Incorporating Asian Music Characteristics: Rethinking Music History Through a Hermeneutic Lens
Reading the introduction to the International Conference John Cage 101, held in August 2013 in Tanjung Malim, Malaysia, two sentences stood out: “Cage was an early proponent of the need for Western music to incorporate Asian music characteristics. He studied Zen and I Ching, both philosophies having a powerful impact on his music, writings and art.” This article examines the implications of that statement, which appears to praise openness while simultaneously reflecting a globally dominant view of musical intellect rooted in the West—a tradition Cage himself partly sought to leave behind. He studied the I Ching [Yì Jīng], as many had before him. But what could this contribute to the world of composition? Methodologically, this discussion adopts a hermeneutic perspective on Asian music characteristics that become integrated into contemporary works. By drawing on teaching materials about John Cage and recent fieldwork observations, the essay explores what music history might mean when treated as an open system of events shaped by practical needs, while also examining musical and historical terminology both inside and outside Asia.
More than a decade ago, Nylan (2001) noted in his comprehensive commentary The Five Confucian “Classics” (pp. 204, 206) that “Outside China, the Changes is without doubt the best-known Chinese book, in addition to being the most familiar of the five classics. Beginning with Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) and continuing through to Carl Jung (1875–1961) and Joseph Needham (1900–1995), the work has had considerable influence on intellectuals in Europe and America, who have mined it for alternate theories of structural change in the natural world.”
But does that mean the I Ching’s significance has been truly understood? How much misinterpretation remains, even after accounting for the historical, social, and cultural conditions under which the work was encountered by scholars and artists who were no longer satisfied working within conventional Western musical frameworks? John Cage was one who pursued a musical escape. Was he a genuine pioneer? And if so, why have so many Chinese composers who similarly applied I Ching principles been forgotten?
Through a hermeneutic analysis of texts by contemporary composers, statements from Cage, and long-term observations of a decentralized academic discourse on music history, this article raises important questions for Asians who are supposedly defined by musical characteristics.
First Idea
In the novel Stone Raft, José Saramago depicts the Iberian Peninsula breaking away from Europe through synchronically arranged perspectives of isolated individuals gradually becoming connected: five people and a dog. Looking at the story’s concept reveals cross-references to core ideas of the I Ching, particularly regarding connectivity through chance and a holistic projection of seemingly unrelated events. Yet Saramago had no such intention. Only an observer from outside, examining the fiction with some knowledge of the I Ching, might perceive parallels of thought. Saramago, intentionally writing in his own way but disconnected from the work, reflects on human life: “We are probably incapable of filling emptiness, and what we call meaning is no more than a fleeting collection of images that once seemed harmonious, images on which the intelligence tried in panic to introduce reason, order, coherence.” (Saramago, 1995). This passage acts as a relativization of the I Ching and, in that sense, shares common ground.
Another case involves a piece of music deliberately using the I Ching as a tool to generate sound events by chance—exactly what some consider John Cage’s incorporation of Asian music characteristics. The tool itself suggests an external identity, foreign to the normative space where the compositional process was located: the West.
I am interested in what makes music characteristics “Asian.” Is there some reliable “Asian-ness” we can draw upon? And if so, in which musical dimension or academic field could we find clear evidence of Asian music characteristics? The I Ching’s world of interpretive truth might help sort this out, precisely because the I Ching does not claim any Asian-ness.
Outside of China, interestingly, the Book of Changes is rarely used to explain change itself. Instead, it is employed to fix decisions in a quite static manner, without actively contributing to the process or even being aware of the dynamics it describes. Chen offers a concise introduction to the meaning of lines within the 64 hexagrams: “The ‘six empty places’ refer to the six lines (yao) of a hexagram, which stipulate the patterns, directions, and principles of change. The movement from the bottom line up to the top line symbolizes the change of a specific situation. I Ching proposes 64 hexagrams, in which each contains six lines with a total of 384 representing all the possible situations of the universe. The first or the bottom line indicates the foundation of change; the second line is the sprouting period, which indicates the formation of a change of things; the third line is the embodiment indicating the concretizing stage of change; the fourth line is like the leaves of a tree, indicating the strong growth of change; the fifth line is the blooming period, indicating the flourishing of change; and the sixth or top line is the fruit, indicating the fullness of change, which implies a stage of transformation to another cycle.” (Chen, 2008:8).
The ‘West’ and ‘Asia’ from a twenty-first-century viewpoint are nearly undefinable spaces in the broadest sense. They barely imply hegemonic directions of thought, practice, or behavior; yet there is no definite West or Asia. This lack of conceptual clarity, however, is precisely the strength of these non-academic terms. John Cage, placed in the context of the conference mentioned earlier, is one appropriate example of how both ‘West’ and ‘Asia’ are clearly understood through the lens of an acting individual. The authentic definition emerges only within the framework of personalized meanings attached to these terms. From these reflections, I suggest that Asian-ness expressed in this context can only apply to cultural non-Asians. Asian-ness in an abstract dimension would not work when used for composers, musicians, performers, or researchers with Asian roots who work within manifold musical cultures across the geographic space of Asia, including culturally reconstructed spaces in the Asian diaspora.
Second Idea
In China, many composers have used ideas from the I Ching in their works but were never recognized as musical pioneers (Wang Yehu, 1984; Yu Siu Wah, 2013). Some should be named here: Zhao Yuanren (Chao Yuen Ren, 1892–1982), for instance, in The Ornamented Baban and the Waves of the Xiang River (Hua baban yu xiangjiang lang), two organ pieces from around 1913; or Huang Zi (1904–1934), for example in his ten-movement cantata Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge, movements IV, VII, and IX left unfinished), written around 1932. Many younger composers have remained more or less devoted to Chinese philosophical roots, such as Chen Gang and He Zhanhao (The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, 1959); Wen Deqing, especially in his chamber music from the 1990s onward; and Lin Hua in The Wind and Rain, composed in 1991—to name just a few from a sizable group. The primary link between these composers, all trained in Western composition techniques, and their use of the I Ching lies in the imaginative impulse drawn from its metaphors and predictions, which underlie many of their works. In this context, Tai Chi by Zhao Xiaosheng is especially noteworthy: he created a compositional system based on the sixty-four divine Tai Chi symbols.
Yet despite being acknowledged as masters of Western composition, these artists see themselves as less distinctive—essentially equal to Western composers despite their Chinese origin. A young lecturer from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music recently said that it is very difficult to identify what constitutes a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Western composition. They may all use the same methods, thus simply being Eastern or Oriental composers. Though they have abandoned traditional ways of perceiving musical life, producing works, and participating in culture, they are considered less outstanding because they follow the standards defined by the normative spaces in Asian societies. Not feeling bored by their compositional principles, they continue creating works that try to “find a Chinese answer to Western seriousness” (Tang Junjie, 2013).
Third Idea
Since 1983, I have traveled back and forth to Southeast Asia, observing obstacles related to creating a Southeast-Asian-ness in performance practice and in musicological academia. Additionally, attempts have been made to divide this sub-Asian region along insular versus mainland boundaries or based on religious variations. Though these efforts are probably well-reasoned, they imply a claim for distinctiveness that cannot easily be established through individual performance or its analysis.
Witzleben, who in 1997 wrote an influential article titled Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music, clearly states that he uses the term “Asian” considering that his observations apply to many parts of Asia, not just China (Witzleben, 1997, p. 222). Nevertheless, he focuses mainly on those cultures with long-standing written traditions of music scholarship and does not subsume Asian-ness as typical musical characteristics when answering whose ethnomusicology is being examined.
As an indirect obligation to his connection with Chinese philosophy, he also states that “if so-called ‘musicology’ had treated Western art music as one musical system among equals rather than as the primary focus of the study of ‘music,’ there would have been less need to develop a ‘comparative musicology’ or ‘ethnomusicology’ to deal with all the musics excluded from the ‘mainstream of musicology’” (Witzleben 1997, pp. 226–227).
A similar perspective could usefully be applied to music practice and performance: if so-called Western art music had been perceived as one musical culture among equals rather than the primary culture to be practiced and performed, there would have been far less need to discuss Asian music characteristics presumably incorporated elsewhere to make something distinct from the mainstream.
Writing Music History
These considerations lead directly to the forces that shape history. Music history, like any historical account, is essentially an abbreviation of “writing music history.” While past events themselves will never change, the perception and description—which in turn modify perceptions—will likely change continuously, depending on levels of knowledge about key events, everyday life, and technological evolution. Writing music history and discussing various stages of music theory began in nineteenth-century Europe, home to most colonial powers whose influence extended over Asia. Eurocentric approaches dominated all early efforts to establish the social sciences in general. The world was as small as one could travel, though that should not be used as an excuse to ignore cultures beyond that world. The central point, however, is that an unknown type of musicology, as well as unfamiliar music practices and performances, spread through colonial infrastructure and centered on local power structures in every region.
This rather general observation aligns with the views of many progressive ethnomusicologists since the 1990s, including Rice (1987), Nettl and Bohlman (1991), Racy (1991), Qureshi (1995), Rees (1995), and Witzleben (1997). In mainstream music history, this obvious phenomenon received little attention (Born & Hesmondhalgh, 2000).
Chinese, Western-trained composers emerged at almost exactly the same time John Cage was born. They “entered the music history (Yu, 2001), on which was recognisably written”—not by being present at the same moment, but by accepting the music system provided by the dominant power centers in and around China, primarily Hong Kong and Shanghai, where European music became a status symbol viewed as offering wealth, progress, and connection to a supposed cultural authority, regardless of one's actual social position. The latter factor likely contributed heavily to its appeal.
Developed as an independent discipline, musicology—which mainly involves current writing about music history—supports the worldview of the powerful explorers rather than examining all music practices and performances equally across locations. Hence, there remains a need for an expanded and corrective musicology, which might be called ethnomusicology or comparative musicology. The terminological example of “Chinese music characteristics” found in some compositions points to the need for improving how the development of this academic field is understood historically.
Cultural Understanding
Explaining his idea behind The Prepared Piano, Cage said, “I couldn’t find an African twelve tone row” (Cage, 1991). The effort and mindset underlying that statement reveal a great deal about how Cage approached cultural differences. It implies that he expected to find an African twelve-tone row, and it further suggests he believed twelve-tone technique was widely practiced internationally, at least among the musical elite. Following this reflective style, he might also have understood the I Ching simply as a tool to ease compositional decisions. So, any other tool capable of generating chance events could have served the same purpose. While his engagement with Buddhism may well have helped him develop productive ideas about emptiness, nothingness, or indeterminacy, it is difficult to argue that he fully assimilated the interconnected meanings embedded in Buddhist teachings—devoted monks themselves would hesitate to claim complete understanding of those texts.
In a related context, Köchler (1997) analyzed cultural self-comprehension versus the paradigm of civilizational conflict, concluding that interpretation and explanation of a text or event are fundamentally different and often contradictory. Applied to the relationship between the West and China, this problem—evident by the late nineteenth century (Nadler, 2012) and persisting into the present—remains alive. Yu observes in his teaching materials used at the Chinese University of Hong Kong the recent trend of non-Chinese composers increasing their contact with China: “Chinese sounds, musical forms and theatrical gestures are now, for better or worse, widely disseminated: they may even be absorbed into the creative language of non-Chinese composers. The use of traditional Chinese materials has its pitfalls, however, for many of these carry deeply ingrained connotations which the composer ignores at his peril. What is at stake, perhaps, is whether the use of any idiom is based on thorough understanding and empathy, or it is simply an application of Chinoiserie.”
So John Cage inevitably de-rooted and fragmented his understanding of Buddhist matters based on his prior cultural knowledge and personal interpretation, as Adler confirms: “…whenever people try to establish a certain reading of a text or expression, they allege other readings as the ground for their reading” (Adler, 1997, p. 321). Gadamer (1976), however, includes prejudice as a form of pre-knowledge used in gaining understanding (Salling Olesen, 2013). Cage may well have found “not being familiar with something” particularly appealing. The fact that he could not fully grasp Asian philosophies likely sustained his long-term interest; it became something he genuinely tried to understand. In that sense, his enduring curiosity might be seen as pioneering on an ideological level, possibly alien to his contemporaries in the immediate environment.
Improvisation
One common piece of pre-knowledge about Asian music characteristics involves the nature of ‘improvisation,’ often treated as oppositional to the understanding of ‘composition.’ Digging deeper, applications reminiscent of Asian-style improvisation can be found throughout experimental contemporary music. Edwards attempts to describe group improvisation: “One of the most exciting yet possibly troublesome aspects of group improvisation is that, rather than a single-person-led evolvement, ideas may be put forward by any agent present” (Edwards, 2010, p. 54). Weinberg develops an individual approach to communicating musical meanings by sidestepping verbal meaning entirely, fascinated by the result: “By sending a motif to a co-player who can transform it and send it back to the group, participants can combine their musical ideas into a constantly evolving collaborative musical outcome” (Weinberg, 2005, p. 23).
This kind of musical exchange is traditionally practiced across many cultures outside the musicological mainstream, including Asian cultures. Its wider rediscovery through contemporary experimental music highlights a gap in musical understanding—a gap only filled by pre-knowledge. Hayes and Michalakos temper this enthusiasm with an observation: “…after performing together for a significant amount of time, performers begin to predict or expect what their well-known partners might contribute in any given situation. On one hand, this is of course an advantage in long-term collaborations, as players become familiar with the sonic worlds of their peers; but, in some cases, it can also lead to a lack of spontaneity, or at least spark a desire for a freshness of sorts” (Hayes & Michalakos, 2012, p. 38). Kim-Boyle, speaking from another angle about his experience with the Radio Net project, offers a perspective on what this means for the composer’s evolving role.
This echoes what Kim-Boyle describes as an interdependent setting involving “the role of the agency of others in conditioning the play of participants, the degree to which dialogs are mediated by the mechanisms of the network, the public versus private space of performance, the degree to which the dialogs enabled represent truly unique ways of communicating, and the new role of the composer as a designer of a musical environment rather than a creator of self-contained musical work” (2009, p.365).
I find myself leaning toward agreement with him — at least when the lens is applied to certain musical practices and performances across Asia. Consider a relatively common and well-known example from the Buddhist-Daoist cultural sphere: a piece of music that appears in numerous forms, arrangements, and local dialects. Its coherence springs from the metaphor Liu Shui or Lưu Thủy (“Flowing Water”).
When flowing water meets obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses. It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it (translated by Wilhelm, 1950).
As instrumental ensemble music in both China and Vietnam — cultures linked by the Mahayana branch of Buddhism — the piece operates within a loose framework of rules. These rules govern phrasing, final pitches, tempo, interval relationships, and certain melodic sequences. Whatever its specific form, the piece relies largely on group improvisation.
The traditional Vietnamese Lưu Thủy circulates in Huế, the old imperial city, serving as the head piece of a five-part suite: Lưu Thủy, Kim Tiền, Xuân Phong, Long Hổ, and Tấu Mã. Each title draws on metaphors rooted in the I Ching literature.
A derivation of the Lưu Thủy performed in Huế is also found in southern Vietnam, where it functions as the head piece of a six-part set existing in three different extended forms. One version has sixteen two-measure phrases, another sixteen four-measure phrases, and a third contains thirty-two phrases of four measures each. These are respectively called Lưu Thủy Tấu Mã, Lưu Thủy Đoản, and Lưu Thủy Trường.
Below are the four first final phrase pitches from each of these pieces.
Table 1: The four first final phrase pitches of Lưu Thủy Tấu Mã, Lưu Thủy Đoản, and Lưu Thủy Trường
When considered against shifting pitch characteristics, the evolving extensions reveal additional rules. For instance, hovering tones that require an obligatory vibrato — in this mode, the final pitches XỰ, Ú, and CỘNG — alternately appear in final or internal phrase positions. Repetitive sequences are rare. The musicians must individually fill the spaces between final pitches. Their manners of performance are heavily interdependent (Jähnichen, 2012)
because they follow a rule that forbids parallel melodic lines or internal rhythmic accents in unison (music examples 1, 2, and 3). Traditionally, the full rule set is demanding and embodies the design of the musical environment for a single piece — exactly what Kim-Boyle identifies in the context of contemporary experimental music as “the new role of the composer” (2009, p.365).
Figure 1: Spectrogram of the climax in the piece Liu Shui for two guqins, “overcoming the blockage” (music example 4). Rhythmic accents, shown as vertical strokes, are followed by declining, blurring rhythmic structures, which are resumed in the final third of this section, culminating in a passage with strongly marked multiple glissandi that suggest fluidity.
Another composition, the 2007 piece Liu Shui, helps clarify the force of history. Performers Dai Xiaolian and Lu Xiaozi — both specialists in traditional Chinese music at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music — play an arrangement by Ly Huang of Liu Shui on two guqins. The piece is situated within a “dialogue field.” Changes in the music’s flow are prompted mutually by both performers. Yet the entire arrangement is fixed, permitting only slight interpretive differences. The composition is already, so to speak, explained. Even in a spectrogram, the deliberate imagery of flowing water is discernible.
As members of the cultural elite operating within an educational system grounded heavily in Western composition, creative work demands precise pre-decisions — decisions that were once made live on stage, guided by the rule framework and the musical behavior of fellow musicians. At best, while referencing tradition, the performers aim to make the music sound spontaneous and free, guiding their melodic lines toward a shared final phrase pitch. Still, there is little leeway for chance to creatively intervene.
Last: Chance
Kenneth Goldsmith, an American writer with a professional kinship to John Cage, explores works that use chance as a creative tool, potentially yielding boring outcomes: “I think that there were a handful of artists in the 20th century who intentionally made boring work, but didn’t expect their audiences to fully engage with it in a durational sense. It’s these artists, I feel, who predicted the sort of unboring boredom that we’re so fond of today” (2004, p.2).
Employing chance as a guiding principle means abandoning intention, rational content, purpose, and every rule familiar to the composer. It is exactly this last implication that makes chance a questionable principle to uphold. Neglecting rule sets requires knowing them intimately. John Cage, who absorbed various composition techniques with perhaps some ambivalence before striving to neglect them in his own work, must have felt this disappointing contradiction (Cage, 1991). Translating this into symbolic imagery, a summary of “known” rule sets might resemble the figure on the left (Figure 2a). When these rule sets are neglected, a figure representing the “rule of negligence” might emerge (Figure 2b).
The figure on the right (Figure 2b) nonetheless idealizes avoidance in a way that seems historically inaccurate. Given what the composer knows in the totality of experiences, the actual figure corresponding to the neglect of rule sets might instead look more like this (Figure 3).
Figures 2a, 2b, and 3: Demonstrating the imagination of rule sets and their neglect.
Though chance is the professed principle, its outcome is embedded within a performance context that aims to surprise, bore, or excite an audience. By not doing something, one makes that very thing even more prominent. The rule set of avoidance ultimately takes on an exaggerated shape of the very features being avoided, and from a distance
becomes alarmingly similar to them. To genuinely disregard everything known about compositional schemes, one could likely do nothing at all.
Music history occurs everywhere in the world and results from manifold creativity — even its avoidance suggests some form of creativity. Yet if we speak of incorporating Asian musical characteristics, the work must primarily be done within Asian cultures, from a perspective of critical historical awareness. Considering this, John Cage occupies a modest place, far from the urgent realities of Asia. His personal significance — and the significance of everything he incorporated into his works — is itself culturally patterned.