| Sumario: | This article interprets music as a narration text and believes it to be a powerful witness to collective trauma and cultural memory. The cross-cultural comparison of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 and Wang Xilin's Symphony No. 4 probes how each composer has constructed a peculiar aesthetic of tragedy. According to this article, these works represent two paradigmatic forms of testimony to historical suffering: Górecki's 'meditation', an inward narrative of spiritual transcendence; and Wang's 'outcry', an external protest against historical violence. By examining the sound structures of the works, analysing their emotional strategies, and investigating their differing uses of national musical languages, we can see how these aesthetics are created. The composers' differing attitudes towards tone clusters are at the heart of a significant finding. This is their different aesthetic. In Górecki's work, the diatonic cluster achieves a 'meditative stasis'. For Wang, the chromatic cluster brings forth an agonistic cathartic cry. In the end, this article enriches our understanding of tragic music of the twentieth century by demonstrating how musical narratives testify to history on account of their cultural specificity and common humanity.
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