Reading Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Kurth in Sang Tong: Modernist Harmonic Approaches in China

Abstract

In 1939 Wolfgang Fraenkel fled Nazi oppression and left Germany for Shanghai, bringing with him what was then understood by many as the pinnacle of Austro-Germanic musical modernism. This article challenges the existing view that what Fraenkel achieved in his decade-long exile in China was largely the dissemination of dodecaphony. I contend that the use of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1911) and Kurth’s Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), among others, in Fraenkel’s teaching had deeply influenced Sang Tong, his student at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in the 1940s, and retrospectively one of the most esteemed and long-standing presidents of the Conservatory. I argue further that Sang sought to inject modernism into the debatable notion of Chinese pentatonicism with recourse to Schoenberg’s delineation of quartal harmonies in Harmonielehre, and Hindemith’s categorization of intervals and harmonies according to their “inherently” different tension levels in Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937). Sang’s discussion of functional and coloristic harmonies also resonates with Kurth’s discourse on harmonies as being constructive or destructive to the rule of major-minor tonality in Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (1920). This reading of Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Kurth in seminal texts published by Sang over two decades in China’s post-Cultural-Revolution era is revealing of the subtle ways through which their ideas infiltrated the development of art music in China, and how despotic ideologies might have, paradoxically, fueled rather than suppressed composers’ innate urge for artistic autonomy.