Title: The night of the torch festival

Composer:Guo Hengji

Year: 1983

Genre:

• Small ensemble
• Original composition
• Chinese plucked string orchestra

Call No.: SC118

Description: "The Night of the Torch Festival" is a piece for Chinese plucked strings composed by Kwok Hang-kei. It depicts an imagined scene at the Torch Festival-celebrated by the Yi, the Bai, and several other ethnic groups in southeast China-where participants dance joyfully by the fire. The piece draws on melodic materials often used to represent music of the Yi people in modern Chinese instrumental pieces, including the predominance of arpeggiated tonic triads and the occasional flattening of the third and seventh scale degrees in an otherwise diatonic melody. It shares its title, subject matter, and source of creative inspiration with a famous pipa solo piece composed by Wu Junsheng in the late 1970s. Kwok's piece features a full set of Chinese plucked strings in homophony, with individual instruments taking turn to play the main melody. It begins with a slow, graceful passage to set the scene, after which the pipa introduces the first theme at a walking pace. A slower, more intimate dance follows this exposition, with zheng and pipa players taking the lead. A sudden change to triple meter in a lively tempo begins the next section, where the driving rhythm is interspersed with phrases in quintuple meter. As the music resumes its duple-meter momentum and reaches a climax, it is interrupted by the coda, where the first theme returns and brings the music to a calm conclusion.

Note:

Instrumentation: yangqin (2), liuqin (1), pipa (1), zhong ruan (1), da ruan (1), da sanxian (1), zheng (1), diyin gehu (1)