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Calligraphy of Dynasties by Lorelei Tong

Written By: evan on April 17, 2009 No Comment

This is an excerpt from Calligraphy of Dynasties by Lorelei Tong. The full piece was presented at the 10am concert.

Calligraphy of Dynasties is an 8-channel electro-acoustic composition for Chinese calligraphy of Han dynasty, Tang dynasty, and Ming dynasty. The music tries to capture the drama of the characters being written, which are hypothetically presented in 2D animation composited with close shots of real-time handwriting. For each dynasty, the most representative instruments are chosen as source material for the music. For instance, bronze bells, Qin and Xun are used for Han dynasty; short samples of Kun opera are used for Ming dynasty. The music is dynastically contextualized. The spatialization basically follows the strokes in a sonic space, most precisely in the section of Ming dynasty, least precisely in Tang dynasty, according to the cultural themes and the styles of the calligraphy.