The Cross Culture In Music

Jack Body (1944---) is a famous composer, educator, ethnomusicologist and musicalfestival director in New Zealand. His music is filled with simplicity and nature. Mostof his works are closely related with folk music and culture. In Body’s opinion,“Contemporary music does not necessarily limit to western Contemporary music, butin general covers the music that is featured with modern characteristics; as fortraditional music, it mainly means the folk music in different countries and ethnicities(especially the raw folk music) and the classical music such as religion music andpalace music. Body thinks the nowadays music needs to find ways of inheritance andblending from the comparison and juxtaposition of traditional and contemporarymusic.”①Body’s view of music has strong connections with the post modern thoughtsin the latter half of the20thcentury. In addition, this kind of post modern thoughts isderived from the cross culture phenomenon where different cultures are blended andmutually interpreted.We can see the cross culture phenomenon in every place of arts, especially in currentdays of the21stcentury. With the rapid development and change of technology, mediaand global language environment, cross culture has been taken as a universal trend ofculture development. It opens a new direction in nowadays convention and innovation.According to the “Random House Merriam-Webster’s College Dictionary”, the word“crossover” has the following interpretation:(1) crossing, i.e., a place where twothings (such as a street and a railroad track) cross each other; and (2) a shortconnecting track by which a train can be transferred from one line to another. Later onthis word extends its meaning as cross-culture. The cross-culture phenomenon means:an open mind that leads to innovations by spanning the boundaries of different spacesand civilizations and integrating the essence of different cultures through free thinking.The value of crossover lies in the fact that it can ignite spark and pop up fantasticideas through blending elements of totally irrelevant and even paradoxical genres. The most common and essential meaning of crossover is that it mixes the essences ofdifferent cultures and they complement with each other. It is a kind of intersection andcombination in the context of diversified cultures. Meanwhile, as the trend of the21stpost modern culture, it expedites the innovation and development.“The phenomenonthat crossover advances system evolution is in accord with the ordered principle insystem theory. This principle tells the system cannot be ordered without the system’sopenness and outside interaction. The closed system will result in out-of-order andthus lead to recession, crash and death.”①As a result, as a universal phenomenon inarts and non-arts fields, the crossover will last forever and itself will evolve, and itopens the new direction between the tradition and innovation.This thesis covers two parts and each part consists of two chapters (four chapters intotal). In the first part, by taking the works of various composers both at home andabroad, the background of cross-culture phenomenon will be introduced. We willdivide the crossover music history into “pre-crossover” and “post-crossover” timeperiods. Meanwhile, we will also elaborate on the cross-culture phenomenon historyin Chinese new music works. The different styles of the cross-culture phenomenon inmusic will be analyzed in the second chapter of the first part.In the second part of this thesis, we will focus on the analysis of Jack Body’s worksespecially his new work “The Songs and Dances of Desire”. Jack Body’s biography,his representative works will be presented in the third chapter. In addition, we willalso investigate how the non-western arts and his supervisors impact Jack Body’sworks in this chapter. In the fourth chapter, more detailed analysis of his music theater“The Songs and Dances of Desire” will be given. This will cover the work’shigh-level design, the content, the style, the sources of various music he used, thetypical features of crossover and how these features are used in this work.In the conclusion section of the second part, we not only summarize the various issuesraised in this thesis, but also express the author’s own views about the cross culturephenomenon in music, especially on what we can learn from the successful experiences of Jack Body’s works on cross music.