The Artist and his Time: the Life and Work of Composer Du Mingxing

Section 1. World music: retrospections and modernity

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the life and work of the outstanding Chinese composer Du Mingxing (born in 1928) – a luminary of national musical art of the 20th – early 21st centuries. A general periodization of the artist’s work is proposed, covering several complex stages of China’s development. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. To date, the long and incredibly eventful life of Du Mingxing, this outstanding composer, pianist, and teacher, has not received proper scientific coverage and musicological assessment due to the fact that information about the Chinese artist was extremely limited for many years, which determines the novelty of the presented study. The purpose of the research is to create a “periodization of the life-creative path” (N. Savitska, 2010) of the composer Du Mingxing based on the systematization of his biographical data and the study of the “process of professional self-realization of the artist” (ibid.) through the evolution of his personality in a time perspective. To implement the concept of the article, the following methods are used: a biographical method, which allows us to establish and collect data on the artist’s life and work, to trace the connection between the musical work and the composer’s life events; a historical and cultural method – to highlight historical facts related to different periods of Du Mingxing’s life, the cultural environment in which he was at different times; a psychological method, which allows us to reveal the musician’s personal traits in time evolution; a communicative method – to establish connections between the features of the author's works and the reaction to them of Chinese society; a genre-style method – to identify the typical and individual in Du Mingxing’s work; a phenomenological approach – to understand the composer’s musical work and the principles of his thinking. Research results. Reconstructing the life and work of Du Mingxing allows us to identify and characterize the following fundamental stages of his path in musical art: the period of personality formation (1928–1949); the period of professional development (1949–1976); the period of creative maturity (1977 – present). Du Mingxing’s development as a composer coincided with the period of strict ideologization of art after the formation of the People’s Republic of China. It was under these conditions that Du Mingxing demonstrated enviable creative fortitude and inventiveness studying deeply the traditional Chinese music for embodiment of its spirit in European music forms. Only after gaining the long-awaited freedom of creativity, in the late 1970s, the artist finally begins his professional self-realization. For almost every composition, regardless of the instrumental composition it was written for, the author initially created a piano score, which was later transformed into the final version of the work. Only at the age of 85, due to lack of time, the composer first wrote an orchestral piece, “Memories of Sunlight,” without a preliminary piano “sketch”. Conclusion. The flourishing of his composing creativity at such a venerable age testifies to the musician’s ideological youth of spirit, his “mature youth” (according to N. Savitska). This is confirmed in every way by the semantics of the works, even the titles of which often feature concepts of symbols of the celebration of life – spring blossoming, sunshine, the Phoenix rising from the ashes, awakening.