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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Taiwanese composer Chiang Wen-Yeh (1910-1983), also referred to by the Japanese name Bunya Koh or the Mainland Chinese transliteration Jiang Wenye, was considered one of Asia's leading composers in the 1930s but was pushed aside by political turmoil and was all but forgotten by 1960.
Chiang was born near Taipei during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and so held Japanese nationality. Though he was a talented singer in his childhood, he started his musical education late: while studying electrical engineering in Tokyo, he began to attend night classes at the Tokyo Music School (now part of the Tokyo University of the Arts) and sang in an amateur choir. He never worked as an engineer. After completing his engineering degree, on the recommendation of his choir director, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Record Company as a baritone singer, and in 1934 he became a founding member of Fujiwara Opera, Japan's first professional European-style opera company. Around the same time, he began to study composition with Kosaku Yamada and Kunihiko Hashimoto (both of whom have featured in past Forgotten Masterpiece Fridays) and, briefly, the visiting Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin. He got his first big break as a composer in 1936 when his Formosan Dance for orchestra was chosen for submission to the art competition at the Berlin Olympic Games; though the piece did not win a medal, it earned the notice of publishers in Europe and made Chiang, under the Japanese name Bunya Koh, one of the most-performed composers in wartime Japan.
In 1938, Chiang moved to occupied Beijing where he was appointed professor of music at Beijing Normal University. The move suited both the Japanese authorities, who considered Chiang a useful propaganda tool as a prominent composer of Chinese ancestry, and Chiang himself, who sought to reconnect with his Chinese cultural background. Chiang apparently considered himself to be entirely apolitical, and chose to remain in Beijing after Japan's surrender in 1945 and through the Communist revolution of 1949. For a time, he was still important in the Chinese musical scene, and he was one of the founders of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. However, in 1957 he was accused of bourgeois sympathies because he refused to stop teaching European modernist music and had his salary reduced. When the Cultural Revolution began a decade later he was stripped of his position at the Central Conservatory and sent to a labor camp. Most of his scores were confiscated and destroyed; most of what he composed between 1945 and 1966 was lost to posterity, including all four of his symphonies. Eventually, when the Cultural Revolution ended, he was reinstated to his teaching position, began to compose again, and made plans to emigrate to Taiwan, but all this was cut short when he was paralyzed by a stroke and forced to retire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Chiang was considered a traitor for having worked with both the Communists and the Japanese. With the exception of a Chinese-language choral setting of some of the Psalms that he completed between 1945 and 1949, his music was banned in Taiwan until 1987. A few performances of his Formosan Dance in the mid-1980s evaded censorship by listing him under his Japanese name, which led to his surviving works (mostly from the 1930s) being revived in both Taiwan and Japan in the 1990s.
Chiang's Sketches of the Old Capital first appeared in his sixteen Bagatelles for piano in 1935, which were intended to evoke scenes of ancient Beijing. The following year, perhaps inspired by Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, he selected five of the Bagatelles and re-published them as "Five Sketches," adding a recurring "Ruins" theme that he interspersed between them much like Mussorgsky's "Promenade" theme, as if someone were walking through the ruins of the old city and reminiscing about times gone by. In 1939, he orchestrated the Five Sketches, and titled the resulting orchestral piece "Sketches of the Old Capital." The structure of the piece thus looks like this:
[Ruins Theme]
I. Suona (Street Scene)
[Ruins Theme]
II. The Atmosphere of the Theatre
[Ruins Theme]
III. In the Ruins
[Ruins Theme]
IV. Shepherd Boy and Weeping Willow
V. Old Capital Gate
The title "Suona" for the first movement refers to a Chinese double-reeded horn similar to (and mostly likely sharing a Central Asian origin with) the European shawm.
Movements I-III (including Ruins theme between III and IV)
Movements IV-V
Taiwanese composer Chiang Wen-Yeh (1910-1983), also referred to by the Japanese name Bunya Koh or the Mainland Chinese transliteration Jiang Wenye, was considered one of Asia's leading composers in the 1930s but was pushed aside by political turmoil and was all but forgotten by 1960.
Chiang was born near Taipei during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and so held Japanese nationality. Though he was a talented singer in his childhood, he started his musical education late: while studying electrical engineering in Tokyo, he began to attend night classes at the Tokyo Music School (now part of the Tokyo University of the Arts) and sang in an amateur choir. He never worked as an engineer. After completing his engineering degree, on the recommendation of his choir director, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Record Company as a baritone singer, and in 1934 he became a founding member of Fujiwara Opera, Japan's first professional European-style opera company. Around the same time, he began to study composition with Kosaku Yamada and Kunihiko Hashimoto (both of whom have featured in past Forgotten Masterpiece Fridays) and, briefly, the visiting Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin. He got his first big break as a composer in 1936 when his Formosan Dance for orchestra was chosen for submission to the art competition at the Berlin Olympic Games; though the piece did not win a medal, it earned the notice of publishers in Europe and made Chiang, under the Japanese name Bunya Koh, one of the most-performed composers in wartime Japan.
In 1938, Chiang moved to occupied Beijing where he was appointed professor of music at Beijing Normal University. The move suited both the Japanese authorities, who considered Chiang a useful propaganda tool as a prominent composer of Chinese ancestry, and Chiang himself, who sought to reconnect with his Chinese cultural background. Chiang apparently considered himself to be entirely apolitical, and chose to remain in Beijing after Japan's surrender in 1945 and through the Communist revolution of 1949. For a time, he was still important in the Chinese musical scene, and he was one of the founders of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. However, in 1957 he was accused of bourgeois sympathies because he refused to stop teaching European modernist music and had his salary reduced. When the Cultural Revolution began a decade later he was stripped of his position at the Central Conservatory and sent to a labor camp. Most of his scores were confiscated and destroyed; most of what he composed between 1945 and 1966 was lost to posterity, including all four of his symphonies. Eventually, when the Cultural Revolution ended, he was reinstated to his teaching position, began to compose again, and made plans to emigrate to Taiwan, but all this was cut short when he was paralyzed by a stroke and forced to retire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Chiang was considered a traitor for having worked with both the Communists and the Japanese. With the exception of a Chinese-language choral setting of some of the Psalms that he completed between 1945 and 1949, his music was banned in Taiwan until 1987. A few performances of his Formosan Dance in the mid-1980s evaded censorship by listing him under his Japanese name, which led to his surviving works (mostly from the 1930s) being revived in both Taiwan and Japan in the 1990s.
Chiang's Sketches of the Old Capital first appeared in his sixteen Bagatelles for piano in 1935, which were intended to evoke scenes of ancient Beijing. The following year, perhaps inspired by Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, he selected five of the Bagatelles and re-published them as "Five Sketches," adding a recurring "Ruins" theme that he interspersed between them much like Mussorgsky's "Promenade" theme, as if someone were walking through the ruins of the old city and reminiscing about times gone by. In 1939, he orchestrated the Five Sketches, and titled the resulting orchestral piece "Sketches of the Old Capital." The structure of the piece thus looks like this:
[Ruins Theme]
I. Suona (Street Scene)
[Ruins Theme]
II. The Atmosphere of the Theatre
[Ruins Theme]
III. In the Ruins
[Ruins Theme]
IV. Shepherd Boy and Weeping Willow
V. Old Capital Gate
The title "Suona" for the first movement refers to a Chinese double-reeded horn similar to (and mostly likely sharing a Central Asian origin with) the European shawm.
Movements I-III (including Ruins theme between III and IV)
Movements IV-V
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-23 08:17 pm (UTC)