Ge Gan-ru’s Lost Style is widely regarded as the first Chinese  avant-garde composition. Its premiere in 1983 caused a scandal  in Shanghai and forced its author into an emigration that continues  to this day. Unlike, for instance, Four Studies of Peking Opera, which  is based on legible imitations of the sounds of classical Chinese  culture, this cello etude plays with tradition in a highly ambiguous  way. By so doing, it even better illustrates an interesting paradox:  awareness of one’s roots can be a necessary condition for finding  one’s own voice. Ge Gan-ru recovered what had been lost in  the dark era of the Cultural Revolution by drawing on the devices  of the Western avant-garde and European musical notation.  Raven Chacon, of the Navajo Nation, reaches for the same tools,  but reduces them to a minimum, deforms them, and saturates  them with ancient, ambiguous visual symbols. Can a score be  a Trojan horse?