The Study and Practice of Applying the Serial Technique in China
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Abstract
At the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s, after the cessation of the Cultural Revolution Chinese composers began
intensive study of the 20th century European musical classics, including the compositions of the Second Viennese
School, as well as the European and American postwar avant-garde, including serialism. The result of this was an
adaptation of serial technique on the Chinese cultural soil, a synthesis of the method with national traditions – modal,
timbral, metro-rhythmic, philosophical and aesthetical.
Mastery of the technique took place in two mutually conditioned directions – the theoretical-methodological,
connected with expounding the chief principles of Schoenberg’s compositional method, and the practical, which
led to the creation of dodecaphonic works by Chinese composers. The first to demonstrate interest in the 20th
century Western classics was Luo Zhongrong. As the result of his translations of musical texts, the theoretical
works of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith became well-known, the ideas of the American apologists of
serialism, George Perle and Allen Forte, began to be disseminated. A major researcher of serial technique in China
is musicologist Zheng Yinglie. From the late 1970s he developed original courses devoted to twelve-tone music for
students and aspirants, and in 1989 he published his own tutorial materials as a monograph “Courses of Composition
of Serial Music.”
Special interest for Chinese musicians was aroused by the figure of Arnold Schoenberg. At the present time
analysis of chosen works carried out by Chinese music scholars has firmly entered into tutorial material for students
of higher musical educational institutions in the People’s Republic of China. The greater part of articles about
Schoenberg written in China is devoted to his pedagogical, theoretical and conducting activities. In the domain of
Chinese scholarship all of the crucial works by Schoenberg pertaining to different periods of his work have been
examined. In recent years there have appeared articles elucidating the history of study of the legacy of Schoenberg
in China.
Keywords: Chinese serial technique, Arnold Schoenberg, Zheng Yinglie, Luo Zhongrong, Chinese musicology.
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