TWELVE-SOUND VERTICAL ROWS IN THE COMPOSITION GAO WEIJIE “MYSTERIOUS DREAM” FOR VIOLA AND PIANO SOLO

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the musical language of the contemporary Chinese experimental composer Gao Weijie in the ensemble “Mysterious Dream” for viola and piano solo. Outlining the political and artistic situation in the country, it should be noted that only after the Cultural Revolution in the 70s and 80s did Chinese artists have the opportunity to get acquainted with innovative European cultural achievements, and thus were able to enrich Chinese musical practice with atonal and dodecaphonic works. Having gained freedom of expression in their country, Chinese composers began to work on creating an individual style. The article outlines the figure of Gao Weijie as a talented composer, innovator, prolific musicologist, and one of the founders of the Association of Composers for the Study of Music. A detailed analysis of the twelve-sound series and its reversals in the composition “Mysterious Dream” made it possible to reveal the peculiarities of its use in the viola and piano ensemble, namely, to trace the logic of alternating segments of the series in horizontal and vertical presentation. The series in the original provides for the placement of sounds in a chord at a fixed interval distance with a combination of wide and narrow arrangement. The condition declared by the author implies that the sound “g” does not change its pitch, and the other sounds either remain in place in their octave or are transferred to another octave. According to the rule of intervallic rotation, eleven more chord variations can be made. The analysis of the work, namely the use of different variants of the series horizontally and vertically and the separation of its segments, as well as such a traditional element of Chinese music as pentatonic in different pitch positions, demonstrated that a carefully thought-out mathematical system, and thus a clearly constructed structure of the composition, is not limited to logical constructive calculations, but creates different images, states, moods and has a clear architectural expression. The talented interpretation of the series and all its rotations and traditional pentatonic of various inclinations testifies to the synthesis of the original interpretation of innovative techniques and specific national Chinese expressive means.