AdolfSatan
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2017
- Messages
- 1,890
Warning: This will be a dense and long-winded post, filled to the brim with autism. Proceed with caution.
On portraying Chinese music
I'm sure at some point in your life you've come across Hindi or Arabic pop music. And it most likely was presented for the sake of amusement, since who the hell could ever take such bizarre concoctions seriously?
Just look at how clichéd and ridiculous everything is; it's as if they were parodying themselves!
Apparently there's quite a huge industry behind it, and I'd swear that folks aren't putting so much effort and money into this just for the laughs.
So, what gives? If everyone's being serious about this, why is it so... shitty?
Turns out music isn't a universal language as many would have you believe. There's no divine message hidden that will move the souls of all men alike, indistinct to their origin and creed.
As I exemplified in my previous post, like the spoken tongue, it all boils down to a series of culturally inherited codes which, in tacit agreement, are assigned certain values by a community.
How could we ever understand a melody from a distant land if we can't even agree on how the octave should be divided? What the hell is an octave anyways, for that matter?
Not even through harmony could we ever hope to communicate meaning, since to many cultures the concept is entirely foreign, just like several of which I'll speak further on are to us.
Our pop music arrives to unaccustomed ears that pick its most salient and identifiable features. They reinterpret it under a new set of codifications, and thus such... interesting results are born.
The same will happen when, me, you, or anyone foreign to the culture tries to coin some Chinese sounding BGM. Because it's not just the music, but also what surrounds it.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the Chinese is a tone language; they employ different melodic patterns to change the meaning of a syllable that comprises several words, which spoken plainly would mean the same.
A slide, or any peculiar motif that might seem random or improvised into the music might actually carry a literal and well defined meaning to the knowing ear.
What happens when you unknowingly ignore these facts is what gave us many pieces (both musical and written) during the Orientalist period in European art. Which, while fantastic, had nothing to do with reality. It was indeed as many of them were called, an impression.
If you pick any Asiatic flavoured piece by a Western composer, you'll be more than likely to find a fine example of what I'm trying to portray. There they are: the pentatonic scales, hexafonic non-harmonies, parallel fifths, and disjointed polyrhythms that seemingly mimic the nature of such foreign music.
In short, all a trained ear could classify and keep in memory to later reproduce back at home; but there are several missing elements that make Asian music what it is.
We would often discredit noises, detunings, disharmonic overtones, and some portamentos, as an unwanted portion of the execution —merely a pitfall of the interpreter's shortcomings—, but in every single one there's a meaning we are failing to comprehend.
What I would suggest you do is, if you care about the music being true to the setting, hire a Chinese composer that's familiar with the classical tradition of his country. Describe to him what you want, and then select and fit the pieces in the game while trying to keep an ear towards the interpretation us westerners will have of it (no matter its original meaning, a vividly rhythmic major-sounding piece will strike us as odd in a moment of sorrow).
It's hard work, but completely doable.
Alternatively, you could avoid coming across as a cheap knock-off* by forgoing any intention of sounding "Chinese".
Rather than picking its most prominent features, or god forbid, trying to clad faux-music with emulated instruments for the sake of credibility, take the subjacent meaning and devise something new out of it, foreign to both ears. A lot of Asiatic music is programmatic in nature, which can lend lots of material to draw from.
Perhaps it needn't be made with melodies, but rather with textures. Or placing an emphasis solely on the rhythmic aspect. The possibilities are infinite, that's up to you and the composer.
*And believe me, this will happen. I've witnessed way too many times the folk music of my country butchered by foreigners. Even with interpreters that share our same language!
On portraying Chinese music
I'm sure at some point in your life you've come across Hindi or Arabic pop music. And it most likely was presented for the sake of amusement, since who the hell could ever take such bizarre concoctions seriously?
Just look at how clichéd and ridiculous everything is; it's as if they were parodying themselves!
Apparently there's quite a huge industry behind it, and I'd swear that folks aren't putting so much effort and money into this just for the laughs.
So, what gives? If everyone's being serious about this, why is it so... shitty?
Turns out music isn't a universal language as many would have you believe. There's no divine message hidden that will move the souls of all men alike, indistinct to their origin and creed.
As I exemplified in my previous post, like the spoken tongue, it all boils down to a series of culturally inherited codes which, in tacit agreement, are assigned certain values by a community.
How could we ever understand a melody from a distant land if we can't even agree on how the octave should be divided? What the hell is an octave anyways, for that matter?
Not even through harmony could we ever hope to communicate meaning, since to many cultures the concept is entirely foreign, just like several of which I'll speak further on are to us.
Our pop music arrives to unaccustomed ears that pick its most salient and identifiable features. They reinterpret it under a new set of codifications, and thus such... interesting results are born.
The same will happen when, me, you, or anyone foreign to the culture tries to coin some Chinese sounding BGM. Because it's not just the music, but also what surrounds it.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the Chinese is a tone language; they employ different melodic patterns to change the meaning of a syllable that comprises several words, which spoken plainly would mean the same.
A slide, or any peculiar motif that might seem random or improvised into the music might actually carry a literal and well defined meaning to the knowing ear.
What happens when you unknowingly ignore these facts is what gave us many pieces (both musical and written) during the Orientalist period in European art. Which, while fantastic, had nothing to do with reality. It was indeed as many of them were called, an impression.
If you pick any Asiatic flavoured piece by a Western composer, you'll be more than likely to find a fine example of what I'm trying to portray. There they are: the pentatonic scales, hexafonic non-harmonies, parallel fifths, and disjointed polyrhythms that seemingly mimic the nature of such foreign music.
In short, all a trained ear could classify and keep in memory to later reproduce back at home; but there are several missing elements that make Asian music what it is.
We would often discredit noises, detunings, disharmonic overtones, and some portamentos, as an unwanted portion of the execution —merely a pitfall of the interpreter's shortcomings—, but in every single one there's a meaning we are failing to comprehend.
What I would suggest you do is, if you care about the music being true to the setting, hire a Chinese composer that's familiar with the classical tradition of his country. Describe to him what you want, and then select and fit the pieces in the game while trying to keep an ear towards the interpretation us westerners will have of it (no matter its original meaning, a vividly rhythmic major-sounding piece will strike us as odd in a moment of sorrow).
It's hard work, but completely doable.
Alternatively, you could avoid coming across as a cheap knock-off* by forgoing any intention of sounding "Chinese".
Rather than picking its most prominent features, or god forbid, trying to clad faux-music with emulated instruments for the sake of credibility, take the subjacent meaning and devise something new out of it, foreign to both ears. A lot of Asiatic music is programmatic in nature, which can lend lots of material to draw from.
Perhaps it needn't be made with melodies, but rather with textures. Or placing an emphasis solely on the rhythmic aspect. The possibilities are infinite, that's up to you and the composer.
*And believe me, this will happen. I've witnessed way too many times the folk music of my country butchered by foreigners. Even with interpreters that share our same language!