Terra Kytaorum
Terra Kytaorum is a work for brass ensemble and percussion by the contemporary classical composer Jeffrey Ching. Its subtitle is Souvenir des Yuan, which incorporates it into that composer's series of musical souvenirs based on melodic material from various Chinese dynasties: Souvenir des Tang, Souvenir des Song, and Souvenir des Ming. The present work was completed in London on 31 December 2000.
World premiere and instrumentation
Terra Kytaorum was commissioned by Weltblech, who premiered an abridged version in Berlin on 9 January 2001. It is scored for 4 trumpets, horn, 3 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, and 2 percussionists. Played uncut, the complete work, unique in scale in the brass ensemble repertoire, would last over an hour.Pseudo-historical background
The work is premised on fictitious events from mediaeval history which existed only in the composer's fancy. Ching writes:
The last Mongol emperor to reign in Beijing, heir to the Yuan dynasty of Khubilai Khan, was intrigued by the idea of bringing together the religious music of his many subject peoples in one of the great biannual sacrifices to Confucius. For the climactic ritual before the spirit tablets of Confucius and his four leading disciples, the emperor, who was an enthusiastic clockmaker, hit upon the idea of the five musical styles overlapping, like the co-ordinated mechanism of clock parts moving at different speeds. The experiment, although opposed by conservative mandarins, had a certain success, and was only spoilt at some points by the screams of the political prisoners being tortured or executed in a nearby suburb—victims of court purges for whom the gentle teachings of Confucius must have seemed an irrelevant hypocrisy.
This pseudo-history is developed into the following fifteen-part musical structure.
The sections of the work
Most of the hymns are preceded by announcements by the third trombone chanting into his instrument from backstage, impersonating a herald speaking in 14th-century Mandarin.- 1. Intrada—a Manchu drumming pattern punctuates the ceremonial entry of the participants
- 2. Fiat —a 12th-century imperial calligraphic sample from the Song dynasty is translated by an exact system of correspondences into musical brushstrokes of sweeping glissandi. The background ticking of the wood block is arithmetically derived from the escapement mechanism of the great Song water-clock of 1092—as if to signify, in Chinese time, that the Song’s "days were numbered".
- 3. First Hymn for Welcoming the Spirits, arranged in the Korean style
- 4. Second Hymn for Welcoming the Spirits, arranged in the ancient Chinese style.
- 5. Third Hymn for Welcoming the Spirits, arranged in the Tibetan lamaist style
- 6. Hymn for the Ablution, used as tenor cantus firmus in Agnus I from Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame —With a little stretch of the imagination, it is not inconceivable that Christian missionaries could have shown off the latest ars nova music upon reaching the fabled Land of the Cathayans.
- 7. Hymn for the Ascent into the Hall, arranged in the Chinese Ming style
- 8. Hymn for the Libations and Gifts, superimposed on the notorious rondeau, "Fumeaux fume" by Solage. Monkish humour might have insisted that this smoky piece accompany the one part of the ceremony for which the burning of incense was prescribed.
- 9. Hymn for the Elevation of the Ritual Tray, arranged in the Japanese gagaku style —Of course, the Mongols failed to conquer Japan, so one must imagine captured Japanese musicians playing this music, a vicarious triumph for Mongol amour-propre.
- 10. Hymn for the First Presentation . A guide for the listener through the overlapping of the hymns: each hymn is announced by three strokes on the temple block, and completed by three strokes on the wood block and three scrapes on the guiro.
- *Hymn to Confucius, arranged in the Chinese Qing style —the tuning is based on the reconstructed official Qing scale, which had 14 chromatic steps instead of 12 to the octave
- *Hymn to Yan Hui, arranged in the Korean style
- *Hymn to Zengzi, arranged in the Tibetan style
- *Hymn to Zisi, arranged in the Japanese style —In the tradition of the Chinese historians, Ching appends his moral verdict to the bare facts: the vainglorious Mongol invasions of Japan, frustrated, like the Spanish Armada, by bad weather, are satirised by cheap wind and thunder effects.
- *Hymn to Mencius, used as tenor cantus firmus in Agnus II from Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame
- 11. Ritual Address to the Spirits—chanted centre-stage by the bass trombone into his instrument, using reconstructed Yuan Mandarin, and substituting for the name of the emperor’s ritual deputy my own Chinese name
- 12. Hymn for the Second Presentation, arranged in the Tibetan style —punctuated by distant screams
- 13. Hymn for the Clearing Away of the Food Vessels, arranged in Chinese Republican style —punctuated by distant screams
- 14. Hymn for the Ushering Out of the Spirits, performed in the Korean style —This is overlaid with a second series of calligraphic glissandi: the signature of Zhu Yuanzhang, Fiat , found on extant military papers for the anti-Mongol campaign. The fatal clock starts ticking again.
- 15. Fiat —the final series of glissandi, based on another of Zhu’s signatures. The steady ticking gives way to the running out of the sands of time —now for the last Mongol emperor of China. Finally, Zhu drives him and his entire court out of China, becoming the first Ming emperor in 1368.