East Meets West

I’ve been listening all day to piano and orchestral music from several Chinese composers: Shande Ding, Yah-jun Hua, Wen-cheng Lu, Guang Ren, Bi-guang Tang, Lishan Wang, Jianer Zhu. They combine traditional Chinese music with Western forms, and are far more accessible than many contemporary Western composers. They are not naive compositions; the sound palette is formed by modernist dissonance as well as by traditional Western music. But the music is not “challenging” or “subversive.” It aims to be, and is, beautiful.

Another irony of twenty-first century culture: Just as we are relearning Christendom from Africans, we have a chance to relearn the riches of Western music from the East.