Instruments the Chinese Orchestra

The repertoire of Chinese composer Wenchen Qin is often characterized by immediate connections to the topics of nature and religious spirituality. For Qin, the religious connotation in his music often serves specifically as the medium connecting humans and nature. One only needs to look at the titles of his works to see the prevalence of these two topics: Pilgerfahrt im Mai (Pilgrimage in May) (2004), The Nature’s Dialogue (2010), The Border of Mountains (2012), The Cloud River (2017), The Light of the Deities (2018), Poetry of the Land (2020), among others. Qin’s proclivity for these topics can be traced back to his childhood in Inner Mongolia where he was born. The vast landscape of Inner Mongolia, with its endless grassland interspersed with surging mountain ranges, bears a palpable trait of ruggedness and broadness of space, of which one can often identify musical counterparts in Qin’s music almost viscerally.

In The Alchemical Wedding (1996), for large ensemble, Australian composer Liza Lim seeks contact points between “seemingly disparate musical entities” (1996)—a pursuit reflected in the work’s title. This virtual contact is evidenced by the work’s peculiar instrumentation, where the Chinese Er-hu and Indonesian Angklung are pitted against a large Western ensemble. Reflecting the cultural fusion of composer’s upbringing between Australia and various Asian countries, The Alchemical Wedding represents a marriage of musical possibilities through the collision of Asian and Western instruments and aesthetics.

Composers make use of their knowledge of different orchestration techniques in creating certain effects and sonic outcomes. These effects may be comprehended by listeners to a greater or lesser extent depending on the amount of shared understanding with the musical tradition, style of music, and other factors. In this project, we look at how the success of these effects depends on both prior knowledge and experience, and how they are perceivable by listeners. Successful orchestration is built upon the fact that regardless of the instruments used or the musical or cultural connotations of the music, they adhere to universal mechanisms of auditory perception and cognition.