I answered this questionnaire for the pianist and musicologist I-Hsuan Olivia Tsai in March last year. She has been doing research into Western composers living and working in Asia, and has given presentations on my music alongside that of Paul San Gregory and Michael Timpson. Her next Lost in Diversity presentation will be at the CMS National Conference in November 2024, at which she will present on our music, including my piece for soprano, flute and piano, Songs of the Raccoon Dogs (2023).
I came across this questionnaire recently and found it interesting reading my answers to Olivia’s questions from last year, so I thought it worthwhile sharing them here:
Lost in Diversity
How is living in a place with very different cultures affect your creative process, if at all?
My almost eleven years in Asia have inevitably affected my creative process, but it is almost impossible to imagine the counterfactual. I have no idea what sort of music I would be writing if I had never left the UK. I can only reflect upon the environmental influences of which I’m aware.
I think there are probably two main areas of influence. One lies in the emphasis on traditional (Western) compositional techniques, which I inherited from my time both at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing (where I studied conducting from 2013-2014 on a Chinese government scholarship (中央政府留學基金委員會的獎學金)）, and subsequently as Head of Composition at Tianjin Conservatory of Music, where I was responsible for overseeing the composition curriculum at the heart of which was this traditional training. The “four core subjects” (四大件) that are taught to every composition student in every Chinese conservatoire– harmony, formal analysis, counterpoint and orchestration– inculcate in Chinese composers the importance of traditional technique, and this powerfully influences the music scene and composers’ self-conception. By contrast, these core subjects are hardly taught to anyone in the UK now, and there is generally a belief that they are irrelevant to modern art-music or commercial composition. This leads to a very different attitude in the two countries towards “newness”, individuality of “voice”, personal expression/self-realisation, and the relationship of the artist with their audience and the wider society.
Although I do not especially consider the composer of art music to be obliged to compose music that serves anyone except themself, I think being in China for seven years did prompt me to reflect more upon, and to seek to find my own understanding of, this relationship. Unlike many composers thoroughly ensconsed in the avant-garde tradition (and whose careers have perhaps prospered while remaining entirely within that tradition), I do not choose (or feel compelled) to compose with only one “unique” or challenging voice. I am willing to adjust my language, sometimes to a performance situation, sometimes to the needs or interests of the particular performers of the premiere. I think I’ve made a good attempt in a lot of pieces at staying right on the edge of the boundaries set for a particular performance, or straying just enough beyond those boundaries so as to make the piece challenging and stimulating (for me, if for no one else).
There are a great many composers like me, so I am not claiming to be unusual in this respect, but my framing, and the circumstances that led to the necessity of my doing such “adjustments”/careful judging of boundaries, might be different from many other composers.
There were two occasions, however, when I deliberately resisted pressure to compose something that paid deference to Chinese tradition. My piece for thirteen Chinese intrumentalists Iceflow (IV) deliberately avoids using any traditional musical gestures or performance techniques associated with the instruments for which it is written. I consciously attempted to treat the Chinese instruments as pure “sound-producing tools”, and to compose a work with its own totally abstract (non-referential) structure. In my piece for solo traditional sheng, Sculpture in Melody, I even tried to write “against”the limitations of the instrument, by selecting a Scottish bagpipe melody as the thematic material, and exploring the extremes of polyphony that are possible on the instrument. This latter piece in particular led to an arduous and ultimately unsatisfactory process of revision, discussion, and rejection between me and the performer. I worked on revising the piece over the course of three years, trying to incorporate all the feedback and changes requested by the performer, only ultimately to have it rejected by her. It has never been performed in public, and only the first half of the work has been recorded.
In Taiwan, I feel like I’ve returned somewhat to a much more familiar milieu. Taiwan is not marred by the nonsense of the 「中國派」(see my comments below). I feel that Taiwan is much closer to the UK in the diversity of languages employed by contemporary composers, and individual composers are more likely to be focussed on expounding their own “voice” in their music, rather than demonstrating technical prowess or timbral variety for the sake of proving mastery, which was more likely to be the case in China.
This has had the effect of emboldening me to explore more challenging aspects of my compositional preoccupations since arriving in Taiwan, compared to when I was in China– although this may in part be because my technique has developed to a level that allows me to do so. It is hard to say whether or not it would be exactly the same situation had I spent seven years in Taiwan and then moved to China for four years. I suspect not, however, if only for political reasons.
In recent pieces, Moon (for alto sax, zhonghu, marimba doubling vibraphone, and guzheng), Walking by Willow Creek (sheng, pipa and guzheng), and my most recent work “Songs of the Raccoon Dogs” (soprano, flute doubling piccolo, and piano), I have been more willing than before to embrace the characteristics of traditional Chinese melodies, allowing them to be audible in my music. Rather than rejecting tradition as a reaction against perceived social pressure, as I had in the two “China-period” pieces described above, I am happier for the “traditional” elements to be audibly present in my music now, because they are more organically part of the language and the focus of the musical development. In Moon, for example, I juxtapose transformations of A-Bing’s 《二泉映月》 and Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The main theme of Walking by Willow Creek is the result of a deep analysis of the motivic structure of the melody of 《茉莉花》.
Incidentally, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the “New Waves” (「新潮」) that happened roughly simultaneously in China and Taiwan gave birth to quite different sorts of figureheads and aesthetics. For the Chinese new wave, there was from the outset a politicisation/racialisation of art music composition, such that those composers were at pains to incorporate explicit elements of Chinese music into their music, and these elements were “programmatised”, in that their presence in the music was performative: a statement was being made about the artist’s ethnic/cultural identity. In Taiwan, avant-garde music did not ever seem to be characterised by the same sort of self-reflexive identity politics, and perhaps paradoxically both gave rise to more distinctive individual voices (I’m thinking of, say, 賴德和 or 潘皇龍), while generally speaking maintaining a much closer affinity between Taiwanese new music and the European/American avant-gardes. (This is just my impression, it needs research to back it up!).
In the country where you live, do you feel the community support diversity both musically and socially? Why or why not?
Yes, I think diversity is very much supported in Taiwan. It certainly was not in China, and my impression (although I have not been there for four years) is that it is less and less so. The problem in Taiwan is that music is massively devalued in Taiwan. In this respect China actually outshines Taiwan– although this may be because of music’s instrumentalisation and politicisation in China, which might make it more likely to be given institutional and government support.
As a westerner in Asia, do you feel included in the community? Why or why not?
Yes. As I state below, I feel that I am not given (particularly) special treatment, but this also means that I feel included and integrated into Taiwanese society.
Do you feel different or are reminded of your difference (whether intentionally or not)?
Much less often than I was in China. This could be because my language and cultural competency are much better now. It is hard to compare.
Do you feel you are treated equally, and/or given equal chances in general (or perhaps more advantage)?
During my time in China (2012-2019):
I’ll first address the question of employment in a conservatoire/university: There is a very contradictory situation in China. Foreigners are, superficially, treated respectfully and even valorised, and there is a constant mind-set of comparing China and “abroad” (by which is usually meant the West). I do believe that my ethnicity played a very large role in my getting my first full-time job in Tianjin, but that is partly structural, in that foreigners can only be employed in higher education institutions on temporary contracts or special “foreign expert” （類似「特聘外籍專家」） or “attracting foreign talent” (類似「外籍人才引進」)schemes, and so there is a permanent apartheid between the local workers and foreigners. The latter are never able to be properly ensconsed in the employment/promotional structures (升等，在中國叫做「聘職稱」). This means that if an institution is able to apply for such a scheme, then as one of very few foreigners in your field either already in, or willing to move to, China, it *may* be the case that your chances of getting a position are higher. The flip-side to this is that one is just as easily terminated at the end of your particular scheme; what’s more, you are never really integrated into the higher education system, especially into the professional development and administrative aspects of the profession, and so one lacks the nurturing of one’s professional skills that one ought to get (and does get in the Western system). You are never seen by the Chinese as “one of us”.
Regarding artistic practice: My experience is that it is very hard to get music performed or have performers invite you to compose for them. If you are not a world famous composer, or at least later in your career and of particular standing somewhere in the West (I have observed that in China people place especial store on a person’s standing in their own culture or previous country of residence) or especially well-connected, you will not get asked to compose music and you will not get opportunities. It is another kind of apartheid: if you, as a Western composer resident in China, were to be given opportunities, then you are depriving a Chinese person of the same opportunity, and this will rarely be acceptible. It would be much more likely that a distinguished professor at a well-renowned institution abroad might be given such an opportunity, but even that would seem to be a rare occurence.
It is worth noting that a Westerner trying to build a career in China is caught in a contradictory situation, in that they find it difficult to get interest in China, but they are also cut off from opportunities “back home” by virtue of their living in China. The UK is open to giving opportunities to anyone of any ethnicity as long as they are resident there, and in fact there are active efforts towards “positive” discrimination to disproportionately give opportunities to various minority groups. Diversity is the goal. I found myself in a situation where the place I Iived prejudicially favoured “local” composers, while the place of my birth and nationality favoured people that lived there, *especially* non-majority identities, and so I Iost out to a considerable degree on both counts.
Taiwan (2019-today):
Employment: I am definitely NOT given any preferential treatment in Taiwan, neither in my job, nor as a composer. Or perhaps I should say, no (or very few) concessions are made for the fact that I am a foreigner and non-native mandarin speaker in terms of what is expected of me as a full-time professor in a university. The initial transition was, unexpectedly, the hardest of my life (I mistakenly thought that my hard-won cultural competency garnered in China would be largely sufficient for the transition, but I vastly underestimated the differences in behaviour, communication, procedures and educational practice between the two countries). I think the lack of concessions made towards me in my job is a good thing, however, as I have been forced (and it was a very arduous process) to integrate into the higher education environment in a way that China never gave me an opportunity to do so.
There is an interesting situation here, in that there are a lot (many tens) of PhD composers, many educated abroad, who do not have a full-time position here, and live off a mixture of different adjunct teaching positions, with a lot of travel time between one place and another, or maybe have jobs which are not primarily music-related. I was very lucky that I was able to get a full-time position in Taiwan, and at least in that instance I was de facto favoured over other Taiwanese applicants: it is impossible to say if ethnicity had any influence there, or if my previous position in Tianjin was the principal factor.
Regarding artistic practice: it is hard to say if generally I might or might not be discriminated against. I do know of a particular instance where I was specifically not chosen for an opportunity (this was admitted to me personally by an insider) because they wanted to give a chance to composers who have recently graduated and returned to Taiwan, and are yet to have full-time (and perhaps not even part-time) positions. My understanding of the thinking behind this was that, in order for “young” composers to have a chance of getting a job position, they need to have performances of their music. Even though I was *also* a recent arrival, and not at all established or connected in Taiwan, and also practically unperformed in Taiwan, I was considered not so “in need” of a performance. I have suspected that other missed opportunities have been similarly motivated, but I have no evidence for those cases.
I have recently started to get to know many other composers and performers, and to feel much more a proper part of the community here. I had two performances last year; I have another two planned for this year. Things are perhaps picking up a little, but it has taken me three years of hard work even just to get this tiny amount of momentum.
As an addendum to all the above: it may be that my music was not to people’s liking/did not suit particular political ideologies that favoured certain stylistic traits over others. This will certainly have been the case, and became increasingly the case, during my seven years in China. Since around 2017, there has been an overarching emphasis on the 「中國派」, which is an entirely artificial, top-down imposed and politically ideological (and even racialist) concept which has little to do with what Chinese composers might otherwise be interested in composing.
How would you describe yourself as a composer? What are your inspirations and influences?
I am a composer of notated art music, rooted in the Western modernist/avant-garde tradition, and possessing a particular lineage through my teacher, Michael Finnissy, to “New Complexity”. This last term is problemmatic, but I think it does have utility, referring to a kind of avant-garde art music that possesses an especially complex structural discouse built on complex musical materials, with complex and detailed notation. I write a lot for Chinese traditional instruments, and I have also attempted to incorporate elements of traditional Chinese musical materials and aesthetics into my pieces, and this perhaps differentiates me from other new complexity or post-new complexity composers. Other influences include Anglican choral music, spectralism, and compositional techniques of medieval and Renaissance choral music.
What pieces with piano would you recommend for me to feature in the presentation, and why?
None of my solo piano pieces have a particularly obvious connection to Asian music/philosophy/culture.
I have a recent set of “Hoklo folk transcriptions” for soprano, flute and piano, called Songs of the Raccoon Dogs. You might find my re-interpretation of these 福佬歌謠 interesting, in relation to my harmonization of largely pentatonic melodies, vocal embellishments, and the concept of transcription (in Busoni’s sense) and notation.
I have a piece for treble voices and piano accompaniment setting Su She’s poem 赤壁懷古，called Red Cliff / 《赤壁》。This piece exclusively uses five-note sets, including the pentatonic scale, as well as the “African pentatonic scale”, and (I think, but I’d have to go back and check my sketches) Indonesian or Japanese scales. I use these scales not so much as cultural emblems, than as pure pitch sets which I freely transpose/intermix as I require different harmonic colours/tensions.
If you were interested I could try composing something for you, but I know that time is short!