East playing West

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.