Evoking Common Emotions through Scale Degrees and Intervals: A Comparative Example of Western and Asian Compositional Patterns

Abstract

          Taiwan is an island with a beautiful name, Formosa, and a culture that blends several cultures, ranging from Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese to western. The first wave of new music occurred in 1959 when the late Professor Hsu Tsang-Houei returned from Paris. In 1981, Professor Ma Shui long, a composer with a longtime passion for merging eastern and western music traditions, founded the Music Department at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), after which a diversity of approaches to composition teaching started to find a place at our university. This paper explores some of the approaches I have taken to teaching composition at TNUA over the past 25 years.