Jeffrey Ching

Jeffrey Ching (Chinese name in Pinyin: Zhuang Zŭxin 莊 (庄) 祖欣; born 4 November 1965) is a Philippine-born Chinese-British contemporary classical composer of unusual originality whose works explore the correspondences and contradictions between the musical traditions of Europe and Asia.

Life and Education

Ching's distinctive musical language owes much to the diversity of his cultural background and education. He was born to a Chinese Buddhist family in the former Spanish-American colony of the Philippines, and received a Catholic education at Xavier School, a Jesuit school while growing up next door to his grandfather's private museum of ancient Chinese scrolls (now on permanent display in the Shanghai Museum). He began composing before he was ten and remained self-taught until the age of seventeen, when his first opera "Rendezvous in Venice" was premiered. He went to the United States to study music and sinology at Harvard University, graduating with a double magna cum laude. His graduation thesis on the sumptuary laws of the Ming dynasty was based on extensive research into primary sources. Afterwards he went to England to read law, philosophy, and composition at Cambridge and London Universities. From 1987 to 1991 he was Lecturer-in-Music at the University of London. In 2004 he was conferred British nationality, but now resides most of the year in Berlin with his wife, the Spanish-Philippine soprano Andión Fernández, for whom the vocal parts in his principal works were created. They have one son.

Creative Development

Early Works

Ching's first creative phase was prolific, producing over 200 works in a multiplicity of techniques in which he laid the foundations for the harmonic and contrapuntal assurance of his mature compositions. Some of these exploratory pieces appear to test specific classical models to extreme limits, e.g., the ""Superklavier" Sonata" for piano (first sketched in the 1980s, withdrawn after its premiere, and revised intermittently over the next two decades). Despite the self-mocking rivalry with the "Hammerklavier" implied by the title, Ching's single large movement of 1,631 bars has the quantitative edge over Beethoven's 1,167 bars in four movements; and where the "Hammerklavier" ends with a double fugue not obviously related to earlier material, the "Superklavier" has a triple fugue that incorporates all the themes and most of the subsidiary ideas of the preceding thirty-seven minutes.

At the opposite pole to such grandiose experiments are satirical miniatures such as the five-minute "Sonata No. 9 1/2" for piano (premiered by the composer, Makati, 1993), a score written exclusively in graphic notation to indicate the use of fists, arms, elbows, pointed fingertips, and even buttocks, on the keyboard.

First Three Symphonies

While the early "Symphony No. 1 in C" (first version premiered by the Bach Society Orchestra under James Ross, Harvard University, 1981) was a meticulously crafted homage to Viennese classicism, the expressionistic "Symphony No. 2, "The Imp of the Perverse"" (premiered by the Jeunesses Musicales World Youth Orchestra under Woldemar Nelsson, Manila, 1995) was set down fully orchestrated in a trance-like state lasting around forty days, without any sketches or pre-conceived structural or tonal plan.

It was not until 1998 that Ching's technical versatility was put at the service of his widening ethnographic interests. A Philippine government commission on the occasion of the Philippine centennial resulted in his "Symphony No. 3, "Rituals"" (premiered by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra under Josefino Toledo, Manila, 1998) which fuses Balinese gamelan, Chinese Ming, and Spanish Renaissance elements into a continuous forty-five-minute collage for three orchestras and male chanter. Following this compositional breakthrough, Ching broadened his field of cross-cultural investigation even further, as an examination of his recent works reveals.

Recent Works

*"Terra Kytaorum" for ten brass and two percussionists (premiered by Weltblech, Berlin, 2001), creates an hour-long, pseudo-historical liturgical service for the last Mongol emperor out of the diverse mediaeval traditions—French, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese—that could have been represented at his court. In this work Ching also first attempted to create musical sculptures out of Chinese calligraphic samples by a precise tabular method of his own invention.

*"Symphony No. 4, "Souvenir des Ming"" (Jeunesses Musicales commission, premiered by the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitri Jurowski, Shanghai International Arts Festival, 2006) is a passacaglia and fugue on fragments of Ming dynasty temple hymns, that uses fractal proportions to enable the chromatic polyphony of J. S. Bach and the equal temperament discovered by the Ming musicologist Zhu Zaiyu to engage in a kind of conceptual dialogue. At the Golden Ratio a series of nine fugal episodes begins, each the added lengths of the previous two; the last episode, a fifty-four-part fugue in strict eight-part invertible counterpoint, leads to an aleatory stretto in 105 parts.

*"Symphony No. 5, "Kunstkammer"" (premiered by Andión Fernández, Trio Neuklang, and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin under Mikhail Jurowski, Berlin, 2006) is an encounter between the strict contrapuntal devices of Frescobaldi, the Turkish melodies with four quarter-tones notated by Demetrius Cantemir, and the court music of Qing China based on a fourteen-note "octave" with twelve eighth-tones. The middle of the first movement could be described as quintessential Ching: the soprano fits the last Ming emperor's suicide speech to Frescobaldi fragments scored with accordion pitch-bends, 'cello harmonics, clarinet multiphonics, harp vibrato, and solo strings tuned a quarter-tone sharp and flat. At the climax of the second movement, thirty-six Ottoman modes and twelve Ottoman rhythmic cycles are deployed to create an innovative combination of fugue and variation form.

*"Kunstkabinett" for seven players and soprano (premiered by the Modern Art Ensemble and Andión Fernández, Berlin, 2007) brings together culturally disparate musical objects which share nothing but "the personal taste of their collector". The opening Mozart minuet (KV 576b) is broken up and expanded by piano and quarter-tone-sharp string trio, then gives way to a dissonant collage of ancient Korean, Japanese, and Tibetan sonorities superimposed in turn, before concluding with the Chinese folksong "Molihua" sung unharmonised by soprano onto the undamped piano strings.

*"Notas para una cartografía de Filipinas" for piano and lap-gong (premiered by Kyoko Okuni, Münster, 2008) attempts to draw a musical map of the Philippine archipelago which interpolates palm- and fingernail-tapping, string-plucking, and strokes on the "gansga" (the lap-gong of the Kalingga and Tinggian tribes) as "Orientalist" effects into the Baroque framework of prelude, toccata and double fugue.

*"The Orphan", commissioned by Theater Erfurt, Germany for its 2009-10 season, is an opera based on a 14th-century Chinese play and its European transformations at the hands of Voltaire, Goethe, and other Enlightenment dramatists. This will be a new kind of multicultural music-theatre that is yet rooted in Eastern and Western traditions, and features a libretto in seven languages, a large orchestra of both conventional and electronic instruments, and a mixed cast with opera singers, speaker, mimes, chorus, and dancers.

Honours

Although Chinese by parentage and a European resident for over twenty years, Ching's achievements are well recognised in the country of his birth.
*In 1990, 1993, and 1997 he represented the Philippines in three major cultural delegations to China.
*In December 1998 Ching was named one of the five Outstanding Young Filipinos of the year by the President of the Philippines, on the basis that his "works have expanded the scope and quality of Filipino musical literature, and no other Filipino has achieved such depth, dimension, and volume of work at so young an age".
*In June 2003 he was awarded the newly established Jose Rizal Award for Excellence (in the category of Art, Literature and Culture) by the President of the Philippines.

References

* Hila, Antonio C. "Understanding the Early Music of Jeffrey Ching: An Erudite Composer", "Unitas", Vol. 75, No. 3, Sept. 2002, pp. 454-75. ISSN 0041-7149
* Programme brochure for Weltblech concert, Berlin, 09 January 2001.
* Programme brochure for Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin IV. Abonnementkonzert, Berlin, 01 March 2006.
* Xu, Jing (徐靜). "Zhuang Zuxin: Meilidi xuanlü rensheng" (庄祖欣: 美丽的旋律人生), "Guangming ribao" (光明日報), 15 September 2006.
* Orosa, Rosalinda L. "Ching Amazes", "The Philippine Star", 28 October 2006.
* Programme brochure for Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra concert, Shanghai International Arts Festival, 17 November 2006.
* Orosa, Rosalinda L. "Jeffrey Ching: An Update", "The Philippine Star", 28 July 2007.
* Programme brochure for the Modern Art Ensemble concert "Soundbridges—Neue Musik: Südostasien und Taiwan", Berlin, 16 September 2007.
* Programme brochure for the concert "Zwischen Orient und Okzident: Musikalische Anverwandlungen (3)", Münster, 30 September 2008.