Remarks on the tenor duets

The tenor duets I've been composing are simple, musically speaking. Although the harmony is quite ambiguous, it is built on Western scales. But it does have very obvious and simple musical patterns. Anyone who can read music can learn this music, although it requires a degree of aural aptitude because of the lack of accompaniment.

Still, the main barrier I've put up to learning these pieces is that one voice is in English and the other in Chinese. Not only that, but I am providing only the Chinese characters for the Chinese part—no transliteration, no pronunciation guide. Having studied Mandarin, I know that Romanizations of the language are extremely misleading, and pronunciation guides are tragically ineffective. Instructions on how to pronounce the language would, in my opinion, be completely useless because Chinese has so many sounds that simply do not exist in English. For Mandarin syllables like shi and zhi, to name only two examples, there is no English equivalent. None whatsoever. There is no point of reference. Even with tutoring from a native speaker, a person with no prior experience with Mandarin would have difficulty getting the pronunciation right. Everyone has the capacity to pronounce Chinese, but it demands a lot of practice from most nonnative speakers.

Therefore, in the exeedingly unlikely event that these compositions are learned or performed by anyone else in the future, I am safeguarding them from being butchered by making it very difficult for non-speakers to learn the Chinese part. It's not that I feel people shouldn't attempt this music. In fact, I'd be tickled to death if I were to learn that somebody somewhere had taken an interest in it. My concern is for the beautiful sounds of Chinese. These pieces were composed with these sounds in mind; these sounds are a part of the music.