Throughout Western music history, pre-existing material has long been the aesthetic core of a new composition. Yet there has never been such an epoch as our time in which using pre-existing material, melodic quotation...Throughout Western music history, pre-existing material has long been the aesthetic core of a new composition. Yet there has never been such an epoch as our time in which using pre-existing material, melodic quotation in particular, features so extensively in works of many of the composers. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the use of quoted tunes in a musical piece operates in an interwoven complex where time and space are of the essence. A quote is able to oscillate perpetually between one’s mental worlds of the memorable past and the imaginative present when it is highlighted enough to be recognizable from its surrounding context. Upon interpreting the use of quotation in various contexts, the aesthetic object, I argue, is the shift from original to quoted music, and vice versa. And listeners can respond aesthetically to the quotation itself even without knowledge of its provenance and textual or referential content.展开更多
When the umbrellas were held up against the tear gas attack in the protest on September 28, 2014, the hot issue raised by the marathon-like Yellow Umbrella Movement was not only the matter of politics but also a coinc...When the umbrellas were held up against the tear gas attack in the protest on September 28, 2014, the hot issue raised by the marathon-like Yellow Umbrella Movement was not only the matter of politics but also a coincidence created for the Hong Kong locals to face, or to be faced with an already moot cliche： How the Hongkongese can redef＇me and redeem their almost lost socio-cultural identity, particularly under the increasingly hegemonic influences and the socio-cultural invasion of the mainland after the 1997 Handover. My present paper is not intended to discuss the topic of identity on the platform of politics, or the postcolonial studies such as transculturation or cultural hybridty. But instead, I am far more interested in locating such issue on the aesthetic dimension of collective memory, which is revealed in two local contemporary Hong Kong compositions. In the process of shaping and reshaping a form of＂HongKongeseness＂ in which the composers tend to create and the local listeners tend to experience, albeit transient, can appear in every nuance of the sonic metaphor embedded in the pre-existing indigenous tunes of a self-contained compositional work.展开更多
文摘Throughout Western music history, pre-existing material has long been the aesthetic core of a new composition. Yet there has never been such an epoch as our time in which using pre-existing material, melodic quotation in particular, features so extensively in works of many of the composers. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the use of quoted tunes in a musical piece operates in an interwoven complex where time and space are of the essence. A quote is able to oscillate perpetually between one’s mental worlds of the memorable past and the imaginative present when it is highlighted enough to be recognizable from its surrounding context. Upon interpreting the use of quotation in various contexts, the aesthetic object, I argue, is the shift from original to quoted music, and vice versa. And listeners can respond aesthetically to the quotation itself even without knowledge of its provenance and textual or referential content.
文摘When the umbrellas were held up against the tear gas attack in the protest on September 28, 2014, the hot issue raised by the marathon-like Yellow Umbrella Movement was not only the matter of politics but also a coincidence created for the Hong Kong locals to face, or to be faced with an already moot cliche： How the Hongkongese can redef＇me and redeem their almost lost socio-cultural identity, particularly under the increasingly hegemonic influences and the socio-cultural invasion of the mainland after the 1997 Handover. My present paper is not intended to discuss the topic of identity on the platform of politics, or the postcolonial studies such as transculturation or cultural hybridty. But instead, I am far more interested in locating such issue on the aesthetic dimension of collective memory, which is revealed in two local contemporary Hong Kong compositions. In the process of shaping and reshaping a form of＂HongKongeseness＂ in which the composers tend to create and the local listeners tend to experience, albeit transient, can appear in every nuance of the sonic metaphor embedded in the pre-existing indigenous tunes of a self-contained compositional work.
