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Three Chapters of Revolution-Contemporary Song by Li Tai-Hsiang (運行三篇-李泰祥)

Audio
Three Chapters of Revolution – Chapter I – To Think Hard


Three Chapters of Revolution – Chapter II – Concentrate/ Stay Still


Three Chapters of Revolution – Chapter III – Move


I.    About this Song

Exposition of the music:
When Li Tai-Hsiang was composing this music, he consulted many works that contain strong national style by chamber music masters, such as Bartok, Kodaly, and Dvorak, but he always thought he should be surpassing them. For this problem, Li Tai-Hsiang had not gotten any countermeasures. One day when he took the bus home, he heard sounds of a percussion parade at a temple fair. He suddenly had a flash of wit, “Why don’t we transfer the whole gong-drum music to piano?” Therefore, he discarded the commonly used harmony and lines in piano performance and used piano to express sounds of gongs and drums and the atmosphere and feeling of the performance of gongs and drums.
Stringed music was a hard part. Later on, the method he adopted was to move Huqin’s performance into the part of stringed music. However, the form was not purely instrumental. Tai-Hsiang Li believed the effect he wanted to achieve was to replace vocal sound with stringed music. Therefore, the stringed music is sometimes thin and broken and sometimes violent and intense. Scenes of crowded people and people’s noises one after another are vividly presented in the music. In the area of tone color, Li Tai-Hsiang Li tried to use sounds of dryness, un-smoothness, darkness, and roughness to present Chinese national instrument’s impression to others.
—From Li Tai-Hsiang’s Thanksgiving Concert

II.    Manuscript

Copied published manuscript (page 1) of “Three Chapters of Revolution” for piano trio (1971)    Copied published manuscript (page 2) of “Three Chapters of Revolution” for piano trio (1971)    Copied published manuscript (page 3) of “Three Chapters of Revolution” for piano trio (1971)    Copied published manuscript (page 4) of “Three Chapters of Revolution” for piano trio (1971)

                


To view the story of Li Tai-Hsiang, please go to Li Tai-Hsiang, the Native Musician of Taiwan.
Text and images are provided by The Native Musician of Taiwan-Tai-Hsiang Li Digital Archive, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan