| Shui-Long Ma, one of the foremost living Taiwanese composers, is known for his mastery in combining Eastern elements with Western traditions. Earlier his career, pentatonicism and imitation of Chinese instruments prevail in his music; during an extended period of study in Germany, his compositional language changed drastically in turn toward European modernism.; This document focuses on how the expressive features of Ma's sonata make the work unique by subordinating its traditional formal characteristics to the background. The analysis of Ma's sonata applies Robert Hatten's theory of correlations, markedness, and gestures; Hatten's theory of troping further widens the interpretive window in which a connection can be made between analysis and performance. I begin the discussion of the sonata by stressing its "strategic" design (that is, aspects of musical design specific to a particular work) over its musical discourse (that is, traditional aspects of a work's formal and harmonic design) in order to explain the sonata's narrative structure. Then, I move to a discussion of how the sonata's temporal design reflects its modernism. Finally, I turn toward a discussion of the sonata's expressive genre, a concept that lends the work underlying coherence in spite of its seemingly discontinuous textural surface. |
