While Zhou Long's colorful orchestral music purportedly reflects Chinese aesthetics and culture, particularly the nation's music and poetry before the Cultural Revolution, it is almost equally a product of Western orchestral tradition and exoticism, in which things Chinese are imagined and romanticized. By his own admission, Long hearkens back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.) for much of his inspiration and subject matter, but this idealization of a bygone golden era is difficult to square with the music, which seems ...
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While Zhou Long's colorful orchestral music purportedly reflects Chinese aesthetics and culture, particularly the nation's music and poetry before the Cultural Revolution, it is almost equally a product of Western orchestral tradition and exoticism, in which things Chinese are imagined and romanticized. By his own admission, Long hearkens back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.) for much of his inspiration and subject matter, but this idealization of a bygone golden era is difficult to square with the music, which seems patently modern and more than a little derivative of European Impressionism and lavish Hollywood film scores. Such atmospheric pieces as Poems from Tang, The Rhyme of Taigu, and Da Qu may suggest Chinese instruments, ancient performance styles, and even Buddhist rituals, but there is little reason to suppose Long's symphonic fantasies are based on anything more than speculation. The Future of Fire, Long's choral anthem, is perhaps the least Chinese sounding and the most overtly Western...
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