Unofficial Histories: Musical Quotation and
Collective Memory in Hong Kong
What people within a society reorganize as their shared common legacy can be termed collective memory. According to the sociologist who coined this term, Maurice Halbwachs, “there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection.” Despite its alleged autonomous status, music can serve as a powerful platform for the operations of memory within the temporal dimension of our experience, both in our everyday life and, albeit in a different form, in the ritualized context of the concert hall experience. In the following discussion, I wish to look at how musical borrowing in a self-contained instrumental piece can be interpreted in terms of the relationship between individual and collective memories.
While musicologists such as Larry Starr or Peter Burkholder merely regard
musical borrowing as an intertextual element to convey various meanings or
compositional device to create stylistic diversity, I wish to argue that a
musical quotation can function as a representation of one’s act of recall. Thus
viewed, musical quotation is no longer an isolated abstract realm which is a
merely thematic, harmonic or rhythmic deviation from the overall texture of a
piece, it rather evokes the totality of the sonic world of a specific time,
place and event, operating in every dimension of personal and collective
memory. Be it a tune, a rhythmic pattern or a specific sonority, a reference to
a style or genre, a quotation is a tangible link between the sonic and cultural
reality of the past and those of the present, as well as a metaphor for
identity formation. In the following, then, I shall examine the function of
musical borrowing in two contemporary Chinese compositions to illustrate my
argument. These are Symphony 1997:
Heaven, Earth, Mankind by Tan Dun in 1997 and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Tung Lai Shing in 2000.
Tan Dun, a Chinese-American composer with
hardly any connection, personal or otherwise, to Hong Kong, was commissioned to
write a piece by the Association for Celebration of Reunification of Hong Kong
with China
to celebrate the reunification on July 1, 1997.
Attempting to borrow a sonic image to represent Hong
Kong ’s indigenous culture, Tan’s compositional choice was to
incorporate a pre-recorded musical performance of Cantonese operatic singing at
Temple Street
into the sixth movement of his symphony.
The street performance heard in the
recording is a duet named Xiao Yao
[The Death of the Princess] (香夭), which is sung in the last scene of the well-known Cantonese
opera, Di Nu Hua [Princess Cheung
Ping] (帝女花). Both the duet and the opera have been popular
with Hong Kong locals for years. Tan’s
intention to insert the original recording into this symphony without any
editing or manipulation is obvious. Most audiences, in fact, are capable of
linking this recorded sonic material with an image of “Chineseness,” or “Hong
Kongeseness.” The insertion of such a
collected sound on Tan’s part may be a function of his desire to represent
spatial and temporal distance and the reshaping and cementing of one’s identity
as one recalls that experience.
This kind of
folk borrowing has been a patriotic and political cliché in the music of
Mainland China
in the early 20th century. Like them, Tan makes use of a collective
sonic image to emphasize the celebratory tone of a work which was, after all,
composed at the request of rulers. A political reading applies to the other
striking quotation in this piece. As you may recall, at the end of movement 5,
the choir sings the textless parodic fragment of “Ode to Joy,” appearing to speak
to the audience about the emancipation of Hong Kong
from its British colonial sovereignty. Then, a strikingly primordial sound of Bianzhong (編鐘) is heard, enticing listeners to
anticipate a journey back to the unknown distant past. Unexpectedly, however, it is the recording sound of Temple Street ,
acting as a mirror, as it were, that allows one to experience one’s “self”
within the local cultural context. While
the bass plays a drone in the background at the opening of the movement,
familiar traditional percussive sounds lead the entry of the street singer’s
reciting voice. This intrusion into the texture of piece of sounds and music
from a real life setting is meant to open up a new aesthetical dimension so
that all audiences, irrespective of background, may feel, perceive and recall
the ordinary experiences of daily life.
In fact, Tan is
an old hand at playing chicanery of collective memory by using quotations to
“popularize” his music for both the Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Tan only
affords a souvenir-like memory as manufactured by the tourist industry,
however, functioning as much a tourist attraction as a symbol of ordinary life
of Hong Kong . The recorded excerpt works on
one’s memory rather like a postcard or a souvenir. Just as souvenirs can induce
pleasure and allow collectors to relive a certain experience by associating the
surviving object to a particular place, period or event, a sound recording too
can be used in a similar fashion. With a
similar trick, Tan borrows Mo LiHua
[Jasmine Flower] (茉莉花), a popular Chinese folk tune in the second movement. His intention
of using Chinese folk material as expressive shorthand of “Chineseness” is
clear.
While Tan’s
shorthand form of borrowing seems to constitute a confirmation of a shared
identity, Tung’s use of collage quotations appears to evoke a sense of
“forgetting” of such a shared, indigenous identity. I now turn to his piece, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Tung is a local composer steeped in a distinctly local cultural
background. His choice of quotation are
from a less popular Cantonese opera Hai Jiao Hong Lou [Red Chamber at the Corner of the Sea] (海角紅樓)
and opening of the prelude of Verdi’s La Traviata. The title of the
piece, as well as the title of its second movement, does suggest a possible
connection with Milan Kundera’s novel of the same name. Tung also made a
special reference to one of the book’s chapters, “The Angel.” This movement and the previous one, “When
Life Turns Fate,” allude to the tragic life and inescapable fate of the
characters in the stories of the operas and the
relevant Chinese classical literature The
Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), opening up a larger
and wider contemplative space for our perception and imaginative participation.
Unlike Tan’s shorthand form of borrowing, Tung’s
several fragmented quotations and stylistic allusions work like a catalyst to
affect the listeners’ mood and mode of perception, mediating between one’s own
“self” and one’s imagined other “self” through a highly individualized web of
sonic images. In fact, Tung’s scattered quotations become more captivating when
they interact with the listener’s disjunct memories. Fragmentation makes
symbols out of ordinary things and allows quotidian objects and perceptions to
acquire new significance. Hence memories are more evocative precisely only when
they are fragmentary. Like relics of
past cultures, the shards of memory reveal to listener’s imagined world that is
at once partial and plural, functioning as an ironic metaphor of one’s
life.
The opening muted divided strings from La Traviata in the beginning of movement
2 seems to proclaim that from the past to present, life is ironic and is only a
circle game of inescapable tragic occurrences. Several percussive sounds from different parts of the world, again in
the form of fragments, continue to agree with the proclamation and confirm it
twice. The third time, however, after
the deep reverberated sound of the scratched strings of the piano is played,
whose role normally is to introduce the percussion, a traditional Cantonese
operatic female voice appears instead. The singer utters two disjointed words,
“思凡,” [thinking the secular world]. The listeners, who were drawn to a tragic
reality a moment ago, are now asked to shift to a more distant and illusive
story world, that of Red Chamber or Hai Jiao Hong Lou (海角紅樓). This is like a dream inside a dream.
By incorporating a genre that does not traditionally belong to the
concert hall into a Western orchestral work, Tung rebuffs the accustomed
complacency that is in fact the product of a cultural hypocrisy. The collision of eastern and western idioms,
as well as the low-brow (Cantonese opera) and the high-brow (Western opera),
results in a sense of tragic foreboding, evoking all the inconsistencies and
contradictions that is part of the everyday ironic life of Hong
Kong .
This irony is emphasized by multifarious
collage of sonorities in both movements. Tung’s diverse tapestry of sounds
produces a crisscross of imagined sonic maps.
The shakuhachi-like flutes, Tibetan singing bowls, African bongos, South
America marimba, Chinese bass drums, and many other Western orchestral brass,
strings and percussions are entangled in an ironic kaleidoscopic chaos,
appearing to reflect a sonic image of multicultural styles of postmodern Hong Kong . Buried in this chaos, the indigenous, local
culture seems to have disappeared or to have been forgotten. Not only does this
multicultural irony mock at the intangibility and inconceivability of daily
life, but it also reflects the ambivalence of accepting any permanent identity
on the part of the Hong Kong locals.
David Leung (theorydavid)
2012-10-13 (published)