Pitt professor mixes music and science

Growing up in China and moving to Hong Kong with his family may have not have had much… Growing up in China and moving to Hong Kong with his family may have not have had much influence on Bell Yung had his mother not exposed him and his siblings to western culture early on.

Many times his mother had music playing and showed her children different art forms. This influence caused Bell to gain interest rather early in his life.

Bell, a Pitt professor of music and the director of the Asian Studies Center, told his story to about 70 people as part of the annual SciTech Festival at the Carnegie Lecture Hall on Monday night. The theme this year is sound.

By the time he was in kindergarten, Bell was already learning to play the piano. But as he grew up and was going to off to college, he knew he needed to figure out what he was going to do with his life.

He attended the University of California at Berkley, but he did not go into his passion of music; rather, he studied engineering physics.

He said he made his choice to pursue a career in science because he needed to do “something real, something useful.”

After graduating, he contemplated going back to the piano, but he decided to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he ultimately received his doctorate.

While there, Bell continued to take piano classes from teachers at Julliard.

Physics bored him by this time, and he thought again about becoming a professional pianist, but the time commitment discouraged him.

“I didn’t really want to practice the piano for eight hours a day,” he said.

After graduating, he could have gotten a job, but when Harvard accepted him, his choice was made. He went to Harvard University to study musicology and receive his second doctorate.

Bell said he enjoyed his two fields of study, physics and musicology, because of their differences.

Physics requires him to look at the physical world and strictly controlled data, while music lets him express his emotions and is uncontrollable because it involves “irrational” humans, he said.

“Music makers are the cause of fascination in the field of musicology,” he said.

In physics, the personal aspects are not relevant, though, he added.

While involved with physics, he asks himself how does something happen, with music he can delve further and ask why something happens and why people do it.

“[Music] allows me to be free of words and to free the patterns in my emotions,” he said.

Bell is considered an ethnomusicologist, something he does not necessarily like.

“[Ethnomusicologist] is a terrible word,” he said.

Bell said he disliked the word because deciding who or what is ethnic is difficult to do. He added that in places like the United States, defining what someone means by ethnicity becomes increasingly difficult since so many races and cultures are represented.

Nonetheless, Bell specialized in music of the Chinese culture.

A culture’s music dates back to the beginning of its culture, he said. So China’s musical history is quite long he added.

Since the Communist Revolution in the middle of the 20th century, the culture and, therefore, the music has changed.

The qin, a Chinese instrument that has been around for thousands of years and has been associated with the higher scholarly class, has gone through changes in recent years.

In a communist culture, there are not supposed to be any separations in social classes, so the qin became used by more people and the instrument itself has changed with the more costly silk strings being replaced by louder metal strings.

Other musical forms in China have undergone changes in light of the political changes. Narrative singing used to be common; however, it has died out recently, he said.

“It’s not even an endangered species,” he said. “It’s already extinct.”

To preserve some of the culture, Bell has worked to create a CD and is now working to put together a DVD about Dou Wun, a narrative singer.