Roeder

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 1 NO. 2 (2011)

Fluctuant Grouping in a Silk-and-Bamboo Melody

John Roeder

---

Abstract:

Liuban is one of a constellation of old tunes (qupai) that are foundational to music of China, and in particular to the rich “Silk-and-Bamboo” music (jiangnan sizhu) of the lower Yangzi region. This essay highlights some of the extraordinary qualities of Liuban by treating its grouping structure not as fixed, but as constructed dynamically by the listener. A processive analysis shows how Liuban deploys its materials elegantly to suggest but then to subvert grouping function, creating fluctuant, protean sensations of beginning, ending, and continuation that are analogous to its gentle varying contour and pitch focus. It manifests not a fixed form but an almost self-antithetical process—a Dao, or path of natural action—through which a moment of maximal conformity simultaneously appears as a moment of maximal possibility. During the preparation for that moment, sensations of symmetry are infused with remembered asymmetrical qualities and vice versa.  The analysis thus provides a dynamically oriented supplement to standard fixed-state accounts of the grouping structure of this melody. It also provides a productive basis for comparing Liuban with other qupai like Baban, and for understanding the “flowered” melodies that are derived from them, thus providing a new approach to this fundamental but as yet little-studied procedure in Chinese music.

Read full article in PDF version

Contributor Information:

John Roeder is a professor in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in the theory and analysis of music outside the classical Western canon, focusing especially on rhythmic and pitch processes in recent art music. Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada have supported his research into graphical representations of music, musical transformations, the preservation of digital art, and musical periodicity.  A book he co-edited with Michael Tenzer, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music, will be published later this year by Oxford University Press.

© 2011 by the author. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this article without requesting permission. When distributing, (1) the author of the article and the name, volume, issue, and year of the journal must be identified clearly; (2) no portion of the article, including audio, video, or other accompanying media, may be used for commercial purposes; and (3) no portion of the article or any of its accompanying media may be modified, transformed, built upon, sampled, remixed, or separated from the rest of the article.

---