Orchestral Texture in Wang Xilin’s Symphonic Works

Abstract

Wang Xilin (born 1936) is a Chinese composer currently living in Germany. In his home country, he is known as a musician of the Western trend. His works are occasionally performed in China and are widely known abroad. He has written about one hundred works in various genres, among which orchestral music plays a key role. In his symphonies and symphonic suites, Wang Xilin reinterprets in a new manner the diverse traditions of the Russian and Western European classics. On the other hand, these works vividly express the national Chinese color, manifested in the figurative and emotional sphere, melodicism and textural techniques. The composer has turned towards the orchestral genres during the course of his entire life. They have become a peculiar brand of chronicles of his style and reflect the periodization of his musical output, in which it is possible to highlight three styles. Each of them has its own priorities in his choice of textural means. Thus, his early period (1961–1977) is marked by the study of the Russian and Soviet schools of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory and of Chinese folklore during his exile in the province of Shanxi. The list of textural techniques in the orchestral works of this period — the suite Poems of Yunnan and Symphony No 1 — is not marked by any originality: the composer uses doublings, imitations and canonic expositions most frequently. Wang Xilin bears a striking resemblance to Dmitri Shostakovich in his construction of monodic lines. In his second period (1977–1990) Wang Xilin expanded his arsenal of textural means, in particular creating original “figuration canons” based on pentatonic chants based on intervals of seconds and fourths. These were first used in the suite The Impressions of Mount Taihang and were subsequently widely used by him in his symphonies and suites of his later period. Despite the ban on Western music during the Cultural Revolution, Wang Xilin studied the scores of Charles Ives and Krzysztof Penderecki. This influenced the third period of his work (starting from 1990), marked by a general chromatization of the harmonies and thematicism and the creation of different types of sonorous textures in his music. Overall, the textural basis of Wan Xilin’s works examined here is polyphonic many-voiced texture, but it also includes some homophonic-harmonic sections. Among them there are pastoral fragments with static textures and dance sections with tutti-pizzicato in the strings.

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