With flowers blooming and all sorts of greenery coming to life, I think now would be the time to introduce you to the work Taipei’s Chen Yang and his 現代四季 (Modern Four Seasons). Kindly shared with me by fellow midwesterner, Chris J. Morris, 現代四季 (Modern Four Seasons) is a wonderful, lively work of little-heard or little-discussed about “New Chinese Music” I’m trying to flesh out on the blog.
By now, if you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably begun to pick out some of the key strokes that are coloring what constitutes, “New Chinese Music”. If you’re thinking about compositions that gamely mix traditionally-influenced melodics and harmony with contemporary, electronic instruments, you’ve got some of it. If you’re thinking about composers, many who studied both in the “West” and at home, reimagining kosmische, New Age, jazz, and contemporary (or minimalist) music with forward-thinking, home-grown ideas – I wager, you’ve got most of the gist.
Chen Yang, himself, was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to putting on tape his own stamp in this new world of New Chinese Music. One wouldn’t think it so but Chen was born in 1956 with congenital deafness that left him unable to hear from his right ear. It would be years later, at the tender age of 5 years old, that he would “grow” into music and surprise his family by showing a prodigious talent at playing piano. By the age of 12, Chen’s family were able to enroll him in music school where he’d start his first compositions. From his homebase in Taipei he’d built a strong enough reputation to become an in-demand session musician and join orchestral ensembles (at an age others were still building up their chops).
When Chen was admitted to Taipei’s Chinese Cultural & Arts Institute he’d major in theoretical composition and would focus on five specialties in music – theater, traditional, dance, contemporary and classical. Later on he enrolled in The Dick Grove School of Music in America affording him the experience to encounter and play with western music he hadn’t encountered before. In the daytime he would be performing with classically-inspired ensemble groups and writing more traditionally-minded work. Other times, he’d explore spaces where he could toy around with electronic synthesizers and computers.
Opportunities to work in the world of soundtrack music (a skyrocketing market in that era) would push Chen to venture back into Taiwan and try his luck at scoring movies, commercials and TV shows. From the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s, Chen would create orchestral soundtracks for various high-rated TV shows. He’d use the proceeds of soundtrack sales and commercial work to finance trips back to America where he’d collect the latest (and greatest) electronic instruments.
In due time, Chen would create his own studio he’d dub the “Environmental Music Studio”. From his studio he would create commercial sound for brands like Kanebo and Renault, drawing work from both brands with a Taiwanese presence and pop artists from Hong Kong and home.
1983’s 浪漫的鍵盤音樂 (Romantic Keyboard Music) became the album that would cement his popularity in the Taiwanese market. Taking advantage of his vast phalanx of electronic instruments, Chen would create one of the earliest versions of modern Chinese New Age albums. Although quite light in atmosphere, it showed that Chen was unafraid to look beyond the past.
Then, just a year later, it’s sequel, 浪漫鍵盤音樂Ⅱ (Romantic Keyboard Music II) found Chen venturing into less classifiable territory. The presence of the Roland Jupiter-8, pictured in the liner notes, and allusions to real and imagined keyboard fantasies, seemed to point at a composer trying to move away from lighter fare, away from mere background muzak and into the realm of esoteric, spiritually-inspired music. That such an electronic-indebted album became as much of a hit, spoke to an audience hungry for more of what Chen could offer.
In 1987, Asia’s oldest modern dance company, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan came calling asking if Chen would contribute some music for their latest work, 天堂旅館 (Paradise Inn). Two songs were written that would eventually find their way to 現代四季 (Modern Four Seasons), “Spring” and “Summer”.
Vastly different than anything he’d done before, Chen leaned heavily into more ambient and minimal arrangements. Sonically, he’d procured astounding instruments (for his time) like the E-MU II sampler and Octave Plateau Voyetra-8 polyphonic synthesizer, leveraging their technology to create atmospheres that recalled the work of Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and the burgeoning New Electronic Music of the west.
Chen would abscond from any orchestral arrangements and instrumentation. Everything written for 天堂旅館 (Paradise Inn) would serve as a springboard to fully experiment with the hypnotic sound of traditional Taiwanese music and this other, cutting-edge sound that would round out 現代四季 (Modern Four Seasons). Yet the music of this album would render itself, surprisingly, personal and more holistic than that.
Songs like “清晨 (The Morning)”, “秋 (Autumn)”, and “心洞 (Hole Heart)”, avoid the treacly tropes of stereotypical New Age music. On it you get sublime, plain-spoken, conversational ambient compositions that invite comparisons to what one would hear happening in Japan’s “Interior Music” scene. Others like “稻 (Rice)” seem to draw influence from Jarre’s Zoolook or the proto-deep house of Art Of Noise. In the end, although not as popular as his earlier work, 現代四季 (Modern Four Seasons) marked a decisive turning point for Chen.
What came next would always have some of this magic. However, this is how you can make New Chinese Music unlike little else out there…at least that we know well enough of yet. More of that, in the future (of course).