Contemporary academic music is increasingly understood as a space of interaction among cultural experiences, modes of thinking, and models of listening, in which the issue of “influences” gives way to questions of the internal organization of artistic thinking. In this context, the work of the American composer of Chinese origin Lei Liang (梁雷, b. 1972) assumes particular significance. For him, music functions not only as a sphere of aesthetic expression but also as a form of intellectual and ethical reflection. His creative output encompasses operatic, orchestral, chamber, vocal, and piano genres, as well as electroacoustic music; at the same time, the composer engages in active scholarly and educational work which, together with his compositional practice, forms a unified field of “music and thinking” as interconnected modes of creative activity.
The unity of artistic, intellectual, and ethical dimensions as a defining feature of Lei Liang’s compositional thinking makes it methodologically appropriate to examine his work through the prism of syncretism. In contemporary humanities discourse, the conceptualization of syncretism extends beyond its earlier use as a historical-descriptive term associated with archaic cultural forms and is understood as an analytical category that designates the multidimensional unity of an artistic whole without reducing it to the sum of its individual components. Of fundamental importance in this context is the distinction between syncretism and synthesis: whereas synthesis presupposes the integration of already autonomous elements, syncretism denotes a state of internal co-presence of different dimensions within a single process, in which differentiation is preserved but no longer functions as the determining principle of the organization of the whole.
Within this analytical framework, particular significance is attached to the comparison of the Western logical-conceptual model of thinking with the Chinese image-based, process-oriented tradition of xiang thinking, oriented toward perceptual experience, non-substantiality, and the processual apprehension of wholeness. Analysis of Lei Liang’s piano works demonstrates that the cross-cultural paradigm in his music cannot be reduced to an “East–West” scheme and is not realized as stylistic eclecticism. Instead, cultural layers in his music undergo a process of deep abstraction, forming a “sublimated” dimension of sound in which the “Eastern” element exists not as an external marker but as a principle governing the organization of time, silence, timbre, and listening.
Within this methodological context, the relevance of the present study is determined by several factors. First, Lei Liang represents a new generation of composers in the era of globalization, whose creative work is associated with a profound rethinking of Chinese intellectual-aesthetic tradition and Western university culture. Second, his music reveals a distinctive type of artistic wholeness that cannot be adequately described solely in terms of stylistic, generic, or compositional features, since its key processes unfold at the level of musical thinking, where cultural memory, philosophies of perception, ethical positioning, and sound organization interact. Third, despite sustained interest in Lei Liang’s work within English- and Chinese-language discourse, research on his творчість remains largely fragmentary and focuses primarily on individual works or conceptual aspects of his music. Lei Liang’s piano oeuvre, while constituting an important component of his artistic output, has not yet been subjected to systematic analysis as a coherent space of syncretic musical thinking. This circumstance necessitates the introduction of Lei Liang’s work and the associated set of problems into Ukrainian musicological scholarship.
