Department of Music Blog

Guest blogger Tim Parenti reports for the Heinz Chapel Choir as they tour China…

Thursday was a pretty exhausting day, but well worth it.  That’s why I’m writing this on Friday morning.

Day 3 – Thursday 30 April 2009
日3：2009年4月30日（星期四）

We started our Thursday with a wonderful breakfast at our hotel, featuring some of the best of Western and Eastern breakfast foods.  We ate up, because we knew we had a long day ahead of us.  The group made its way to the north gate of the Forbidden City, now known as the Palace Museum.  After learning about some of the history behind the museum, we began to make our way through the huge area, entering in traditional style through special gates constructed to keep out Chinese vampires.

The northern section of the city was a residential area, while the center section, home to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, was primarily ceremonial back in the days of the emperor.  We were lucky to have seen the external ornamentations that had been newly refurbished last year for the Olympics.

The sheer grandeur of the area was striking.  It seemed that every time we walked through one gorgeous area of the city, we would pass through a gate that led to a bigger and more impressive area, saving the best for last.  So take a word from us: If you ever visit yourself, start at the back (north) gate.

While there, we met many visitors from more rural areas of China who were not as familiar with foreigners such as ourselves.  One group, whom we were told is from Shaanxi province, was particularly eager to meet us.  We left one of them with a unique gift from his visit with the American tourists: a Tootsie-Pop.

After our visit was over, we passed through more gates until reaching the front (south side), which borders Tian Anmen Square.  We were told that the picture in the middle is of Sun Yat-sen, who is regarded as the father of Modern China, and that the picture is only in the square at the national holidays, 1 May and 1 October.

After lunch, we made our way to the Temple of Heaven, where immediately upon entering, we saw many dancers.  After many of us danced amongst ourselves (and even with some of the locals), we found some musicians and singers as well.  Apparently, many of the folk who come here are retired, and so they just spend their days hanging out in the park.  How wonderful is that?

Though the main attraction for us there was the Hall of Prayer, we couldn’t escape the local charm.

Before we knew it, it was time to head back to the hotel before dinner and the alumni reception, which was hosted by the CEO of COFCO Wines & Spirits (which was selected as the exclusive supplier of wine for the 2008 Olympics), Mr. Ning Gaoning, a graduate of Pitt’s business school.  A few of us went out afterwards; among other things, we saw many of the embassies that are in our area of Beijing, and then we came back, truly tired from all the walking, for a great night’s sleep.

There are many more pictures to show… you can see many of my favorites from Day 3 here.

Coming up: Today (Friday), is Labour Day here in China.  We will visit the Beijing Zoo, Summer Palace, and a jade workshop, before heading to the Olympic Park for pictures.  We will conclude the day with our first concert at the Central Conservatory of Music in conjunction with Beijing’s Financial Street Choir.

Guest blogger Tim Parenti reports for the Heinz Chapel Choir as they tour China…

Days 1 and 2 – Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 April 2009
日1／2：2009年4月28～29日（星期二／星期三）

It has certainly been a long day.  Well, a long day-and-a-half, to be fair.  And I am really tired.

To keep things simple on my end of things, I’m going to link to a few pictures at a medium resolution throughout my narratives, as well as a few more at the end.  I do hope you’ll take the time to view them.

After staying up until about 02:30 in New York on Monday night (Tuesday morning), the guys in my room decided to get a little bit of rest before waking up around 05:00 for final preparations.  We took the 06:00 hotel shuttle to JFK’s Terminal 7, and met director John Goldsmith there.  Check-in was surprisingly quick, and many of us were completely through security before 07:00.

Since our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 10:10, we had some time to kill in the terminal.  After grabbing breakfast, many of us just hung out around the various shops and the food court, while others stayed by the gate.

Finally, it was time to board.  And at 10:41 EDT, we finally took off and began our 8068-mile (12984 km) journey to Hong Kong.  In order to fight jet lag, we were wise to immediately adjust to Hong Kong time, but that made it a bit weird when the staff were bringing around “brunch” an hour later at about 23:45 HKT.

By 01:00, the cabin lights were shut off so that we could get some rest.  And from having stayed up much of the night before, it was much-needed.  Taking the polar route was a lot of fun, too.  We flew over northern Greenland around 04:30, and by then the lights were on again and people started milling about to stretch and to get their blood flowing.  “Lunch,” as they called it, was served at 06:30, and then the whole process was repeated again with a mid-morning nap, more stretching, conversing, and the like.

We landed in Hong Kong at 14:25, which was a little bit disconcerting, as our boarding passes instructed us to be at the gate for our connecting flight to Beijing at 14:35.  At Hong Kong’s airport, they don’t really make airport-wide boarding announcements; rather, they have people with signs that inform passengers of what’s going on.  It was a little bit frustrating being told that it was final call for our flight immediately after going through security, but we hurried along.  We all made it okay, and were off again by 15:36, albeit a half-hour behind schedule.

While most people I talked to said that the 15½-hour flight to Hong Kong was tolerable, and was operated in a manner that helped them adjust well, our three-hour flight to Beijing was, for all intents and purposes, a simple domestic flight on a Wednesday afternoon.  It was rough for a few of our crew, but all-in-all, everyone’s doing well.  Because we hadn’t eaten since 06:30 (and had no time in Hong Kong), the meal served at 16:30 was received quite eagerly.  We landed at 18:26, queued up into a big alphabetical line for passing through immigration and customs, and before we knew it we were gathering our baggage and heading off to the buses.

Dinner was held at the Jin Tai Fulong Restaurant, and while we weren’t always exactly sure what everything was, we were, for the most part, adventurous, and tried a lot of it.

Upon arriving at the hotel, most people took right to bed due to exhaustion from the 30-hour marathon that was Days 1 and 2.  I found it very interesting when being given my room key, though, that I am in room 444, due to the negative connotations the number four has here in China.  It’s basically akin to getting room 666 or 1313 in America — while it’s really just a number, it still doesn’t leave you with the greatest of feelings.

You see, the word for “four” (sì, 四) is very similar to the word for “death” (sǐ, 死), with only the tonal inflection being different between the two.  And since the Chinese are very superstitious when it comes to numbers, many hotels avoid the number four altogether.

Apparently this hotel thought it would be just as well to give the “room of death” (which is actually quite nice) to non-”four-fearing” American tourists.  Yay.

You can see more of my hand-picked images from Days 1 and 2 here.

Fun fact: In case you couldn’t guess, Beijing is still very proud of its hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.  Later this week, we will visit the “Bird’s Nest” and the “Water Cube,” two of the most recognizable venues built for the Games.

Coming up: On Thursday, we will have tours of Tian Anmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven.  We will finish the day with a reception for local alumni of the University of Pittsburgh.

Hey, there.  I’m Tim Parenti, a three-year member of the Heinz Chapel Choir here at the University of Pittsburgh.  Every few years, the Heinz Chapel Choir embark on an international concert tour, and this year we’re off to China and Hong Kong for a fifteen-day “Great Wall” tour, including four concerts in six cities.

We have such a devoted audience in the States, though (and we love you guys!), so we don’t want to leave you out.  As such, I’ve been asked by the Music Department to blog our journey daily as we go along, so that you can follow us and experience a taste of Chinese culture through our eyes.

Since I was planning on keeping in touch anyways, I jumped at the chance!  Since the Internet in China can be finicky, the idea is that I’ll be posting both here and at my personal blog, so in case anything goes wrong with posting to one site, we’ll have the other.  So remember to check back daily for updates… and with that, we’ll jump right into it!

Day 0 – Monday 27 April 2009
日0：2009年4月27日（星期一）

My personal journey began at about 05:30 this morning, doing some final packing before heading out to Pittsburgh International Airport, catching a late-morning flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport.  The tour departs from New York tomorrow morning, and everyone was finding their own way here, so it was a pleasant surprise to find some other choir members on my flight.

The rest of the day has been fairly leisurely here.  Because China is 12 hours ahead of Pittsburgh, we’ll be pretty jet-lagged when we land in Beijing on Wednesday evening.  So, I used my fatigue from waking up early to take some strategic naps during the afternoon — the Chinese night.  After heading back to the airport’s food court for our last state-side dinner (a classic all-American McDonald’s meal), we came back to the hotel to play a little bit of pool.  I played one round, which I was surprised to have won.

Now, we’re approaching the wee hours of the morning here in New York, but the six of us in my hotel room are staying up and active.  We’ll be on a plane by 10:00, and we can sleep then.  It’ll be sixteen hours to Hong Kong, then another three-and-a-half to Beijing, where we’ll start our tour.  So, it will be a long, but fun trip.

Obviously, since I’ll be on planes or in airports for 24 hours straight, the next post won’t be until sometime Wednesday (EDT)… from Beijing!

L-R: Sachem Orenda, McKenzie Ridgeway (F), Nathan Mohney, Christen Wurschmidt, Samantha Meese, Sarah Albani, Maria (Geña) Escoriaza, Ben Pattak, and Kenneth Haney

On Sunday, April 26, the Department of Music celebrated with Class of 2009 graduates and their families.  Department Chair Mathew Rosenblum offered congratulations to all the graduates and Undergraduate advisor John Goldsmith introduced each graduate individually and shared their accomplishments and goals. Congratulations to all of you, and we look forward to following your careers!

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette critic Andrew Druckenbrod profiles faculty composer Eric Moe’s recent string of successes in today’s edition. From the article:

“Moe’s music is of its time but strikingly original. It is harmonically centered, but not tonal. It can be rhythmically repetitious, but not minimalist. It often references contemporary culture, but is not post-modern (in fact, he tends to poke fun at that). At the heart, it is music whose form, phrasing and notes themselves are driven by whatever emotion or thought he (or the texts he uses) are expressing. It often hits the ear like a foreign language you can somehow understand. And musicians are speaking it more than ever.”

The Pittsburgh Electronic Musicians will perform on the patio (facing Bigelow) of the WPU on Friday evening, starting at 5:30. Graduating senior Sachem Orenda, who is one of PEM’s main instigators, will be a featured performer. The show, as you would expect, is free, so be sure to drop by.

Hee-sun Kim’s (PhD 2004, ethnomusicology) Contemporary Kayagŭm Music in Korea offers the first book-length account of a new musical genre developed in post-war South Korea for kayagŭm, a traditional 12-stringed long board zither. The book examines the process by which a traditional instrument has become a vessel for the expression of new ideas concerning modernity, tradition and identity by examining history and relationships among composition, performance and representation. At the same time, Hee-sun Kim shows how, for kayagŭm practitioners, producing and performing new music has become a means of artistic survival and lately, of social distinction and success.

Contemporary Kayagŭm Music in Korea deals with musical sound, the meaning of performance, aesthetics in specific social contexts, and interactions among people. Most importantly the book aims to answer the question of why people make music in a given society at specific times. The book, which is accompanied by an audio CD of representative kayagŭm repertoires, offers unique perspective on music and society in contemporary Korea, which will be of importance to students of Ethnomusicology, Korean music, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies as well as Korean studies.

Contemporary Kayagŭm Music in Korea received a four-star review in the the March 2009 issue of world music periodical Songlines. Keith Howard praises many aspects of the book saying,

“…this book, supplemented by an excellent CD (the author is the performer on several tracks), gives us the needed insight. On the whole, this is easily accessible, well illustrated (with some rare photographs) and sensibly constructed…”

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During Marcos Balter’s year as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory he has seen over twenty performances of his works, including three world premieres and some glowing reviews.

Raw Item, for oboe and small ensemble, received performances by the Manhattan Sinfonietta at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York and at the Fromm Concert Series at Harvard. Matthew Guerrieri of The Boston Globe noted that “…Raw Item had both intricate clarity and a convincing trajectory”. Matthias Röder of Zeitschichten Magazine described Raw Item as “the most exciting and refreshing piece on the program” and described Balter’s music as “agile, flexible, delicate, and fragile.” (more…)

Ethnomusicology lecturer Emily Pinkerton will perform at the Cup and Chaucer (on the ground floor of Hillman Library) on Thursday, April 16 at 12:30. The concert is free, so be sure to stop by to hear this extraordinarily versatile musician.

Musicology graduate student Elizabeth Hoover’s paper “The Archaeology of Musical Narrative: Indeterminate Music as Discursive Formation” is one of four papers selected for the City University of New York’s Graduate Center symposium Representing Music—or—Music Representing. The symposium takes place April 25, and will be moderated by the distinguished musicologist Leo Treitler.

Abstract

The Archaeology of Musical Narrative: Indeterminate Music as Discursive Formation

All too often in teaching the history of Western Art Music the term “story” is employed to relate musical narratives to students.  According to literary theorist, Jonathan Culler, however, “the theory of narrative requires a distinction between…‘story’—a sequence of actions or events and…‘discourse,’ the discursive presentation or narration of events.”  Following this literary model, constructions of musical narratives have surfaced in which musical forms based on tonality designate “story.”  This story, the musical form, is contingent on the “discursive presentation” of “musical” events, or discourse.  Although the translation of literary theory works well for nineteenth-century composition, as demonstrated by scholars such as Carolyn Abbate, Anthony Newcomb, and Leo Treitler, the musical interpretation of the story-discourse dichotomy does not translate in the analysis of twentieth-century indeterminate works.

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