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Organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, commonly known as The Met, a musical presentation from five Chinese was to perform on the so-awaited Music from China. On the 19th of January 2010, at the Central Park located venue in New York, United States. The concert, starred by Frederick Rose, who was the curator in charge, was to take place at the auditorium at eight at the night (The Met). The auditorium was filled with people by seven while the musicians occupied the stage with their instruments and the curator-led the proceedings. Organizers were recognized and given a chance to share the gravity with which the concert should be held.
The event aimed to appreciate and preserve the old cultures with which on that particular day it focused on the Chinese (The Met). Furthermore, the curator revealed that the performance would be about the exhibition: The worlds of Luo Ping, who happened to be a Buddhist artist back in the seventeen century who portrayed life experiences in art.
The group leader, who happened to be called Susan Cheing, was given the stage to facilitate the presentation. Being the director and founder, she elaborated on the vision she had of forming the musical group. The group was formed to preserve the Chinese culture and help the community at large by addressing some of the societal issues like being orphaned, as in the case of Luo of Ping (The Met). She further introduced the remaining four members with whom only one was male. It came to light that Chinese music gains its rich sonorities and compelling melodies on string instruments.
The Pipa was considered the Chinese lute of the plucked instrument family. It has four strings, four tuning pegs, and twelve to twenty-six frets with a wooden body and is designed according to the user’s handedness. The Ruan, commonly known as the moon guitar, is relatively larger but appears in size based on the type of pitch required, which was bigger to provide a base. The Yangqin, commonly hammered dulcimer, happened to be one of the biggest, with a body composed of one hundred and forty-four strings. It was adopted in the 17th century due to trade with the Middle East and achieved much popularity among the Chinese.
The strings are struck with pair of bamboo hammers having rubber tips on the ends, making a crisp and soft sound. The Zheng, also known as Guzheng, made of silk strings and bamboo frames, is played with hands giving strong melodies. Lastly, the Erhu, which was to be played by the male musician, was bowed.
The performance kicked off as the musicians held their places, and the audience became quiet and attentive. The start was smooth as the Erhu was played to give soft touches while complementing the Yangqin. A short pause was taken, and the audience took the chance to clap to appraise the expertise within the kickoff handled (The Met). Other performers who joined in the music performance sounded instrumental since the chordophone instruments had their strings vibrating to release the sounds. The vibration was produced by plucking, as in the case of Zheng, and bowing in the case of Erhu, which produced a sharper sound and striking like in Yangqin making the mode of delivery balanced.
The tone and quality of the sounds varied, with the high-pitched and nasal tones being dominant as the sounds were striking. At times, they appeared bright as if they were ushering in a new dawning, which is why they are often used in Chinese films and are brassy considering the instruments played. The metallic tone was also experienced in some points where the strings were more striking.
On the rhythmical part, several segments could be denoted from the sounds of the performance. In particular, the musical rhythm came out to be more of a regular pulse. In the performance given, Chinese music can be ascertained to have a smoothly continuous tempo lacking sharp breaks as in other music genres. Its tempo happened to speed up, escalating to higher levels before achieving going down slowly. Discerning the music meters, Chinese music, which had the duple rhythm, majorly had a meter of 4/4 and 2/4 (Panda et al., 622). The sounds happened to come out in a pattern of predictable beats with few repeated rhythmic patterns helping to achieve tension. There were no polyrhythms since the music majorly exhibited the duple pattern of rhythm.
Exploring the melody sub-sectors, Chinese music majorly utilizes five notes of melodies but sometimes seven. The melody lines appeared to be varied, and they appeared to have been composed with simple phrases. The tones when studied tend to have a mid-tone that varies in shape. Chinese music mainly exploited the pentatonic scale with intervals almost as similar to the major pentatonic scale. Its mode happened to consist of recurring patterns while analyzing the motives. The motives of the music trumpeted short distinct ideas in a repeated manner (Panda et al., 625). Considering there was no provided text, the text setting could not be determined.
Several substituents could be noted on the side of textures like two independent melodies were homophonic. Each melody came out with one or more supporting lines since the performance was of ancient origin. However, some aspects of heterophony can be argued that they had crept in due to the sound of a single melody in different simultaneous interpretations (Panda et al., 623). The motion could be termed oblique since the intervals between sounds were maintained and converged at some points. Relating the oblique motion to hocketing helped in alternating between the lead performer and others at different points and later converging to perform together.
Considering the antiphony in the music, they majorly appeared to overlap with the takeover of different instrumentals. The feature led to the harmony between the chords as they appeared in groups of simultaneous notes, with the lead melodies having support from other melodies.
Regarding form, many points can be taken into notice, with one being the section. The music could be entirely judged to have changes in melody, text, texture, tempo, rhythm, and dynamics. Some like melody appeared repetitive, but the rhythm achieved a non-repetitive flow. Instrumentation happened to stand out as being the only part of a performance that was unchanged. Considering the phrase of the performance, the melody happened to be broken into smaller segments due to the high pitch in indifferent lengths in a repetitive manner. The music was well versed with stanzas of the same melodies, but there was no established chorus therein.
The performance lasted for an hour, after which the performers received a standing ovation accompanied by a round of applause due to the excellent performance displayed. The curator finally ended the concert as people headed to their homes while a few still lingered around for their businesses.
Work Cited
Panda, Renato, Ricardo Malheiro, and Rui Pedro Paiva. “Novel audio features for music emotion recognition.” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 11.4 (2018): 614-626.
The Met. “Masterpieces of Chinese Music: A Musical Performance by Music from China.” YouTube, 2010. Web.
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