Hwang-Long Pan premiered the first piece of his East and West composition series, East and West I, in 1998. The main compositional concept of this series is the combination of the Western Contemporary Music which he learned from Europe and the East Asian culture of his own background. His music is inspired by these two elements mentioned above. Pan opened up a new stream of contemporary music by integrating the technique and style of the Eastern traditional instrumental music into the structure and sound of Western music.

In this thesis, I chose East and West IV as the core of my research. Through reviewing cited references and interviews with the composer, I discovered Hwang-Long Pan’s central compositional ideas and techniques, and also how he applies them to his compositions. The analysis of East and West IV focus through three aspects: the usage of pitches series, figure elements and articulating techniques. Further, I discussed and summed up how the composer combined these three elements and applied them to his music based on the result of the analysis.

After analyzing and researching on Hwang-Long Pan’s music, and based on what I learned from East and West IV, I make a break through on my compositional style by integrating his composing techniques with mine and applying this new music syntax to my original composition Reminiscence.