Gallery Critiques

Student 14 Fall 2000

1. I attended "Heart's Strings" by Angela Jui Lee on September28, 2000, at 8:00PM. This was a rather interesting program because I had never seen an instrument quite like this. The instrument was highly carved and decorated. It lay flat on a stand, and the musician sat behind it much like you might expect a pianist to do. The pieces that were performed were very long and quite peaceful. Ms. Lee played all the way through the program-a total of nine pieces-with no intermission. The performance time was about 55 minutes. The program did not give any information about the pieces other than their names:

-Autumn Moon

Over the Han Palace

-Plum Blossom

-Yi's Courting Dance

-The Flight of the Sunset Geese

-Spring River, Moonlit Night

-Xianfei's Tear

-Demise of the Last Dynasty -Majestic Mountain

-Twilight Return of the Fishing Boats

2. Many of the pieces performed sounded quite similar, but there were a few noticeable differences. The first piece was very light and relaxing, which is the feeling one might get while viewing an autumn moon over the Han Palace. The piece also contained several scales. Plum Blossom was dissonant and deep at the beginning, but it began to flow more towards the end. The image created in my mind when I think of this piece and its title is the beautiful image of the peach blossoms in the movie we watched in class. That dissonant sound reminds me of the blossoms suddenly popping open, and the flowing rhythm at the end makes me picture the blossoms floating through the air as the wind blows the trees. The third song was very quick and energizing to start off, while it got slow and light at the end. This is an excellent way to represent a courting dance, which would probably be very exciting in the beginning and then slow down as the person doing the courting caught the attention of the one he was courting. A great deal of the fifth piece was played in the bass clef, but at times it went back and forth from bass to treble, and there was also a quick rhythm section. This may have been representative of the river's journey across the land, an aspect we learned in class was quite important to the Japanese landscape art. A river is something that flows around objects and is inhibited by them. A river can be an example of how nature and humans can peacefully coexist. The Japanese might even build a house with a river flowing right through the middle of it. They say that the river helps them and they take care of the river. It is the same idea with trees. Taoists never interfere with nature by clearing the land to build. They just work with what nature provides for them. They adapt to situations that arise rather than working against them. The next to last piece performed was called Majestic Mountain, an object which we learned was one of the highest and grandest objects in nature. The majority of the pieces performed by Ms. Lee had to do with nature, which is symbolic of a Taoist thinker and represents a form of art and the ordered cosmos in the ways that I described above. Also, I consider any kind of music to be a form of art as self-expression. Music is an excellent way to let out your feelings, either through performing musical pieces or just listening to certain pieces and relating them to certain events occurring in your life and the way that you feel. The techniques used in the pieces played by Ms. Lee did an excellent job of portraying certain feelings and making one feel as if they were in the situation that the composer had been feeling when he wrote the pieces.

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