Souvenir des Ming is the title of Jeffrey Ching's Fourth Symphony, which was composed in London between 14 January and 29 June 2002, and is in a single large movement lasting about thirty-five minutes.
Variants are created by simple multiplication, e.g., Lucas x 3, which produces the new series 3, 9, 12, 21... All these are used to generate the precise duration of each variation (so that each lasts the added lengths of the previous two), most of the vertical and horizontal patterns (since the numbers may be made to correspond to pitches, ascending or descending, played successively or as chords), and also many of the rhythmic motifs.
On the other hand, the symphony’s gradual, unmistakable progression from Modernist to Baroque—an atypical experiment in stylistic retrogression within a single movement—is a conscious homage to the great Ming musicologist Zhu Zaiyu 朱載堉, Prince of Zheng (1536–1611), whose 390th death anniversary it was in 2001.
In 1584 Zhu published his mathematics of equal temperament (itself a fractal number series), with a woodcut illustration of a tuning instrument he had had built on its principles.
Twice it parades its Baroque antecedents via the time-honoured circle of fifths sans Pythagorean comma—first, all the way down all twelve steps midway through Fugue II, and then all the way up towards the final aleatory stretto, in a juggernaut of cumulative four-bar phrases.