Ching-Chu Hu
Passions (2001)
Biography:
Ching-chu Hu is Bayley-Bowen Fellow and Associate Professor of Composition at Denison University. His music has been performed in the United States, England, Germany, Russia, Austria, China, Taiwan, and Australia. Honors have included composer-in-residence at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, and guest composer at the American Music Week Festival in Bulgaria. Hu has been a composition fellow at the Aspen and Bowdoin Music Festivals, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. His orchestral work In Frozen Distance—recorded by the Kiev Philharmonic— appears in the ERM Media “Masterworks of the New Era” CD series. Passions (violin and piano) is available on Finnegan’s Wake (Albany Records TROY680).
Hu has written scores for award-winning short films, and received a commission from the Granville (Ohio) Bicentennial Committee to write a series of compositions for a yearlong celebration (2004-05). He is active as a pianist and conductor.
Program Notes:
In the words of the composer, “Passions deals with the intermingling of influences in my life as an Asian American: the folk tunes that have surrounded me since my childhood and a western-based education of classical music and twentieth-century techniques.” Various worlds intersect in Passions, for Hu treats the violin—among European stringed instruments arguably the one with the richest tradition—in ways that mimic idioms associated with the most widely used of bowed instruments in China the erhu (a two-stringed fiddle, illustrated below), and the sheng (Chinese aerophone, also illustrated below), a wind instrument consisting of 17 bamboo pipes. At the opening of Passions, where the piano is silent, the erhu and the sheng metaphorically join with the violin, and although the three instruments are embodied in the one, each retains its distinctive quality. As the piece progresses, however, their identities begin more and more to combine, until a new and hybrid instrument emerges.
For its part, the piano can only echo the sounds associated with the metamorphosis taking place in the violin; and yet it, too, embraces occidental and oriental effects, for as Hu states, “the piano largely alternates between various pentatonic textures and neo-romantic influences.”
Program Notes by Gregory Marion
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
The University of Saskatchewan
Contact information:
Ching-Chu Hu
hu@denison.edu
