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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Zookeeper:   
Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

Managing Editor:
David Salvage

 Contributing Editors:
Galen H. Brown
Evan Johnson
Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

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Jeff Harrington

Latest Posts
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Lumina String Quartet at Europe/Asia 2005 Festival of Modern Music in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia � Part 6
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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Sunday, August 07, 2005
Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Jason Kao Hwang � The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown
New World 80626-2 (2 CD)

Jason Kao Hwang self-identifies, vigorously and defensively, as a �downtown jazz composer/violinist�; perhaps he fears that his street cred will be tarnished by his having written an Opera, for that is what The Floating Box sets out to be. It tells the story of a Chinese mother and daughter living in New York�s Chinatown and struggling with assimilation into American culture, guided by the ghost of the family�s father (a famous erhu player in China). A heterogeneous handful of Western and Chinese instruments forms the ensemble supporting three main singing roles.

Hwang goes all in with the idea that stylistic juxtaposition � not only of European and Chinese instruments, idioms and traditions, but of such intra-Western genres as blues, jazz, Broadway, and so on � is the way to represent the cultural disorientation of the protagonists. Musically speaking, though, the result is a disaster.

The problem with setting up a discourse on such a gross level as genre identification is that the entire work is then heard as a mere succession of stereotyped evocations of different musical styles, which shows neither the work as a whole nor the styles on which it is propped in a good light. �Atonality � blues � Broadway � Chinese opera � chromaticism � impressionism � jazz � pop,� goes the list of genres enumerated in the enthusiastic notes to this release, but none of these musical worlds can have time to fully present itself, because none of them can actually exist surrounded by quotation marks or parentheses, in disembodied and contextless snippets. The result is a messy hodgepodge that might help tell a story but does nothing compelling as music � it has no identity, no force, and no pressing need to exist. We skip blithely from one aesthetic arena to another, with each change evoking at best a smile of recognition and a flicker of interesting juxtaposition; then the libretto continues to drag the music around like an obedient puppy, and we wind up exactly nowhere.
posted by Evan Johnson 8/07/2005



 
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