East playing West

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.