.

This is truly amazing music and an extraordinary instrumentarium, and I’m relishing the chance to write ever more ambitious works for the students.  My first conservative attempt at composing for this group are three pentatonic melodies written for the Confucian “capping ceremony”, which involves three separate rituals of “capping” a young adult with different types of hats, marking their coming-of-age.  My melodies follow closely the proportions of three extant Yayue melodies, but they are not traditional Yayue melodies.  They are instead geometric transformations/defamiliarisations of the traditional melodies.  In this respect I’m still working on how to defamiliarise these melodies in even more fascinating ways.    The students of the Yayue ensemble sight-read through my melodies, and I’m putting these clips up as a record of a very tentative start to a hopefully long-lived collaboration.

《三加冠》Three Yayue for the Confucian “Capping Ceremony”

1. 《缁布冠》

“Capping of the Black-felt “Zi” Cloth”

2. 《皮弁》

“Leather Strap Cap”

3. 《爵弁》

“The Noble’s Cap”