Aesthetics of Cultural Synthesis: Contemporary Chinese Music

FAIN: FB-50674-04

Nancy Y. Rao
Florida International University Board of Trustees (Miami, FL 33199-2516)

The project is the research and writing of the first analytical study of Chinese music contemporary compositions. The project addresses the music of seven Chinese contemporary composers who have become influential on the international concert stage over the past two decades including Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Chen Qigang, Qu Xiaosong, Zhou Long, Guo Wenjing, and Bright Sheng. The successes of this group's diverging approaches to cultural synthesis has effectively changed the contemporary music scene in the United States and Europe. The project studies their music by analyzing their compositions, elucidating their unique approaches to cultural syntheses, explicating the trajectory of cultural symbolism in their work, providing the historical context of the emergence of their modernist music styles, and exploring the role of personal diasporatic experience in this cross-national art form.