Carmen Ching | Apr 2025 | Hong Kong
When Dr Ka Man Carmen Ching first began contemplating her doctoral thesis, she was heavily influenced by Western classical tradition. However, a conversation with composer Pauline Ng led to a shift in perspective.
Dr Ching found inspiration in contemporary works that blended innovation with cultural identity and this was influenced by their Asian heritage and shared musical upbringing. Pauline’s ‘Unmeasured Prelude’, a piece designed to explore the art of improvisation, and Dr Lok Yin Tang’s ‘Convergence II’, a piano piece inspired by Taoist beliefs, became central to the research. Through performance and audience engagement, the author uncovered the expressive freedom of contemporary music, revealing its capacity to honour tradition while forging new artistic paths. She invites our readers to consider joining her in exploring the journey that underscores the importance of diverse voices in shaping classical music’s future.
When I first started thinking about the topic of my doctoral thesis a year ago, it felt like an insurmountable task. I strolled through the corridors of the University of Kansas library, surrounded by the ghosts of great composers – Schumann, Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart – their brilliance stretching across time and space. The list seemed endless, and my headache grew.
Then my composer friend Pauline Ng, who is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the University of California San Diego, texted me as usual, asking about the meal I had just had. It was a bowl of noodles for dinner, a sour and spicy link reconnecting me with my Asian heritage amid the cornfields of Kansas. As I read Pauline’s text about her compositions and research, I realised that I had been overlooking the most obvious topic that I was interested in writing about, one rooted in the place where I was born. Our conversation, which lasted for hours, witnessed our shared passion for teaching (violin for her, piano for me). I called her immediately, and with some hesitation I asked if she could compose a piano work for me. I knew she had been deeply engaged in her research recently and rarely wrote for piano. To my surprise, she said yes without a second thought and suggested she would create a piece that aligned with my teaching methods, which mainly focused on weight transfer.
Soon after, an almost mystical force urged me to reconnect with our music and composition teacher from our DSE1 days, Dr. Lok Yin Tang, who is known for combining traditional Chinese arts elements in her music. I have always wanted to dive deeper into her works – anyone would want to if they have attended one of her shows. I still remember the mixed feelings I had after watching the vampires climb up on the audience seats in her Halloween show Mr. Vampire (月亮光光) back in 2011 – scared, shocked, yet excited and entertained. To my relief, the prolific composer welcomed the idea and recommended that ‘Convergence II’, a virtuosic solo piano piece, be included in my thesis.
My friendship with Pauline began when we were 12 – we were in the same English literature class and would compose all sorts of fantastical stories and whimsical short tunes. When Pauline recommended that I listen to her song ‘At Twilight’, the protagonist, a skylark, immediately reminded me of the bird song we composed for our imaginary romantic opera during an intense race in an athletic meet. I told Pauline about it, and she laughed, admitting that she might have subconsciously borrowed that idea to express the lonely soul in the piece. I decided to include this piece, as well as the ‘Unmeasured Prelude’, a newly written pedagogical contemporary listening etude that she has just composed for me, in my thesis.
‘At Twilight’ is a vocal–piano piece written in 2020 – a time where everyone shared anxiety and loneliness because of Covid. It was also when Pauline initially entered the University of California San Diego for her PhD, with unknown challenges awaiting. It is a six-and-a-half-minute piece written for soprano. Ng mentioned in her interview that she wrote the text first, then the music for the piece.2 The lyrics are as follows:
1 The Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination.
2 Pauline Ng, Interview on At Twilight, December 2023.
Far off on distant shores
She wanders.
Far off on looming mounts.
She wonders.
Far off on lonely soils,
Through wailing winters.
When shall I seek solace?
Hear the skylark weeps in the forest
Dusky twilights come and fade,
Through misty nights she has strayed.
The stars bestow,
On me I glow.
Ah, deaf’ning echoes of your silent cries,
Reminisce those wistful goodbyes,
Beneath the dewy shadows.
My eyes linger on the first ray of sunlight,
Ready to spread my wings and take flight
Till then I shall wait for the spark of dawn…
I, the Skylark.
The poem describes a skylark gathering her courage to take off as she wanders. Here the composer expresses her longing for freedom during the pandemic through this work, with the evident expression marking, With longing, in the beginning of the piece. In the first stanza, the skylark is wandering around different places – she wanders through the shores, mountains, soils and winters. The second stanza expresses emotion more directly as the skylark weeps in the forest because of loneliness and farewells. The skylark gathers her courage and finally flies during the last stanza. Personification is used throughout the whole text, with the skylark representing the composer. There are plenty of elements in the piece that one might find Schubertian – for example, the personification of a skylark, the text-painting technique, the narrative markings and the chromatic harmonies.
‘Unmeasured Prelude’ is a commissioned piece written in 2023, dedicated to this project. The inspiration for the piece came from the Baroque origin of the genre, specifically the works composed by Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729), a pioneering French female harpsichordist and composer of her time.3 Just like Jacquet de La Guerre’s preludes in her harpsichord suites, neither metre nor tempo is indicated. The pianist could freely choose their own tempo and rhythms based on the different note values and harmonies indicated on the score. Here are two figures comparing scores from Jacquet de La Guerre’s prelude from her Suite in D minor and Ng’s work:
Jacquet de La Guerre’s prelude from Suite in D minor
Ng’s ‘Unmeasured Prelude’
The genre of unmeasured prelude had two functions during the Baroque period – first, it served as an introductory movement of the key to the next movements. Second, it acted as a warm-up passage for the performer at the beginning of the piece.4 It was supposed to be played in a style named style brisé, which means broken style, where the broken chords are being played.5 There are two notation styles in general for the unmeasured preludes – the semibreve style and the print style.6 Both Jacquet de La Guerre and Ng use the print style, where a variety of note values, from eighth to sixteenth notes, are used. This is different from the semibreve style, where the score only contains whole notes and slurs.7 Ng’s score is noticeably more detailed than the prelude from the Suite in D minor, including musical markings such as expression markings, pedalling and breath marks. Besides the expressive nature of her compositions, this is also due to the pedagogical purpose of the piece. Ng mentioned that this work serves the purpose as a contemporary listening etude for students, who could freely use their creativity to express the relationship of intervals without the limitations of rhythm and tempo. This fits with Howard Schott’s comment that ‘[s]uch harpsichord pieces are really controlled improvisations’.8 When introducing her original violin etude, ‘Meditative Drone’, she mentioned that that the improvisatory nature of the piece helps the students to enhance their aural skills. ‘Unmeasured Prelude’ serves the same function for piano students to enhance their hearing of intervals. This fits her current research on pitch perception, where she emphasises the importance of developing relative pitch and audiation skills for all music students, regardless of whether they have perfect pitch or not.
3 David Sewell and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Harpsichord Suite in A Minor by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre Arranged for Solo Guitar (dissertation, Arizona State University, 2019), 4.
4 Ibid, 8.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Howard Schott, ‘Controlled Improvisation.’ The Musical Times, Vol. 133, No. 1796 (October 1992), 518.
It’s noteworthy that there was an interesting experiment during the creative process of ‘Unmeasured Prelude’. As a performer of the piece, I was asked to play the draft without any musical directions, such as rhythm, tempo or dynamics. The recording of my performance was then compared to the composer’s. The process felt like the ‘blind men and the elephant’ – the level of self-consciousness would have been high if I hadn’t known the composer for 17 years. Just as I had expected, the interpretations were worlds apart. Mine was double-time faster, had a wider range of dynamics, more rubatos and more variety of articulations, while Pauline’s was played in lento, with the dynamics kept under piano the whole time, as if a submarine were surfing underwater. I realised that, as a performer, I tend to put more effort into enhancing narrativity in music and to make it more comprehensible to the audience – in other words, more expressive and romantic in style. On the other hand, Pauline focuses more on the pitches and the sounds themselves, closer to the perspective of absolute music, where the sensation of the sound itself is more important than its meaning.
This experiment was part of Pauline’s research on pitch perception, aimed at understanding how different individuals interpret relationships between pitches, known as intervals, and determining the importance of the composer’s annotations in ensuring accurate interpretation. Conducting this experiment in the genre of unmeasured preludes made perfect sense, as this style traditionally provides minimal information. Examples of this genre are those in the harpsichord suites written by Jacquet de La Guerre. I was delighted to know that the idea was inspired by one of my performances in New York back in 2018, where I played a whole set of preludes by Debussy in book two and she heard layers of timbres in the impressionistic sound.
In a contrast with the Baroque period genre, Pauline has included quite a few non-traditional markings in her work. One new articulation marking resembles an eighth note with a tie attached to its end, which she described using the Chinese expression ‘like a dragonfly skimming the surface of the water’ (蜻蜓點水), similar to a staccato touch.
The second contemporary feature in this piece involves the notes enclosed in boxes, marked ‘notes in box: ad lib, repeat and reorder pitches, if necessary’, as shown below:
The students must decide on the order that makes the most sense to their ear and maintain that consistency each time they play these sections. The composer specifically indicated that she would like the students to be aware of intervallic relationships and realise them in this piece with weight transfer. Weight transfer is a technique where students evenly distribute their arm weight on the keys when playing, aiming to match the level of sound to create a smooth line when playing multiple notes consecutively. She pointed out that softer dynamics could help the students hear the intervals better. Pauline believes that the meditative nature of this piece encourages mindful playing and active engagement of bodily sensations, setting the stage for a meditative and embodied experience for both the performer and listener.
Meditation might allow us to travel back in time – by that, I mean hundreds of years ago, to the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). There, we shall meet Fan Kuan (范寬), a painter famous for his Shan Shui Hua (山水畫), meaning traditional Chinese landscape paintings. His painting Travellers among Mountains and Streams (溪山行旅圖), the nucleus of Tang’s ‘Convergence II’ (2007), embodies the philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism, where human beings are said to have five eyes – two physical eyes and three spiritual eyes.
Travellers among Mountains and Streams (溪山行旅圖) by Fan Kuan (范寬) [Source: https://www.shuge.org/meet/topic/29749/]
This is achieved through a drawing technique called the scattered-point perspective, where different viewpoints coexist simultaneously in the painting. This idea resonates with the title of Tang’s composition, which is a solo piano piece composed in 2007 with a duration of approximately 10 minutes. According to the dictionary, the term ‘convergence’ means ‘the act of converging and especially moving towards union or uniformity’ or the ‘coordinated movement of the two eyes so that the image of a single point is formed on corresponding retinal areas’.10 In her programme notes, Tang describes the piece as ‘the simultaneous appearance of bamboo and cold snow, flowers in all seasons, and the cycle of life and death in a single painting, spanning hundreds or thousands of years’.
This was hard not to gasp when I first looked at the score – notes were densely packed, with rapid leaps and jumps all over the keyboard. I took out my highlighter and started marking the melodic lines on the same registers with patience. The process of creating colourful annotations became more therapeutic as I discovered the magical spaces hidden in the intricate music that initially seemed arbitrary. The theme is introduced at an adagio tempo and is repeated several times with varying dynamics and pace, alternating with an extremely dense, rapid, high-register motif. A juxtaposed image is hence created, much like the different scenes presented simultaneously in Fan Kuan’s work.
10 ‘Convergence Definition & Meaning’, Merriam-Webster, accessed 7 Sep 2024, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/convergence.
Markings on my score when learning ‘Convergence II’
The piece reaches its climax when the rhythmic, dotted motif condenses into rapid octaves in C sharp, echoing Tang’s idea of ‘the cultivation of higher states of being’ in Buddhism and Taoism, where ‘one can simultaneously perceive the up and down, the far and near, the internal and external, tangible and intangible, covering almost every aspect of space and time’. The simplification of the motif perhaps symbolises the unification of visual angles. The repetition of sound in this section aims to put the listener into a trance-like state, which is highly meditative, as confirmed by some of my audience feedback. This transformation from complexity to simplicity also captures the spirit of the famous quote ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’, from the Heart Sūtra, the central text in Mahayana Buddhism. At the end of the piece, the unsettling chromatic scales create a stark contrast with the abrupt diatonic scale, concluding the composition. This transition from chaos to order evokes a profound sense of resolution and provides a sense of satisfaction for the listeners.
‘Convergence II’, mm. 39–48
The curtain dropped – the show had ended. Performing all three pieces in a single recital was truly an unforgettable experience. As a classically trained pianist, I have always cherished playing Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. However, I felt surprisingly liberated while performing these contemporary works, perhaps because of the creative freedom offered by the composers, particularly in the ‘Unmeasured Prelude’, which was part improvisation. Curious about the audience’s impressions, I conducted a mini survey. To my delight, even though some didn’t fully grasp the music, many appreciated the dramatic moments, virtuosity and subtle tranquillity woven into these pieces. This experience reaffirms why we, as musicians, should consider broadening our exploration of contemporary compositions.