Context, agency and Chineseness: The music of Law Wing Fai

Abstract

‘East Meets West’ is a label often used to refer to compositions that incorporate Asian and European musical elements. Despite its popularity, this characterization is problematic. It not only essentializes both regions, but also trivializes the creative, and highly individual, impulses of the composers as well as the larger political potential of their music. This article discusses the implication of this label by focusing on recent works written for the pipa and Western orchestra by the Hong Kong composer Law Wing Fai. Specifically, it addresses his approach to musical hybridity and its cultural relevance. Underlying the analysis is the assumption that the process of appropriation is always political and never neutral. The author follows the musical traces that characterize Law Wing Fai's personal aesthetics, style and identity, and situates them within the cosmopolitan, contradictory, and idiosyncratic cultural milieu of Hong Kong. By way of Law's music, the notion of fusion is problematized and subjectivity is interjected into the discussion of hybridity. Furthermore, the importance of context in shaping creativity is stressed and discourse is offered that argues for the need to establish an analytical space that transcends the limitations of an ‘East Meets West’ essentialism and allows a recognition of how new artistic possibilities emerge out of a combination of cultural conditioning and individualism.