From Berlin to Wuhan: Twelve-Tone Composition and the Pedagogical Legacies of Kohoutek, Krenek, and Smith Brindle in China

Abstract

In an article provocatively titled “Schoenberg Is Not Dead Yet,” Wen Deqing traced Luo Zhongrong’s (b. 1928; the leading composer of twelve-tone music in China) acquisition of serial technique in the late 1970s to a certain Czech theorist, though he did not seem to be aware of Ctirad Kohoutek (1929–2011) and his Novodobé skladehné směry v hudbě. Through archival work conducted at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, we pieced together the missing information and discovered that Zhongrong’s reading of Kohoutek’s book was mediated through Zhang Hongmo’s translation published in 1979. Despite the importance of Kohoutek’s book in the history of twelve-tone music in China, this source has sunk into oblivion. Taking our cue from Zhongrong’s reference to Kohoutek’s book as a vital source, we undertook a critical study of other neglected sources—Mao’s “Talk to Music Workers” and journal articles and mimeographs distributed in the early phase of the post-Mao period—and argued how the twelve-tone technique was transmitted and acculturated, and how the wave of twelve-tone compositions in the 1980s might have been instigated by socio-political and ideological changes.