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East playing West

By Ian Nance - posted Monday, 11 May 2015


I have long taken a keen interest in Chinese music.

When I first listened to it closely, I was struck by the tonal similarity to that of Scottish, which I had heard from childhood, thanks to my Scots mother and grandparents.

I had thought about both national melodic coincidences, and wondered whether Gaelic music found its way to China along the Silk Road, or Chinese harmonies emigrated in reverse.

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Yet many Chinese melodies are thousands of years old, and their style is entrenched in national culture, so what I am detecting is probably the similarities in the creation of mood and emotion which all music possesses. This is a strong property of solo instruments, such as the bagpipes, the guitar, the piano, the erhu - a two stringed violin, and the dizi - a bamboo flute.

Therefore I was interested to come across Symphony of Millions by Alex Ross in which he describes China's newly-found passion for Western music.

In it Ross suggests that Western music was introduced to China by the Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, in 1601 when in that year he presented a clavichord to Wanli, the longest-ruling of the Ming emperors.

Apparently the Emperor's eunuchs experimented with the instrument for a little while and then set it aside where it stayed undisturbed in a box for several decades, until Chongzhen, the last of the Ming rulers, discovered it and sought out a German Jesuit priest to explain its workings.

As Ross comments, "Succeeding emperors, Kangxi and Qianlong showed the most enthusiasm for Western music. The latter, who ruled China for the better part of the eighteenth century at one point assembled a full-scale chamber orchestra, with the eunuchs dressed in European suits and wigs."

This would possibly have been a culture shock to some inhabitants of the land.

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The music of the West was confined to the various imperial palaces until the nineteenth century, and when it emerged it was played mainly by military or various municipal bands.

Then the chamber orchestra style of Emperor Qianlong changed to full symphonic form in the shape of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra in 1919, a year which found the Italian virtuoso, Mario Paci, directing a host of instrumentalists, originally foreigners, but augmented by enthusiastic local performers in later times as the orchestra spread into a wider portion of the Chinese population,

Then came the Shanghai Conservatory, which was the first Western-style music school on Chinese soil, and may have influenced the effect of traditional Chinese music upon global ears.

It profited from its lively community of adventurers, exiles, and, with the rise of Nazism, German-Jewish refugees. In the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory were associates of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, composers echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century.

Then came the momentous time in China's history when in 1949, Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalists in a civil war. When he assumed power, he encouraged the playing of imported music, although he kept it within strict ideological bounds. Ross then highlights Mao Zedong's stance on the output of the Shanghai Conservatory, which resulted in the lyrics for such songs as "We Are Busy Producing" and "The Little Song of Handing in Your Grains."

He mentions Mao's edict that "our musical workers must develop people's musical activities with limitless zeal", and continues by saying that composers made fitful attempts to modernise their art, especially during the Hundred Flowers period, when Mao permitted them to "apply appropriate foreign principles and use foreign musical instruments."

In 1966, Mao's Cultural Revolution effectively shut down the Central Conservatory. Western classical music was pushed out, along with most of the native traditions from the imperial era. To replace the loss, Madame Mao commissioned a group of eight "model" scores on revolutionary topics.

After the death of Mao and the fall of his wife, classical musicians flocked to the Central Conservatory when it reopened in 1978.

Eighteen thousand people applied for a hundred places, and present in that first class was a group of composers who define contemporary Chinese music today - stylists such as Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Chen Qigang, and Guo Wenjing.

Symphony of Millions reports that these modern composers came up with fresh and vital combinations of sounds, especially when they added to the mix the clear-cut melodies and jangling timbres of traditional Chinese music. Almost all had been forced to perform manual labor or study folk music in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and they arrived at the school with a strong grasp of Chinese heritage.

No composer has embraced that challenge as eagerly as Tan Dun, whose submission to the Olympic ceremony is a radically bathetic pop ballad entitled One World, One Dream. Conceived in league with the songwriter and producer David Foster, Tan's song has been recorded by Andrea Bocelli, the platinum-selling tenor, and Zhang Liangying, another competitor from the 2005 "Super Girl" contest.

During a visit to the home of a well-known singer and his equally famed pianist wife, Alex Ross was introduced to Guo Wenjing who, of the composers of the 1978 generation, is the one least known in the West, principally because he never studied abroad.

Ross suggets that in some ways, Guo is the most interesting of all, because he has achieved a substantial degree of independence within the sometimes stifling atmosphere of Chinese music, and that there is a whiff of danger in his work.

At the core of Guo's work is an encyclopedic sympathy for Chinese traditional music. In the nineteen-eighties, he collected folk songs in the mountains around the upper Yangtze River.

His hero was Béla Bartók, who immersed himself in Eastern European folk music in the early twentieth century, and adopted its irregular rhythms and harsh effects.

Guo was also drawn to Dmitri Shostakovich, master of the Soviet symphony; Guo's mature works, with their martial rhythms, flashes of biting wit, and explosive climaxes, have much in common with Shostakovich's, even if the musical material is drastically different.

The ambiguous Shostakovich might also have been a model for Guo, as he confronted a number of political challenges, apart from the "official" pieces in his catalogue. He composed an overture celebrating the re-absorption of Hong Kong into China, but contrarily also set to music the poetry of a bold and enigmatic writer who had ties to the 1989 student protests.

The curious thing about China's enthusiasm for Western classical music and its tonic similarity is that the People's Republic, with its far-flung provinces and myriad ethnic groups, possesses a store of musical traditions that rival in intricacy the proudest products of Europe, and go back much deeper in time, making traditional Chinese music more "classical" than anything in the West.

The author discovered that the project of revitalising Chinese tradition fell to younger artists like Wu Na, who, at the age of thirty, mastered what some consider the supreme aristocrat of instruments: the guqin (pronounced 'goochin'), or seven-stringed zither.

It is more than three thousand years old, and has a repertory that reaches back to the first millennium. Philosophers and poets from Confucius to Li Bai prided themselves on learning it.

In the modern era, the featuring of the guqin has become a little obscure, though interest is growing again.

With the support of an elderly Taiwanese couple, Wu Na runs a guqin school in Beijing. When the writer stopped by, two college students were seated at their instruments, imitating their instructor's moves. Wu herself wasn't there; she was in New York, on a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council.

Alex Ross tells what happened when he returned home and visited her at her temporary apartment, in Chelsea.

When he walked in, she was listening to a recording of Liu Shaochun, one of the players who helped to preserve guqin tradition through the tumult of the revolution. "It is music of intimate address and subtle power that is able to suggest immense spaces; skittering figures and arching melodies give way to sustained, slowly decaying tones and long, meditative pauses".

"Liu Shaochun came from a wealthy family," Wu told him. "He grew up playing guqin, practicing calligraphy, writing poetry."

Then the Empire fell. "In the end, he had only his guqin. But he was still very powerful. He taught the 'give up'-you can give up everything and become very free."

Afterwards, Alex went for a walk in the august sprawl of the Temple of Heaven complex, and saw a van approaching. Twenty or so well-dressed Chinese tourists piled out. Guessing that they were headed into the hall, he slipped into their midst, and made it through the doors.

A half-hour performance ensued, with a full complement of Chinese instruments, and players dressed in vividly colored courtly garb. It was a sound at once rigid and brilliant, precise in attack and vibrant in delivery. It was the most remarkable musical experience of his trip.

At the time, he didn't quite know what he was hearing, but later surmised that he had witnessed a re-creation of zhonghe shaoyue, the music that resounded at the temple while the emperor made sacrifices to Heaven. He walked for another hour in the temple park, thrilled to have had an aural glimpse of what he took to be the true music of China.

A little later, hearing a wistful melody coming from an unseen bamboo flute, he went in search of its source, hoping for another revelation. After making his way through a maze of pine trees, he found a man of great age and haunted visage, playing the theme from "The Godfather."

I found that these revelations contained in "Symphony of Millions" seem to explain some of the similarities between the occidental music with which I grew up, and that of the enchanting 'Middle Kingdom', perhaps belying Rudyard Kipling's 1889 poem in which he claimed:

"East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet".

Let your own ears decide.

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This is a review of Symphony of Millions by Alex Ross.



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About the Author

Ian Nance's media career began in radio drama production and news. He took up TV direction of news/current affairs, thence freelance television and film producing, directing and writing. He operated a program and commercial production company, later moving into advertising and marketing.

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