Research on Peking opera (Pian 1975, Rao 2007, Wang 2022) has focused on the historical background, Chinese aesthetics, and music and philosophy. A few scholars have compared the structure of Peking opera with western musical form theory, while analyzing the melodies of Peking Opera according to the Chinese modal system. This presentation also compares Chinese folk music with western music theory but will focus on exploring new ways of understanding form and development through analyzing Chinese folk song. Also, I will discuss how the compositional techniques express the meaning of the lyrics in the context of the Chinese modal system.

I will use Lao-Sheng Er-Huang Yuan-Ban as an example and focus on its version of “period” structure in musical form and its musical development compared with Western music. Also, I will consider the ways that the lyrics motivate the melodic development, because of the pitched nature of Chinese pronunciation and the lyric structure. For musical form, there are two significant differences between western and Chinese musical context; first, in Western music, the restatement or varied repetition mostly refers to the consistency of melodic outline, rhythm and harmony, while in Peking Opera, restatement mainly refers to the consistency of the basic tune, central tone and sub-phrase structure. Second, the sequence of Chinese modes sometimes hints at what lyrics cannot express, through uncertain or hesitant changes in gong systems, based on a difference of one note. In addition, I find that whether the usual Chinese speaking tone is consistent with the melodic outline can help to reflect the inner emotions of the protagonists: if the melody diverges from the usual speaking tone, it represents complex and deep emotions. The rhyme of lyrics reflect musical form as well.

Peking Opera is typical Chinese folk music and it’s important to analyze it from the perspective of the Chinese modal system, as well as understanding its points of contact with Western formal theory. This will help us explore more possible varieties of musical language and their points of contact.

This study focuses on the modernist techniques used by Chinese American composers (Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Zhou Long). It offers a reading of their use of post-tonal gestures as stylized portrayals of folk musical practices from the East.

With Western musical discourse well studied and appreciated by the middle-to-upper-class Chinese in the twentieth century, modern Chinese musical expressions and composition techniques have assimilated Western idioms. One example is using harmonic seconds and tritones to depict “ethnic colors” (Zeng and Tong 1982) in regional folk music; Chen Yi has also discussed interval class 1 as a signature sound in fiddling practice. The persistence of nearly-perfect intervals found in all composers in their Chinese-suggesting pieces could be traced to such a stylized effort in representing Chinese folk cultures and creating a modernist soundscape.

The four composers also use modernist approaches to “undo” state nationalist intervention in folk music from written sources. This allows them to create a less refined soundscape from the imagined “root” of Chinese culture. Anthologized folk songs published by the Chinese government tend to be metrically regularized and temper the regional flavors with simple, diatonic melodies. To recreate the indigenous flavor, Sheng, for example, distorts the notated rhythm through additive means and introduces embellishing notes to the transcribed melody, often using half steps or large leaps. Newly composed, atonal fragmented gestures used in tandem with folk song quotations also unite the composer’s ethnic sentiments with the nationalist culture. With the amateur music makers in rural communities being embraced as successors of Chinese ethnic cultures, the pitch and rhythm complexity and unpredictability may also be interpreted as imitating the folk practice's imprecise and spontaneous music-making processes.

Therefore, post-tonal gestures and compositional processes are as powerful as the direct quotation of Chinese folk music elements expressing composers’ ethnic heritage deemed lost to modernity. Using such strategies, Chinese American composers depict an imperfect, amateur, rural Chinese image that is perpetuated with its foreignness while being able to be blended into the modern, Western musical space.

The 1937 manifesto Kokutai no Hongi dictated the modern national mission: “to build up a new Japanese culture by adopting and sublimating Western cultures with our national entity as the basis, and to contribute spontaneously to the advancement of world culture” (Hall, ed. 1949, 183). Encapsulating the paradoxical joint projects of Japanism and Westernization, the text critiques “abstract thought” as the peril of “Western liberalism” and extols instead, “concrete creation” as a Japanese artistic practice—a distinction also found in musical discourse, which claimed composition in the realm of “creation” [創造/sōzō] rather than the homonymic “imagination” [想像/sōzō]. Curious, then, that a significant fraction of contemporary compositions were fantasy pieces, and that fantasy was theorized as one of three compositional types alongside the sonata and variation. Fantasy, to be clear, indexes a European art music category purporting a freedom of expression and fancifulness of thought that seems antithetical to the warring nation’s increasing regulations over the imagination and its expressions. How, then, did musical fantasy serve the national polity? How was musical fantasy conceived as a musical form in this adoptive phase of Western style composition as a “Japanese” art?

In this paper, I analyze Sōkichi Ozaki’s Phantasie und Fuge (1936) and the theories on fantasy penned by his teacher Saburō Moroi. Examined relative to the Kokutai and Alan Tansman’s theory of “the rhetoric of unspoken fascism,” I argue that musical fantasy upholds an imperial philosophy that similarly distingishes abstract from concrete form. As I demonstrate, Ozaki signals a formal topography using trite tonal conventions, deploying what he calls a “model form.” Form here functions as a fungible organizational and rhetorical device rather than an abstracted order of events, just as the Kokutai emphasizes “formal qualities” like repetition over “such matters as premises, transitions, or conclusions” (Tansman 2009, 152). Noting Moroi’s claim that the “fantasy type” lacks formal expectations, I conclude that musical fantasy becomes justified as concrete creation by appropriating, or sublimating, Germanic Formenlehre. Joining the conversation on German-Japanese musical relations and an anticolonial re-disciplining of comparative music theory, I show how sociocultural values and politics of fantasy inform compositional practice.