Word: chen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reliance on analogies and poetic images to express his meaning. Chen is surprisingly tough-minded about musical interpretation. He is unmoved by "19th century poetic crap" and condemns those romantics who "use all that perfume and stuff just to cover them up because they don't bathe...
...Chen knows that it becomes boring to swoon over each phrase of a piece without giving a strong sense of direction to the whole. So in his conducting, he takes extreme care to shape and mold the large sections. Last summer he did some work on Beethoven's Eighth Syphony with the Summer School Orchestra. The first movement of this piece is a big shout of excitement, energetic and very loud for the most part, with many fortissimo markings. However, at the beginning of the recapitulation, there is the only fortississimo marked, a distinction that is not easy to make...
...Chen has a weakness for these military analogies. Perhaps the correspondence between war, with its manipulation of armies, and music, with its manipulation of tones, suggests itself to him through his study of Tai Chi, one of the Chinese martial arts. Through these exercises, which teach a stylized and highly disciplined form of self-defense. Chen claims to have acquired the self-control and profound concentration that he brings to his conducting. The bare hands are the weapons both for self-defense and for conducting, and Chen has trained his to function "with their own mind, and yet without mind...
...conscious ties that Chen maintains with China. Although he still has relatives there, he has little desire to return to a country fundamentally different from he one he left. His musical training is thoroughly Western and he has very little knowledge of or curiosity about Chinese music...
...Chen's description of his creativity, there is a sense of man as a vessel, a medium for a higher creative energy. "A person is expressive regardless of whether it's music or not music. I don't speak good English, but I know I am expressive. That's all, I get the idea across, because the idea is there. It's very much there and it gets across in spite of all the grammar you can talk...