At the chamber music concert on Wednesday (at 5 pm), an Austrian man behind me asked Professor Harbison this question: “If Japanese people are playing music written by Austrian composers who died 250 years ago, why aren’t Austrian people playing Japanese music by composers who died 250 years ago?” Disregarding the apparent confusion about the performers’ nationality (they were Chinese and Taiwanese) since it’s sort of irrelevant to the question, I think that there are interesting reasons for the unreciprocal relationship that he described. Harbison gave a decent enough answer, “Just give it 20 years.”
But I’m not that optimistic. For one thing, we’re all playing Western instruments intended for the types of music written by Western composers. But let’s set that aside as well, supposing that a violinist can learn erhu, flautist can learn dizi, guitarist can learn pipa, etc. There’s no lack of equivalent instruments in Asia’s rich musical history.
I think the primary problem is the lack of structured polyphonic harmony – the invention that frames the very essence of Western Music. Traditional Asian music has gorgeous melodies, intriguing scales, lovely instruments, and its own culture and spiritual meaning. But when the instruments are not playing in unison, the multiple lines are not structured in such a way that they form distinct chords or counterpoint. That is not to say that Asian polyphony is inferior in any way, but that its very nature makes every additional voice added difficult to “fit in.” I have not heard any Asian multiple-instrument traditional songs that have gotten in more than 4 or 5 parts. Note: pieces such as the “Butterfly Lover’s Concerto” do draw from traditional melodies, but it’s important to realize that the harmonies have been added very recently in light of Western influences and not get them confused with the state of things before European trade began to significantly affect music.
The genius of Western diatonic harmony is then this: it allows for a logical method of adding instrument after instrument while creating a harmonious whole – that’s why we call it harmony in the first place. Even as composers write increasingly atonal pieces, the mentality of this “big picture” layering remains; it’s why atonal composers still have to study musical theory extensively before departing for contemporary works.
The simple rules of voice leading and chordal progression are extensible, and over just a few hundred years, European music went from monk music, which was probably less developed than Chinese music at an equivalent point in history, to the huge symphonic works of the Romantic era. It took really only 400 years or so, which is a very short time in terms of musical evolution. It then fed into jazz and rock and rap (the background samples) and all those types of music that now dominate the world market.
Modern music is evidence of the outcome of pitting all the world’s musical styles against one another: the vocal styles are regionally varied, with every place adding its own twists; we see in the United States primarily a combination of African and European traditions. The rhythm is decidedly African in origin. But the harmonic structure is always Western. The blues probably originated from variations on African tribal songs in the 1700s and 1800s, but the chords (I I IV I V IV I) are genuinely European. The same happened to Asia: the songs of the late 1800s and early 1900s, eg “enka,” are Asian melodies with European chords attached.
No matter what “high artists” as I’ll call them – learned musicians, musical scholars, composers, etc. – want to say, it’s the populous that has to make the final call as to what music will reign – and they cast their votes by simply listening, buying, and downloading songs. And when the most Asian-sounding pop song is Jay Chou’s Fearless ending song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cUqFzkEOKI), I think it’s safe to say that Western harmony can claim victory. The entire song is set to i vi iv V (v), and you don’t have to look far beneath the instrumentation and visuals to see that Jay Chou’s doing the same thing we all did in 21M.301 or the equivalent intro to music theory class.
So the Austrians, with their Vienna Philharmonic and other great orchestras – what are they to do? How would they adapt Asian songs for so many instruments without necessarily infusing them with Western harmony? It would be very embarrassing for them to all play in near-unison. And who would the audience be? Asian people have already moved on: just listen to any J-pop, K-pop, C-pop, whatever language you like – the music of 250 years ago is a distant memory, sung as folk songs at reunions or out of nostalgia. The concerts are for the new pop idols and the occasionally classical-music group.
As for why Asian people tend to learn Western songs, since that was the premise of the original question … well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I was raised being told that most Asian music was essentially junk and not worth learning (which of course I disagree with now), whereas Western music is to be taken very seriously. While there’s a big movement for the revival of traditional cultural elements like music, the implicit highest honor is still to excel at the pieces written by the geniuses of Classicism.
