Concerts at the UCCA Showcase Young Chinese Composers

 

Chen Bingye performs a piece at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art at the first in a series featuring young composers (Photo courtesy UCCA).

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 4, 2013

 

BEIJING — In January, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) began a series of concerts in association with “ON | OFF”, an exhibition of 50 works that has filled the cavernous arts center. The next two concerts will take place in the coming two months.

Born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the musicians involved in this concert series grew up in a new era of consumerism, wider access to information and a more international art scene. 

Eli Marshall, the American composer curating the concert series, told ARTINFO, “I am programming all three of these concerts away from traditional chamber music and toward more integrated forms which are sometimes seen as more fringe: percussion, electronic-acoustic, and traditional Chinese instruments.”

The first installment, “Sound | Space Percussion Dramas by the 70|80 Generation of Composers” which took place in January for a crowd of about 200, focused on percussion. It brought together works some of China’s rising composers, as well as one of the country’s most acclaimed, 2011 Rome Prize-winner Liang Lei who now lives in the US.

Marshall explained that he wanted to show that “composers can do much, even without definite-pitched instruments.” Percussion plays an important role in Chinese drama, narrative storytelling and Chinese opera. Here, the compositions were in varied ways inspired by this dramatic inheritance. 

Liang’s contribution, “Dialectal Percussions,” which the composer wrote nearly ten years ago, was performed to a background of shadow projections that moved along the tall factory walls. Based on the sounds of the loal Beijing dialect and the expressive narratives traditionally performed in the city, dramatic lighting is obligatory here, as is a theatrical delivery from the percussionist. The poised musician’s movements slowed and started in ways that sometimes brought dancing to mind. 

Another highlight of the show was Chen Bingye’s “Improvisation,” played for the first time time here in Beijing. A young professor at the Central Conservatory in China and ten years Lei’s junior, Chen played her own composition on a single bass drum for nearly ten minutes. She manipulated nearly every section of the drum to evoke a wide variety of sounds, mostly using brushes.  

The next concert in the series, though, will leave percussion to concentrate on experimental electronic music. Video works and recorded pieces will be presented together, in a show that will feature "noise" figures like Yan Yulong of Chui Wan and Zhang Shouwang of Carsick Cars. 

The final concert, Marshall tells us, “will consist of a large ensemble of traditional instruments performing newly-commissioned works by a wide range of composers of this generation.” If there is enough funding, they even plan to release an album with this last concert. 

  

See VIDEO of UCCA's Philip Tinari introducing "ON/OFF" to ARTINFO.

Originally posted in Artinfo China.