Chen Yi is a remarkable composer who has achieved worldwide acclaim for her many compositions–compositions that seek to reconcile–or at least convincingly meld–the disparate musical styles of East and West.\u00a0 Born in Guangzhou, China in 1953, she studied violin early on, practicing surreptitiously with a mute during the privations of the Cultural Revolution.\u00a0\u00a0 Ultimately, she had to give up music, owing to her impressment into forced agricultural labor in a variety of locations in China.\u00a0 After that unfortunate episode in China\u2019s history, she was able to enter the Beijing Conservatory in 1977.\u00a0 Her career as a composer ensued with great success, culminating in a major, broadcast concert dedicated entirely to her compositions.\u00a0\u00a0 She came to the United States in 1986 and studied composition at Columbia University with the distinguished composers, Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky.\u00a0 Thereafter, in 1996, she accepted a position at the Peabody Conservatory, and in 1998 joined the faculty of the University of Missouri at Kansas City.\u00a0\u00a0 She is the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, awards, and prizes, and enjoys performances of her compositions all over the world.<\/p>\n
Ge Xu (Antiphony)<\/em> was commissioned by the Women\u2019s Philharmonic of the Bay Area in San Francisco as part of their Meet the Composer New Residencies Program.\u00a0 Composed in 1994 while Chen Yi was in residence with the orchestra, Ge Xu (Antiphony)<\/em> received its world premi\u00e8re in January of the next year. The composer relates her inspiration for the composition:<\/p>\n For celebrating the Chinese lunar New Year or mid-autumn festival, Zhuang minority people in Southern China often gather in the field and sing mountain songs in solo, choir or antiphonal forms. In the antiphonal singing, distinct groups or individuals make up the texts in a style of antithetical couplets, competing with one another. It is this vivid scene that has inspired the composer to write music for keeping spirits high and hope alive.<\/p>\n Antiphony is simply musical performance that is characterized by the alternation of soloists or musical groups\u2014a time honored style found in most cultures.\u00a0 In Western music it is found as early as medi\u00e6val liturgical chant, and memorably in the works of Gabrieli in sixteenth-century Venice.\u00a0 Chen\u2019s study in antiphony divides the orchestral color palette into multiple combinations, variously contrasting or combining them into a remarkable variety of sounds.\u00a0 Throughout the work we are regaled with creative and novel ways of eliciting non-traditional sounds from the familiar array of orchestral instruments.\u00a0 In addition to the usual special techniques such as string harmonics and muted or stopped brass, at one time or another one will hear strings playing behind<\/u> the bridge, glissandos in the horns, and cymbals rubbed together or placed on the heads of timpani\u2014to name a few.\u00a0 Extremes of tessitura, layers of completely different rhythms, dense, bombastic\u2014almost chaotic\u2014textures alternating with the most ethereal, delicate soft ones.\u00a0 It\u2019s all part and parcel of Chen\u2019s imaginative creation of antiphonal sounds.<\/p>\n Beginning with a soft, high, unaccompanied violin gesture soon joined by a Debussy-like sonority of harp, horns, and soft percussion, dense woodwind rhythms and stentorian brass soon add their contrasting layers.\u00a0 A faster dance-like section follows\u2014much simpler in rhythm, but with an amazing paroxysm of challenging and contrasting activity in the low strings.\u00a0 It all ends in a dramatic cadenza for the percussion section.\u00a0 The percussion continues, soon joined by unusual sounds from the strings, with a dense cloud of complex woodwind activity floating above it all.\u00a0\u00a0 The dance-like section grows out of all of this to take us to the conclusion.\u00a0 It\u2019s \u00a0abruptly soft, with the ethereal textures of the very beginning.\u00a0 A solo bassoon plaintively recalls the opening violin gesture, but now a half step lower.<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a92020 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[30],"class_list":["post-396","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-chenyi"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}