Just think about you are assigned as the head of a UN delegation. You are sent to a country where is anarchy or just overthrow the monarchy. There's no order. People were doing all kinds of things, and you were asked to help the country to re-establish order to have to manage the country. What do you do? The first thing you do, you establish new order. You don't want to go back to the old monarchy, but you want to have a new government. That means certain notes are more important than the others. Just like in society, certain people will have more power. So you have a new government, and this is the challenge all the composers faced. How do you establish new order? So what I try to do, this work that Four Movements that I wrote was 26 years ago. So when I was thinking about the same question, but I also tried to remember what was the good thing that could left over from the monarchy system, the tonal system. There are two things. One is we remember that we have hierarchy, because we only have 12 notes, 12 different notes on the piano. So to establish hierarchy is very important because only then can you have the direction, have order. Number 2 is the classical music has two things we call the tension and the release. What is tension and release in music? It's like a waves in the river pushes the water all the way up and down, all the way until it reaches the ocean or when the piece finishes in music. So in classical music, you have a dissonant chord. It's okay. It's almost sound like what we just heard. All is forgiven. So you have a conflict of acoustics, that you have a clash of sound, a dissonant. The dissonant energy pulls back, immediately requires that goes into a consonant. This is one of the greatest things of tonal music, that you have this tension and release that creates this direction. So for example, the piece that we talked about two weeks ago, Brahms opus 118, number 2. I'll play the first few bars. If you just try to feel the harmonic push, you will feel very obviously the note from the very beginning, the A major chord, the tonic, the king and then goes in to the five. So you feel just a beautiful melody, yes. But Harmony pushes you, keeps going because there's tension and the release, or the Beethoven last week we talked about. You feel the music pushes from the beginning from this, the opening or the way to, naturally pushes the wave forward. Those are the two things that I thought I wanted to try to keep in my music. Although I want to re-establish order, a different order, not the monarchic order. The best way I thought was go through something, working on something that I really knew well that Chinese folk songs because I grew up in China and studied Chinese folk songs and spent lot of time with folk singers, that I tried to find this thing. Because as you know in Chinese music, you have this pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale, for those of you don't know, if you just play the black key, it's a pentatonic scale. If you use orange to play. I don't have orange. It could start on any note and end on any note because you have a melody. First time, it goes quite well. Did it end on that note? No, but any note. So sort of feeling like the opposite of what we just heard. The music could start anywhere, end on anywhere. So it's lack of direction. The problem is because it's all consonant, no clashing, no dissonant. So that's one of the things that I see, if I could find a way to remedy that problem within Chinese folk music. So today, we're going to do using this work to demonstrate what I tried to do. We're going to concentrate on the second and the third movement, movement 2 and 3. We are very fortunate to have two world-class musicians to join us. So please welcome now Andrew and Trey Lee.
