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This thesis aims to offer a practitioner’s perspective of composition for the Chinese instrumental ensemble of the twenty-first century. Chinese instrumental music composition has appeared in the concert hall in China since the beginning of the twentieth century. Modeled on western classical music, modern Chinese instrumental music has undergone a series of development and reformation that aimed to merge the Chinese and western musical ideas and techniques. The very role of the composer and the notion of concert-hall practice were being emphasized, whereas various ingrained characters of traditional instruments, such as music-making conventions, instrumentation preferences, and certain ideology behind timbre, were overshadowed. Also attributed to such nature of Chinese instrumental music is that composers and performers are often in a quandary when juggling Chinese instrumental music conventions with a mindset framed by western classical music. Furthermore, in the current globalized/globalizing culture, Chinese instrumental composition is propelled by manifold musical influences. I intend to share the insight and to document the first-hand information acquired through the composition processes from a composer’s perspective. My sharing and documentation focus on the issues of incorporating idiomatic music materials from various Chinese instruments into original compositions, as well as on several matters concerning rehearsals and performances. Including six chapters, this thesis anthologizes six original works and discusses the composition strategies relevant to the distinctive instrumental combination of each. Chapter 1 presents an adaptation of a western symphonic poem for modern Chinese orchestra. Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate respectively a composition for a large Chinese wind and percussion ensemble and a composition for a large plucked-string ensemble. Chapters 4 and 5 cover two pieces of contrasting instrumentation, namely a mixed ensemble of fourteen instruments and a huqin sextet. Chapter 6 is about a multimedia composition with electronic soundtrack and installation art for seven players. / published_or_final_version / Music / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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The focal point of the work is the turntable and DJ (or Disk Jockey; one who controls the turntables). This concept not only manifests itself through the utilization of actual turntables, but also much of the acoustic material performed by the ensemble consists of "metaphoric turntables". These are contrasting layers of sound superposed over one another that are played by small groups of specific instruments within the larger ensemble. These instrumental groups simulate the sonorities generated through turntable manipulation such as warping, oscillations, crossfading, transforming, and numerous scratching techniques. The DJ (sometimes referred to as a turntablist) employs many techniques, articulations, and effects that are notated and explained in the accompanying analysis.

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Mobiles is a composition for an ensemble consisting of 12 instruments. The piece, in one movement, incorporates intuition, chance, and twelve tone techniques and reflects the relationship between motion and rest or tension and release. The structure is modeled according to principles of growth and decay, starting off slowly, building, and then dying away. Much of the material is inspired by mental images invoked from modern theories concerning chaos. Mobiles' character stems from the principal use of two motives, the chaos motif and the echo motif. Primarily, the chaos motif is representative of a state of motion while the echo motif represents a state of rest. Mobile architecture is usually characteristic of symmetry, balance, and proportion, but because of uncertainty in a natural environment, this proportion often falls short of a perfect symmetrical balance as in the case of a crystal or a fractal design. It is this kind of architecture that Mobiles portrays in its form and developmental process.

Macula is a two-movement piece of music written for a mixed ensemble often instruments. The piece explores an aspect of visual perception in which an object seemingly becomes both larger and more detailed as it draws closer. This becomes a metaphor for the structure of the piece, where materials are gradually transformed and re-contextualized to suggest the notion of continually zooming in. The accompanying analytical paper gives a general overview of the procedures and techniques used to organize and compose the piece.