Christian Utz: Kunstmusik und reflexive Globalisierung. Alterität und Narrativität in chinesischer Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts^*

The optimistic assessment that the future of classical music will be dominated by Chinese (or Asian) artists motivates a re-evaluation of twentieth-century music in the context of “reflexive” cultural globalisation. The term classical music itself is inappropriate when describing the complex intercultural foundation of the past century of art music in East Asia. Drawing on theories by Ricœur, Taylor, Bhabha, and Samuels, “alterity” and “narrativity” are introduced here as key concepts for an interpretation of works that combine Chinese and European instruments or sounds from the 1930s until the present. Earlier concepts of musical narratives approaching alterity and interlinkage of Asian and Western musical discourses such as reform (Liu Tianhua), coexistence (Yamada Kōsaku, Hashimoto Kunihiko), integration (Shi Yongkang, Chinese “conservatory style”), and individualization (Takemitsu Tōru) were closely related to socio-political processes in East Asia. Recent compositions that employ bicultural instrumentation exhibit more specific and reflexive forms of musical narrativity; in these, four modes in which gestural types and structural processes intersect can be discerned: interaction (Chen Xiaoyong), polarity (Tan Dun), stratification (Zhu Jian’er), and hybridity (Chaya Czernowin). Cognitive constraints in the listening process might limit the communicability of several aspects in these narrative concepts.

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