"Oriental Context" In China's Electroacoustic Music

"Oriental context" is a lexical feature in the works of the modern and contemporary Chinese electroacoustic music. It is also a type of non-language stream of consciousness. It appears either consciously or unconsciously and permeates either concretely or abstractly in the works, therefore forming a unique characteristic in China's electronic music.The thesis begins with an introduction of concepts and background related to "context" and proceeds to elaborate on the role and way of expression of context in other art forms, such as movies, drawing, calligraphy and dancing. This is followed by the introduction of how context is correlated to music:First, the presence and symbolic significance of context in China's traditional music; Second the presence of context in western music, such as common knowledge, dodecaphony, atonal and aleatory music, all represent context in various periods in western music."Electroacoustic music" emerged after 1945. The emergence, apart from the realization of necessary electronic technology, is more of meeting the demand of Avant-garde music. The numerous electronic music laboratories that were established continuously in Europe have been working persistently for the composers to seek new sounds. In the development of over 6 decades, electronic music has undergone four major periods, i.e. "Musique concrete", "Work on Tape", "Electroacoustic music" and "Computer music". The lexical features, context characteristics and technical approaches of each period vary from each other. The thesis lists out and analyzes one distinctive electronic musical work in each period, and ends with a summary of all the features about "context".China has been creating electronic music for more than 20 years. In the thesis, four works of prof ZHANG Xiaofu, AN Chengbi, XU Shuya,LIU Jian,WU Yuebei,CHEN Yuanlin,JIN Ping and DONG Kui are compared and analyzed. The critical roles of "oriental context", represented either abstractly or concretely, in the works are listed. The distinctive "oriental context" has gradually evolved into a symbol of ethnic self-consciousness. This unique thinking feature is precisely the important motivation that drives the emergence of China's electronic music school, which is also the intention of writing this thesis.