Chou He
i_athenaeum/c)i_siteimages/fork.spoon.chop.web.jpg)
Chou He (酬和) is named after a genre within the Chinese poetic tradition in which one poet speaks in dialogue with another poet’s work, responding to oration in-kind with oration.
Since at least the Tang Dynasty and over the next millennium, even as local Chinese dialects evolved, competed, and in some cases died out, the literati of China kept alive a virtually fixed tradition, a true living classical language. Written material of the educated class used this highly economical yet poetic linguistic idiom. Correspondence was effectively synonymous with poetry, and replies often extensively referenced the original, either through direct quotation or through elegant turns of phrase, clever transformations of the of the original text. This convention became known as Chou He to respond to a poem with reframed elements of the first. The word uses the character He (和). “He” encompasses different meanings – harmony, togetherness – but when paired with other characters for “song” or “poem”, means an artistic “reply” or to “echo” in tandem. At certain historical moments it may have meant specifically to compose a new poem on someone else’s rhyme scheme. The character 酬 (Chou) means variously to recompense, to respond, or even to propose a toast.
c)i and BNME paired composers to create new works which are in dialogue with one another – either through the sharing of materials and approaches between the composers, or by writing pairs of works which address the same issue or subject – one from the Chinese perspective, one from the American. Five works on the program will be world premieres.
Chou He features works by American and Chinese composers creatively inspired by one another. American composer and Fulbright scholar Eli Marshall, currently on the faculty of the Beijing Central Conservatory, will be represented by the world premiere of a work based on Chou Wen-Chung’s Windswept Peaks, also on the program. Prof. Chou will be present at the concert. Drawing on the chou he tradition, c)i composer-member Douglas Boyce uses Li Bo’s poem “Fighting South of the Ramparts” as a point of departure to create an original work, while Wang Lin, a graduate of the Beijing Conservatory now living in Germany, is writing a new composition based on an original poem reflecting on the surprising emotional power of a return to ones home. c)i composer-member Kyle Bartlett and Beijing Conservatory graduate Wang Lu are producing new compositions by listening to each other’s music and “rewriting” the pieces from memory, producing musical “ghost letters.”
A blog run by the collaborating composers can be found here: {click}