AIDAN HOI-JIN CHAN

陳愷賢

MASTER OF MUSIC IN PERFORMANCE YEAR TWO

RECITAL

AMARYLLIS FLEMING CONCERT HALL

ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC

15.20 // 25 MAY 2023

PROGRAMME:

FLORENCE REECE / AIDAN CHAN

PROLOGUE: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? (1931)

FRYDERYK CHOPIN
FANTAISIE IN F MINOR, OP.49 (1841)

BEN NOBUTO
EMILY LIKES THE TV (2019)

THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA

INTERMEDIO: EXCERPT FROM <<DICTÉE>> (1982)

TAN DUN
EIGHT MEMORIES IN WATERCOLOUR, OP.1 (REV. 2003)
i. MISSING MOON
ii. STACCATO BEANS
iii. HERDBOY’S SONG
iv. BLUE NUN
v. RED WILDERNESS
vi. ANCIENT BURIAL
vii. FLOATING CLOUDS
viii. SUNRAIN

FREDERIC RZEWSKI
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? + IMPROVISATION (1978-79)
PREFACE:

As my time at the Royal College of Music draws to a close, I wanted

to examine the concept of “reconstruction” and scatter my thoughts
throughout this recital programme.

Western Classical Music is in its very core a reconstruction. It is

a tradition that is passed on and preserved by means of replication.
Given its intangibility, every interpretation and performance, no
matter how informed by historical sources, is inherently a
reconstruction of the past in some shape or form and that in itself
inevitably generates something new with every replication.

Classical music is inherently cyclical: it’s a hauntology - a ghost

simultaneously haunting our past, present, and future. The very
conservation of this tradition is ironically only achieved through
its rebuilding and through revolution, and as p o l i t i c a l as that
*
may sound, revolution only implies the cyclical nature of an
existing system. As performers in the modern day, it’s our
obligation to navigate the paradox-purgatory that is being
reconstructionists without being unoriginal.

As such, this recital is essentially a loose and somewhat abstract

deconstruction of my relationship with Western Classical Music,
tradition and language.

Above all else, however, I want to leave my audience with an

experience to remember and to (hopefully) enjoy.

→
*
From Latin revolvō (“roll again”), from Proto-Italic w olwō, from Proto-
Indo-European welH (“to turn, wind, round”).
FLORENCE REECE: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON (1931)

In 1931, coal miners and trade unionists in Harlan County, Kentucky

sought to demand better wages and working conditions from their
employers. Refusing to negotiate, coal company bosses hired armed
guards to break up picket lines and intimidate strikers. The strike
quickly escalated into full-scale violence, with skirmishes lasting
the better part of the decade. This later became known as the Harlan
County War, or Bloody Harlan.

Florence Reece, a labour rights activist and whose husband Sam was
involved in the conflict, penned the labour union song “Which Side
Are You On?”in response to these events (itself being a
reconstruction of the traditional Baptist hymn, Lay the Lily Low).
It has ever since become an anthem that has united labour and civil
rights advocates, and its lyrics have been regularly reconstructed
to reflect each movement’s unique struggle.

In light of this tradition, in 2014, a performance of Brahms’A

German Requiem by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra was disrupted by
demonstrators who stood up to sing a rendition of this song in
unison. They called this act of protest a “Requiem for Mike Brown”,
demanding justice for Michael Brown, the Black, unarmed teenager who
was shot and murdered by a police officer in Missouri.

The American conductor Kenneth Woods would shortly later write in

support of this protest:

If the concert hall can't be the center of civic life, a hub

for intellectual discussion, a place to share ideas, a place we
can mourn, cry, scream, love and heal together, we may as well
burn every concert hall to the ground. When we value genteel
niceties and professional convenience over the existential
questions of right and wrong, life and death, we, as artists,
have probably made ourselves completely irrelevant.
FLORENCE REECE: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON (1931)

Original song by Florence Reece

Verse by Aidan Chan

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

SO WILL YOU SPEND YOUR LIFETIME

OBEYING STATUS QUOS?
OH WHEN THEY FINALLY ROCK THE BOAT
WILL YOU SINK OR WILL YOU FLOAT?

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON!

→
FRYDERYK CHOPIN: FANTAISIE IN F MINOR, OP.49 (1841)

While from Chopin’s letters we know that he assigned his Op.49 the
title of Fantaisie in order to escape expectations of compositional
form and rules, I would argue that this work is not simply just a
standalone free-form virtuosic composition, but rather a
reconstruction of the Baroque keyboard fantasia tradition on the
composer’s own terms, especially considering his reverence and
awareness of J.S. Bach’s keyboard music.

In the spirit of harpsichord fantasias composed by early Baroque

keyboard pioneers such as Frescobaldi and Froberger (who were
proponents of the stylus fantasticus tradition), Chopin’s Fantaisie
is an extended exploration of instrumental and harmonic
possibilities. Following the opening march, a meandering arpeggiated
section that is reminiscent of the unmeasured keyboard preludes of
Louis Couperin emerges, and the appoggiatura motif which derives
from this “prelude” serves as a vehicle for harmonic
transformation throughout the work.

The Fantaisie finds common ground with Florence Reese’s Which Side
Are You On? in the sense that it is also insurrectionary in nature,
although much more subversively. Particularly in the opening of the
work, Chopin makes indirect but strong allusions to Litwinka: a
patriotic song penned by Karol Kurpiński which implored compatriots
to fight for their independence in the Polish-Russian War (1830-
1831), that became widely popular among the exiled Polish community
in Paris of which Chopin was a member.

The philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno described this piece

“as a kind of tragically decorative song of triumph to the effect
that Poland was not lost forever, that some day … she would rise
again.” Out of Chopin’s compositional output, the Fantaisie easily
stands out as the most beautiful to me, documenting struggle,
optimism, regeneration and rebirth through a coded language.
BEN NOBUTO: EMILY LIKES THE TV (2019)

Composer’s Note:
Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) first gained recognition in the 1970s
when avant-garde theatre director Robert WIlson received an audio
tape of Knowles reciting his poem, “Emily Likes the TV”.
Fascinated by Knowles’ unique use of language, which consisted of
continuous, repeated variations on simple phrases in what seemed to
be highly organised sequences, WIlson cast Knowles in a number of
his productions, including Einstein on the Beach (composed by Philip
Glass). According to the playwright, “it was a piece coded much
like music. Like a cantata or fugue it worked in conjugations of
thoughts repeated in variations”.

This piece is based on the audio from a 2017 performance of “Emily

Likes the TV”. Knowles’ words and rhythms are transcribed and
discrete musical blocks are mapped onto their corresponding
linguistic parts to create a musical language that mirrors the
patterns and structures of the poem. As Wilson noticed, Knowles’
poetry has in inherent logic and musicality that belies its
seemingly arbitrary exterior, and his performances simultaneously
appear calculated, mechanical and precise on the one hand, and
playful, charming and whimsical on the other.

Not only did Knowles’ idiosyncratic approach to language resonate

deeply with the New York avant-garde of the 1970s, it also seems to
take on a renewed relevance in the age of cut-and-paste tools, auto-
correct functions, predictive text and other technologies that
render syntax infinicately malleable. Knowles explores the
plasticity of language, rapidly constructing and deconstructing
sentences, in a way that feels similar to how DJs and producers chop
and screw samples, conceiving langue and music as disrect building
blocks’ a single line of text from which an infinite variation of
sequences can be generated, like binary code.
→
THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA: EXCERPT FROM <<DICTÉE>>, P.118 (1981)

- Interval. Recess. Pause. -

Intermezzo. From intermedio: light theatrical entertainment

accompanied by music performed between acts of a play,
th
originating in Italian courts during the 15 Century.
TAN DUN: EIGHT MEMORIES IN WATERCOLOUR, OP.1 (1978-79, REV. 2003)

Following the culmination of the Cultural Revolution which saw the

purging of Western and bourgeois ideas and arts from China,
Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music was re-opened in 1977.
Among the first cohort of students it accepted was Tan Dun, who
first conceived his Eight Memories in Watercolour during his first
year of studies there. Described by the composer as a “diary of
longing”, Tan Dun’s Op.1 is a collection of vignettes born out of
his homesickness and nostalgia for his native Hunan province,
drawing from folk tunes and scenes of his childhood spent in the
countryside, with audible influences from Debussy and Bartók.

Throughout the eight short pieces, Tan Dun evokes elements of

huaguxi ( 花 鼓 戏 ) a traditional Hunan opera form (especially in
Missing Moon), quotes folk songs (specifically in Staccato Beans,
Herdboy’s Song, Blue Nun and Sunrain), and conjures traditional
instruments (bronze bells in Ancient Burial and the pipa or
traditional Chinese lute trills in Floating Clouds).

This work saw a revolution in itself when in 2001, Tan Dun made
several revisions to create the version of the Eight Memories which
is most widely performed today, premièred by a young Lang Lang at
the Kennedy Centre, Washington D.C. in 2003 and famously recorded
live at his Carnegie Hall recital début later that year.

Like much of the art created by Tan Dun’s contemporaries during

this time of radical sociopolitical change, the Eight Memories in
Watercolour are an exploration of a new artistic and musical
landscape, signifying a certain sense of regeneration and
highlighting a new relationship between a modernised China and its
ancient traditions and culture which became simultaneously present
yet distant; tangible yet intangible at the same time.

→
FREDERIC RZEWSKI: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON (1978-79)

The late Frederic Rzewski’s four North American Ballads generate a

new perspective of the piano ballade in Western classical music as
pioneered by Chopin, handling folk themes in a formal classical
th
structure, incorporating late 20 century polymodal harmonies, neo-
Romanticism, elements of minimalism and hints of jazz, all the while
often honouring the rules of Baroque counterpoint.

He also re-examines the ballad in the context of North American folk

music tradition, specifically choosing to reconstruct folk and
protest songs originating from marginalised peoples of the U.S.A.
such as the working class and the formerly enslaved. Rzewski was
acutely aware of the didactic and political power of music and
musicians to affect change, proclaiming:

…one has to imagine the piece of music as consisting not only

of notes or sounds, but as a process of communication involving
groups of human beings on a very basic level of course
involving the collaborative activity of composers, performers,
and audience, but also as a larger process of communication
which involves a much larger and more general context.

In Which Side Are You On?, the second of the North American Ballads,
Rzewski deconstructs the eponymous protest song by Florence Reece
into fragments and then reconstructs them in order to synthesise new
possibilities of musical rhetoric. Rzewski most notably engages with
the work’s title literally, inviting the performer to play a
spontaneous free improvisation lasting the same duration as the
existing written material, so as to create two antagonistic
“sides”. If the existing composition presents as an open challenge
to oppression following the tradition of protest songs, then I aim
to improvise an opposing “side” inspired by the African American
spiritual, another uniquely American musical tradition which shines
another light on a marginalised peoples’ resistance to oppression.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thank you:

Mum and Dad, for the world, your world and my world

Nadia, for music

Catherina, for giving me a voice

My professors, for your patience and beaconing through choppy waters

My close friends, for keeping me grounded when I need it the most

Sage, for being there always

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Asplund, Christian. “ Frederic Rzewski and Spontaneous Political

Music.” Perspectives of New Music 33, no. 1/2 (1995): 418–41.

Bach, Carl Phillipp Emmanuel. “Essay on the True Art of Playing

Keyboard Instruments.” Translated and edited by William J. Mitchell.
New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1949.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2001 (first published by Tanam Press, 1982).

Levin, Robert D. “Mozart and the Keyboard Culture of His Time.”

Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online 3 (2004): 1-26.

Liu, Adrian. “Philip Glass’defamiliarising lens.” The Stanford

Daily, February 5, 2019.

Santa Maria, Tomas de.The Art of Playing the Fantasia. 1565.

Translation, transcription, commentary by Almonte C. Howell, and
Warren E. Hultberg. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press,
1991.

Woods, Kenneth. “Thoughts on the Saint Louis Requiem Protest” A

View from the Podium blog, October 5, 2014.