Listen to This (23 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
“If you are not free yourself, how can you interpret music freely?” the former music critic told me. We met in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Beijing, above Oriental Plaza, the gaudiest of Chen Ping’s malls. Businesspeople negotiated deals at neighboring tables while Norah Jones cooed on the speakers. “It’s very sad,” the critic went on. “Freedom is the biggest thing and it affects everything. People are scared, and they act in a way that scares others. I’m not just talking about music; I’m talking about many professions. There is a lot more to say, and sometimes I don’t know where to begin. Many things are stuck in my head.”
Western music formally arrived in China in 1601, when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented a clavichord to Wanli, the longest-ruling of the Ming emperors. As Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai relate, in their absorbing book
Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese
, the emperor’s eunuchs experimented with the instrument for a little while and then set it aside. 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. Of 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.
Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese
, the emperor’s eunuchs experimented with the instrument for a little while and then set it aside. 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. Of 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.
Only in the nineteenth century did Western music really spread beyond the walls of the imperial palaces, often in the form of military and municipal bands. The first true orchestra was the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra (later the Shanghai Symphony), which began playing in 1919, under the direction of an expatriate Italian virtuoso named Mario Paci. At first, the orchestra had only foreign players and stayed within the bounds of Shanghai’s colonial settlements, but Paci eventually reached out to the Chinese population. In 1927, Xiao Youmei, a German-trained pianist and composer, founded the Shanghai Conservatory, the first Western-style music school on Chinese soil. The growth of the Shanghai music scene profited from a lively community of adventurers, exiles, and, with the rise of Nazism, German-Jewish refugees; on the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory were associates of Schoenberg and Berg.
Mao Zedong, on assuming power, in 1949, initially encouraged the imported music, although he kept it within strict ideological bounds. In
the library of the Central Conservatory, I looked at back issues of
People’s Music
, a house journal whose first issue appeared in 1950, the year that the conservatory was founded. There were lyrics for songs called “We Are Busy Producing” and “The Little Song of Handing In Your Grains.” Each article, my companions pointed out, began with an automatic spasm of revolutionary rhetoric: “Our musical workers must develop people’s musical activities with limitless zeal.” Nonetheless, composers made fitful attempts to modernize their art, especially during the Hundred Flowers period, when Mao permitted them to “apply appropriate foreign principles and use foreign musical instruments.”
the library of the Central Conservatory, I looked at back issues of
People’s Music
, a house journal whose first issue appeared in 1950, the year that the conservatory was founded. There were lyrics for songs called “We Are Busy Producing” and “The Little Song of Handing In Your Grains.” Each article, my companions pointed out, began with an automatic spasm of revolutionary rhetoric: “Our musical workers must develop people’s musical activities with limitless zeal.” Nonetheless, composers made fitful attempts to modernize their art, especially during the Hundred Flowers period, when Mao permitted them to “apply appropriate foreign principles and use foreign musical instruments.”
The onset of the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, 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 extant repertory, Jiang Qing, otherwise known as Madame Mao, commissioned a group of eight “model” scores on revolutionary topics. The most famous of these was the ballet
Red Detachment of Women,
which has a kitschily charming score in a light-classical vein, with an array of native Chinese sounds. Composers had to work within the often peculiar stylistic boundaries that Jiang Qing set up; on one occasion, she extolled Aaron Copland’s film score for
The Red Pony,
and another time she outlawed the tuba.
Red Detachment of Women,
which has a kitschily charming score in a light-classical vein, with an array of native Chinese sounds. Composers had to work within the often peculiar stylistic boundaries that Jiang Qing set up; on one occasion, she extolled Aaron Copland’s film score for
The Red Pony,
and another time she outlawed the tuba.
The operatic bass Hao Jiang Tian, who, while I was in Beijing, was singing the role of Timur in
Turandot
, described to me what it was like to study music amid the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. His first musical performances were as an accordionist and singer in the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team of the Beijing Boiler Factory. (He relates these experiences in an engaging memoir,
Along the Roaring River
.) Tian’s father and mother worked for the People’s Liberation Army Zhongzheng Song and Dance Ensemble, as conductor and composer, respectively, but they came under suspicion and eventually had to leave Beijing. One day, Tian’s father said that the family had to get rid of its record collection. With a shudder, Tian remembers the childish glee that he felt as he smashed the albums.
Turandot
, described to me what it was like to study music amid the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. His first musical performances were as an accordionist and singer in the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team of the Beijing Boiler Factory. (He relates these experiences in an engaging memoir,
Along the Roaring River
.) Tian’s father and mother worked for the People’s Liberation Army Zhongzheng Song and Dance Ensemble, as conductor and composer, respectively, but they came under suspicion and eventually had to leave Beijing. One day, Tian’s father said that the family had to get rid of its record collection. With a shudder, Tian remembers the childish glee that he felt as he smashed the albums.
With the winding down of the Cultural Revolution, in the early seventies, Western music again crept into Chinese life. When Henry Kissinger first visited China, in 1971, in advance of Richard Nixon’s history-making tour, Zhou Enlai suggested that the Central Philharmonic—the orchestra
now known as the China National Symphony—play a work by Beethoven in honor of Kissinger’s German heritage. Jiang Qing and her comrades proceeded to review Beethoven’s symphonies for ideological errors. The
Eroica
was rejected because of its association with the imperialist figure of Napoleon; the Fifth fell short because it was said to be fatalistic. The Sixth Symphony, with its wholesome evocations of birds and babbling brooks, passed muster. When the Philadelphia Orchestra toured China in 1973, it originally planned to play the Fifth, but after Jiang Qing’s views were made known the orchestra had to scramble to find parts for the Sixth.
now known as the China National Symphony—play a work by Beethoven in honor of Kissinger’s German heritage. Jiang Qing and her comrades proceeded to review Beethoven’s symphonies for ideological errors. The
Eroica
was rejected because of its association with the imperialist figure of Napoleon; the Fifth fell short because it was said to be fatalistic. The Sixth Symphony, with its wholesome evocations of birds and babbling brooks, passed muster. When the Philadelphia Orchestra toured China in 1973, it originally planned to play the Fifth, but after Jiang Qing’s views were made known the orchestra had to scramble to find parts for the Sixth.
In the wake of Mao’s death and the fall of Jiang Qing, classical musicians emerged from hiding. When the Central Conservatory reopened, in 1978, eighteen thousand people applied for a hundred places. Present in that first class was a group of composers who define contemporary Chinese music today: Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Chen Qigang, and Guo Wenjing. Under the guidance of various visiting mentors—among them the expatriate modernist Chou Wen-chung, who had gone to America in 1946 and later taken a position at Columbia University—these composers Westernized themselves at high speed, consuming serialism, chance procedures, and other novelties. In so doing, they 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 the students 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.
A diaspora followed. Chen Qigang went to Paris to study with Messiaen. Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long traveled to New York to work with Chou Wen-chung; all three took up residence in the city. Tan quickly gravitated to New York’s downtown scene, particularly to the world of John Cage. By combining Cage’s chance processes and natural noises with plush Romantic melodies, Tan concocted a kind of crowd-pleasing avant-gardism. In 2008, at the Egg, he demonstrated that sensibility with a concert of “Organic Music,” with the China Youth Symphony; in
Paper Concerto
and
Water Concerto
, the Japanese percussionist Haruka Fujii crinkled paper and swished water in amplified bowls and other receptacles. In a further feat of packaging, Tan relates this music to shamanistic rituals of Hunan province, where he grew up. With such deft gestures of fusion,
Tan has satisfied a Western craving for authentic-seeming, folklore-based music.
Paper Concerto
and
Water Concerto
, the Japanese percussionist Haruka Fujii crinkled paper and swished water in amplified bowls and other receptacles. In a further feat of packaging, Tan relates this music to shamanistic rituals of Hunan province, where he grew up. With such deft gestures of fusion,
Tan has satisfied a Western craving for authentic-seeming, folklore-based music.
Many of the ‘78 composers have worked to reconcile avant-garde and populist values. “In the West, our situation as composers is very sad,” Chen Qigang told me. “In the 1950s, we lost command of the field, not just because popular composers took over but because we ceded the terrain. We ‘developed’ to the point where we no longer knew anything about the art of writing melody. We had a kind of nonexistence in musical life.” Nodding to his Olympics experience, he added, “Now I understand how hard it is to compose a cheery little song.” No composer has embraced that challenge as eagerly as Tan Dun, whose submission to the Olympic ceremony was a radically bathetic pop ballad titled “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 crossover tenor, and Zhang Liangying, another competitor from the 2005
Super Girl
contest. “You are me and I am you,” they sing together, in English. Unfortunately, they don’t go on to say, “I am the walrus.”
Super Girl
contest. “You are me and I am you,” they sing together, in English. Unfortunately, they don’t go on to say, “I am the walrus.”
After spending several days in the monumental environs of Tiananmen Square, I was relieved to receive an invitation to brunch at the home of Hao Jiang Tian, the singer who smashed his family’s records, and his wife, the geneticist and pianist Martha Liao. They live in a Swiss-designed building with a superior ventilation system, which keeps Beijing’s acrid air at bay. Tian and Liao also invited Guo Wenjing, who, of the composers of the 1978 generation, is the one least known in the West, principally because he never studied abroad. In some ways, he is the most interesting of all, because he has achieved a substantial degree of independence within the sometimes stifling atmosphere of Chinese music. There is a whiff of danger in his work.
Guo makes an unassuming first impression. He looks like a perpetual graduate student, his squarish face set off by heavy-rimmed glasses and a serrated edge of jet-black hair. But a certain wildness in his personality soon emerges. He comes from Chongqing, in Sichuan province. His conversation has a slightly percussive edge, accentuated with sweeping gestures and abrupt exclamations.
At the core of Guo’s work is an encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese traditional music. In the 1980s, he collected folk songs in the mountains
around the upper Yangtze River. His hero was Béla Bartók, who showed how a composer could immerse himself in folk materials while retaining a potent individual personality. Guo was also drawn to Dmitri Shostakovich, the 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 eternally ambiguous Shostakovich might also have been a model for Guo while he traversed treacherous political terrain; although there are “official” pieces in Guo’s catalogue, such as an overture celebrating the reabsorption of Hong Kong into China, he has also set to music the poetry of Xi Chuan, a bold and enigmatic writer who had ties to the 1989 student protests.
around the upper Yangtze River. His hero was Béla Bartók, who showed how a composer could immerse himself in folk materials while retaining a potent individual personality. Guo was also drawn to Dmitri Shostakovich, the 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 eternally ambiguous Shostakovich might also have been a model for Guo while he traversed treacherous political terrain; although there are “official” pieces in Guo’s catalogue, such as an overture celebrating the reabsorption of Hong Kong into China, he has also set to music the poetry of Xi Chuan, a bold and enigmatic writer who had ties to the 1989 student protests.
For a time, Guo chaired the composition department at the Central Conservatory. He stepped down because, he said curtly, “I didn’t like it. I’m not good at multitasking.” A few nights before, I had heard a choral symphony by Tang Jianping, the conservatory’s current composition chair. With the help of members of the Inner Mongolian Song and Dance Ensemble, the symphony told of the life and times of Genghis Khan. It strongly resembled the pseudo-folkloristic pieces that Soviet composers dutifully produced in honor of non-Russian nationalities. This is the kind of assignment that Guo is now generally able to avoid. He still teaches, although he is discouraged by the tendency among younger Chinese composers to copy European trends in order to establish their academic bona fides. “Say there is a young composer who writes in the style of one of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary operas,” he said. “Today, others would criticize him because he does not sound like Luciano Berio. But I would say, ‘Look, he had the guts to do something that everyone criticizes him for. There must be something good about him.’”
In fact, Guo is carrying on, with greater subtlety, a musical idea that dominated the revolutionary years: melding Western technique with Chinese tradition. Theater pieces such as
Wolf Cub Village
and
Poet Li Bai
, and symphonic pieces like
Chou Kong Shan
(
Sorrowful
,
Desolate Mountain
) and
Suspended Ancient Coffins on the Cliffs in Sichuan
, confront listeners with gritty, grinding sonorities, battering assaults of percussion, exuberant bashings and roarings of gongs, and, in the operas, extreme vocal techniques representing extreme psychological states. If Guo strays at times on the wrong side of the divide between ritual grandeur and monotony, he invariably has a strong impact. Some lines from
Poet Li Bai
,
which chronicles one of the great free spirits of Taoism, seem to sum him up: “Wild and free / Like my poetry / Would I stoop before men of power, / And deny myself a pleasant hour?”
Wolf Cub Village
and
Poet Li Bai
, and symphonic pieces like
Chou Kong Shan
(
Sorrowful
,
Desolate Mountain
) and
Suspended Ancient Coffins on the Cliffs in Sichuan
, confront listeners with gritty, grinding sonorities, battering assaults of percussion, exuberant bashings and roarings of gongs, and, in the operas, extreme vocal techniques representing extreme psychological states. If Guo strays at times on the wrong side of the divide between ritual grandeur and monotony, he invariably has a strong impact. Some lines from
Poet Li Bai
,
which chronicles one of the great free spirits of Taoism, seem to sum him up: “Wild and free / Like my poetry / Would I stoop before men of power, / And deny myself a pleasant hour?”
At brunch, Guo was in a sunny mood, but at one point I managed to annoy him. Speaking of the music of Chen Qigang, I said that its refined, free-floating timbres suggested an affinity between modern Chinese composition and the sound-world of Debussy and Messiaen. Guo swept his arms wide, nearly upsetting the tableware, and proclaimed, “This view shows that foreigners don’t understand China. Music here has nothing to do with France. Opposite direction. Different taste.” Then he smiled, his argument made. He held up two stubby fingers in the air, as if about to give a blessing. “I am anti-fashion. I look down on the trend. I want to escape the whole question of sounding like the West or sounding like the East. Non-European composers always have to have their cultural identity, their symbols. In Germany or France, they have real freedom. They absolutely have the freedom to write what they want. Of course”—his eyes lit up—“if they are so free, why do they end up sounding the same?”
If Guo Wenjing is a composer with one foot in the official world and one foot outside, the sound artist, critic, and impresario Yan Jun lives an almost entirely independent existence. “It is very boring, very dangerous to life, dangerous to young people’s heart and mind,” Yan said of the academic and professional music worlds. “You go to school, you lose your soul. You learn how to join the official system. It’s not about music.” Although avant-gardists in every major city take a similar line, it has an extra edge coming from an artist in China. Thanks to the Internet, such musicians are less isolated than they were in the eighties and nineties, when the idea of a Chinese avant-garde was still far-fetched. Well before I met Yan Jun, I had listened to a couple of hours of his music on his various websites and blogs.
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