Postcard from Beijing: A Triumphant Return

Chinese culture puts a lot of stock in prizes and competitions; whatever the circumstances, the title matters a lot. So it was no great surprise that the youngest and first-ever Chinese winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano competition had a full-evening program at the Beijing Music Festival on Monday night. Rather, it was the audience that provided the surprise; in a country where raucous Peking Opera performances usually beget loud, running commentary from the floor, I have never seen a Beijing audience so completely rapt. Perhaps it was national pride, or maybe audiences here have finally internalized the solemn rituals of Western classical music. Or maybe they were just in awe. Whatever the reason, they remained fixated on a single figure hunched over his piano as if ready to pounce. Even the children were silent and wide-eyed. Only once did I see a woman pull out a cell phone, and she just placed it quietly on her armrest as the gadget’s voice recorder clicked away the seconds of Haochen Zhang’s performance.

Among the ranks of China’s celebrity piano prodigies, Zhang’s homecoming puts him firmly alongside Yundi Li and a whole roster of Van Cliburn finalists. If their experience is anything to go by, November 2 won't be the last New York sees of Zhang.

Posted by Nick Frisch, 2009–2010 Fulbright Fellow researching classical music developments in China

Harmony in Nature, Cont.

I talked before about having spent time with the Dong singers. I was co-musical director of a Dong recording that got a bit of attention in the US: It was featured in David Henry Hwang’s Obie Award–winning play Yellow Face and found its way onto WNYC’s New Sounds playlist—rather appropriately, between the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus and Meredith Monk. I also got married in a Dong village in Liping County, Guizhou, near where the women appearing in Zankel Hall also live. So, I’ve seen that context makes a huge difference.

Dong singing is some of the most un-Chinese music I’ve heard in China, even among other migratory peoples who only happen to be Chinese citizens through accidents of geography. It was the sole cultural record of a people who, until the PRC applied its pinyin Romanization to their spoken language, had no written language of their own. And as with many minorities in China, much can be lost in the translation.

Initially, we had Chinese lyrics provided by a highly urbanized group from Guiyang. We were able to follow most of them line by line, until we got to a song called “I Use a Blue Cloth to Hide My Heart,” which they’d translated as:

I am afraid people will know about my love,
So I use a blue cloth to hide it.
When I think of him, my heart is on fire;
Even when we are a thousand miles apart, I feel he is close by.
If we had no love, we would still feel distant even though we are close.

Excerpt from "I Use a Blue Cloth to Hide My Heart"
Used courtesy of Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop

Somehow, it just didn’t fit the music. So we started spending time with our Dong girls, the younger ones being particularly fluent in both Chinese and Dong, talking through each song at length. They offered a less “official” but more direct version:

If I marry someone I don’t love, I’d rather play dumb—
Go up to the mountain looking for indigo, and hide my heart.
A happy couple, even if they till fields far apart, will still try to speak with each other;
A couple that has no love, even if they work side by side, will have no words to say.

When I went back to the song again, I could hear the happy couple speaking to each other across the field. The polyphony became not just a sophisticated choral technique but snapshot of the culture. I play this song a lot now.

Posted by Ken Smith

Say Qi

Chen Yi’s quartet Qi for flute, cello, piano, and percussion will be the first chamber piece on Ensemble ACJW’s Class of 1978 concerts on October 25 and October 26. The Chinese word Qi (pronounced "chi") describes a metaphysical flow of energy in the universe. It has little or no relation to the physical concept of energy, referring instead to a kind of spiritual vitalism—one that continually changes in order to restore and maintain harmony in all things.

Dr. Chen's musical portrayal of Qi is simultaneously extreme yet cohesive. Textures change rapidly, from cadenza-like passages in the cello and flute to driving motoric rhythms in the percussion and piano. Evolving atmospheres delineate the structure of the piece; often the same sonorities will return with slight alterations, giving the whole work an “ambiguous rondo” feel. It is absolutely fascinating to listen to the piece this way, substituting the Western idea of thematic development with the metamorphoses of sonic blocks.

Excerpt from Chen Yi's Qi
New Music Consort
CRI Records

More fascinating still—to the four of us playing the piece, anyway—is the way the treatment of each of our instruments changes with these textures.

Finding Harmony in Nature

Friday’s Taste of China concert may be the first time that Dong singers have been featured live at Carnegie Hall, but a group of Dong women has appeared here at least once before—on screen as part of Tan Dun’s multimedia concerto, The Map. In a movement toward the end of that piece, which uses field recordings of both Han and minority musical styles from Tan’s native Hunan province as a point of departure, a circle of Dong women sits around singing about cicadas. This is a recurring topic, as the singers have developed a distinctive technique of rapid tongue movements to mimic the sound of that insect.

Of the nine movements in The Map, this one is closest to its roots, the orchestra reduced merely to accompanying the villagers. Having spent a lot of time with Dong singers myself, I can see why. The Dong musical world is so self-contained, so hard to reference or adapt to, that outsiders tend to leave it alone. Even the Chinese government’s regular “happy minority” shows, which think nothing of co-opting Tibetan or Uyghur tunes (ditching the original language in favor of Mandarin, and smoothing out any quirky musical elements), tend to leave Dong music more or less the way you’d hear it in the village on a festival day.

Posted by Ken Smith

10/21 Quanzhou Marionette Theater @ Zankel Hall

The last time I saw the Quanzhou Marionette Theater perform they were doing a Gogol play, which is to say the troupe is hardly beholden to tradition. But when they do get started on tradition, as they did last night at Zankel Hall, they certainly don't hold back.

Like the Salzburg Marionettes, their closest Western equivalent, the Quanzhou troupe largely popularizes “human” opera. But unlike their Western counterparts, who these days mostly mime to recordings, the Quanzhou puppeteers are also trained performers who sing on stage with a live band. Their performance last night was not all that much different from any other night at the Chinese opera, with the usual hodgepodge of scenes and set pieces—except that they avoided the rather recent (and unfortunate) tradition of amplifying performances beyond the pain threshold. Who knew that Zankel could be such a natural Chinese opera house?

That said, the evening took a while to find its stride. The four generals in the opening segment introduced a few conventional Chinese opera gestures, but seeing wooden puppets mimic the stylized contortions that live performers train a lifetime to master is rather like watching a CGI action scene in a movie instead of the real thing. Soon, though, virtuosic displays from the senior troupe members in classic solo roles steadily hit the mark, from the comic precision of Chen Yinghong’s Young Monk, to the lyrical elegance of Lin Xiaojun’s Ruolan, to the drunken exuberance of Zhang Gong’s Zhong Kui.

After intermission, that virtuosity unfolded into genuine dramatic art, first in an effective episode from Journey to the West (strangely translating the villainess as the Skeleton Enchantress rather than the more standard White-Boned Demon, later a famous appellation for Madame Mao) then in a staged tribute to Quanzhou local holiday customs. Only in a highly populist—and genuinely funny—encore, when veteran puppeteer Xia Rongfeng’s monkey started circling the stage on a bicycle, did the puppetry entirely break free of its operatic roots.

Posted by Ken Smith

Carnegie Hall awakens the lion

On October 21 at 1 PM, Carnegie Hall kicked off Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture with a traditional lion dance and “eye-dotting” ceremony.

Watch a video

Video from the Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture opening ceremony.

View a slide show

The opening ceremony for Carnegie Hall's
Ancient Paths, Modern Voices.
Photos by Nan Melville

Posted by Carnegie Hall

ACJW Meets the Class of 1978

Carnegie Hall’s Director of Artistic Planning, Jeremy Geffen, spoke at a recent Professional Development session about The Academy’s role in the upcoming Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival. The five works featured on Ensemble ACJW’s concerts on October 25 and October 26, were each written by composers who entered the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1978 when its doors reopened after the Cultural Revolution had sealed them since 1966 (with the exception of Bright Sheng, who entered the Conservatory in Shanghai the same year).

Part of Geffen’s presentation included a short video with Tan Dun speaking about the sudden, drastic change in the lives of the ’78 class when they were admitted to the conservatory after a period of “re-education” in the countryside. “After the Cultural Revolution, we came in from real life,” recounts Tan Dun. “We were standing on the ruins, thinking, How could we create our musical kingdom again? … Then, of course, China opened.” Western musical ideals, along with the ever-evolving concept of modernism, flooded into Chinese musical thought. This newfound wealth of sonic and cultural influences, coupled with the experience of having been exiled to the countryside and exposed to varying dialects and folk songs, gave the composers of the class of ’78 two diametrically opposed aesthetics to draw from. And although they shared a similar history, their futures beyond the conservatory—and the music they wrote—are all very distinct.

Composers Tan Dun and Chen Qigang discuss their membership in the Class of 1978.

Preparing for this concert has presented Ensemble ACJW with a unique and exciting challenge. For the better part of our season thus far, discussions in rehearsals have

Stringing Me Along

My plans to get a sneak peek at the stars of the Quanzhou Marionette Theater—the 18-inch wooden ones, I mean—got slightly hijacked when the troupe’s president Wang Jingxian phoned to say they were not at their midtown hotel as planned but instead downtown visiting their fellow villager Cai Guo-Qiang, the self-styled “gunpowder artist” who was responsible for (among other stellar events) the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony, where the Chinese rather grandly reminded the world that they invented fireworks.

By the time I raced down to Cai’s East Village studio, the scene had turned into a giant photo-op—not just for the Chinese media but for the players themselves. Cai, it turned out, was in Taiwan preparing for a show, but President Wang and the four senior puppeteers (fellow veterans of the Olympic Opening Ceremony who have all performed in New York before) were hosted for lunch by Cai’s wife, fellow Quanzhou native Hong Hong Wu.

It was hard to figure out who was more honored. While each of the puppeteers took turns being photographed (marionettes in hand) in front of Cai’s artworks—one of which was a recent Quanzhou-inspired piece entitled My Home—Wu herself could hardly take her eyes off her wooden guests.

“I grew up with these puppets,” said Wu, whose grandmother used to live in clear view of the theater. Quanzhou puppetry, which traces its history back at least to the late Tang Dynasty, came to a screeching halt during the Cultural Revolution. When the puppets reappeared after 1976, Wu said, she knew that a terrible decade was finally over. “I haven’t seen the puppets since I left China in 1986,” she said, still beaming wistfully.

Posted by Ken Smith

Changing of the Guard

A reminder for anyone still holding tickets to anything this month by Yundi Li: In late September, his November 1 recital was officially postponed to May 20, 2010, due to an illness in the family. He has also withdrawn from two neighborhood events at Flushing Town Hall: A recital program on November 2 and a master class for young pianists on November 3.

Replacing Li on November 2 (but not for the master class) will be Haochen Zhang, who became the first Chinese-born gold medalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in June. Zhang will perform Chopin's 24 Preludes, Liszt's Rhapsodie espagnole, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. (You can hear his performance of the Ravel from the Van Cliburn finals here.)

In the past few months, the 19-year-old Zhang has already generated more excitement than any young pianist since, well, the 18-year-old Yundi Li became the first Chinese (and the youngest) pianist ever to win the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000. Bookended by those teenage gold medalists, the first decade of the millennium may well go down in history as a turning point for Chinese pianists on the world stage. In the meantime, Zhang just performed the Chopin and Liszt in recital last night at the Beijing Music Festival, and we should have a report on this blog later in the week.

Posted by Ken Smith

Chinese Calligraphy as Complete Art

That thing about qin music being “a literary art” cuts both ways. There’s also a great musical sense—or at the very least, a clear sense of rhythm and form—inherent in fine Chinese calligraphy, which Lin Hwai-min, founder of Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, has called “the epitome of Chinese culture” for its combination of both literal verbal meaning and visual elegance in a frozen frame of motion.

While Lin’s Cursive trilogy turned the latent energy of still, calligraphic characters into living, dramatic ones, the much-younger choreographer Shen Wei mined the same field from the other direction: his Connect Transfer was essentially “dancing a painting” executed on a floor cloth using ink-soaked clothing. Appropriately enough, Shen (who studied calligraphy as a child) has also developed something of a reputation as a proper painter, his artwork having been shown in New York and Hong Kong (the latter in conjunction with a local appearance of his company, Shen Wei Dance Arts). “All art forms are related to each other,” says Shen, who will offer insights into his working process as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works and Process series.

Footage of Shen Wei Dance Arts performing Connect Transfer II

Posted by Ken Smith

Taking It on the Qin

At the 2005 conference for CHIME (the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research) in Amsterdam, Hunter College Professor Emeritus Bo Lawergren generated what passes for shock waves in the academic community by suggesting that the ancient qin had arrived in China from somewhere in Central Asia. Now, one might expect scholars to question the musical bloodlines of the pipa—which does, after all, look a little bit like the oud—but to question the ethnic purity of the qin? You might as well claim that Marco Polo brought the noodles with him from Venice.

Without hair-splitting (I personally side with the late Lou Harrison, who once wrote—in capital letters—“THAT’S ALL THERE IS”) there’s at least one particular attribute that make the qin (or guqin, as it’s formally called to when referring to the “ancient” instrument) conclusively Chinese. The “complex system of tablature” that Stephen Jones refers to in his introduction is actually based on the Chinese written language. The qin became “the music of the literati” because only a true student of literature could read the instructions telling the player where, how and how long to place his fingers. Beyond that, the melody for the qin itself was derived—often overtly, sometimes subtly—from literary sources.

Posted by Ken Smith

It Starts with the Instruments

Believe it or not, the festival's already begun—at least for some of the partner institutions. Yesterday was A China Celebration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which featured an introduction to the Met's Silk and Bamboo: Music and Art of China (running through February 7, 2010) and an hour-long concert by Music From China (which was notably heavy on the silk front, with both plucked and bowed strings, and light on bamboo).

The real treat of the afternoon, though, was Met musical instrument curator J. Kenneth Moore's notes on the exhibition, which traced some 8,000 years of Chinese music making. This was, amazingly enough, roughly 4,000 years before the earliest Chinese writing, and nearly 6,000 years before China first became a unified country. About two-thirds of Moore's timeline took place before recorded history.

History is rarely kind to ephemeral arts—particularly in China, where the First Emperor Qin Shihuang (259-210 BCE) started a national tradition of leaders destroying the knowledge of previous generations—but the difference between music and visual arts was particularly striking given curator Maxwell K. Hearn's earlier introduction yesterday of the portraiture of Luo Ping (1732-1779). Luo's work still exists more or less as it did in the Qing Dynasty. For those who want to know what ancient Chinese music really sounded like, looking at the Met's musical instruments is rather like looking at Luo's brushes.

Still, the history of Chinese music is fascinating, especially on the political and cultural front, where archeology can seem both distant and familiar. From the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Chinese music was dictated by the Yuehfu, a government bureau that not only licensed court and temple musicians but also micromanaged tuning and playing techniques. In many eras, ensembles were funded by the state; other times, musicians were left to support themselves solely though commercial work in theaters, brothels, and teahouses, prompting China's iconic teahouse girls, who famously blurred the line between classical and vernacular music (and just goes to show that the 12 Girls Band is not a recent phenomenon).

Posted by Ken Smith

Named for Solfege

In the spirit of Arthur Rubinstein, who once called Leonard Bernstein “the greatest pianist among conductors, the greatest conductor among composers, the greatest composer among pianists,” we offer Liu Sola: the greatest composer among singers, the greatest singer among novelists, the greatest novelist (thus far, anyway) among composers. Still composing, Sola (as she’s universally known) is now better known for her 1985 debut novel You Have No Choice—a candid look at young music composition students—which helped put the entire Class of 1978 on the map in China as intellectual celebrities.

Sola’s acute multitasking as composer, author, and rather uncategorizable performance artist have made her famous well beyond her catalogue of works.

Excerpt from Liu Sola Discourse on the Zither

Her restless imagination has made her reluctant to rest on her laurels (see a feature segment from CCTV 9’s Culture Express). Ask her which piece best defines her compositional voice and she responds (with the barest hint of irony), “the next one.”

Although Sola’s music is featured on only one program in Ancient Paths, Modern Voices, the website features an episode from her debut novel. This excerpt, from an unpublished translation by Nicolas Groffman, appears here for the first time in English.

Posted by Ken Smith

No Butterflies

One major difference between Carnegie Hall’s Ancient Paths, Modern Voices and nearly any music presenter in Greater China is the lack of the “Butterfly Lovers” Violin Concerto on the Carnegie Hall program. This is especially striking now, since last Friday night alone the “Butterfly Lovers” was on the program for both the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Macau Orchestra (where having booked the original soloist, Yu Lina, created such demand that the Macau International Music Festival had to add a second performance). This week, Jie Chen performs her version of the piece for piano in Taipei.

Of course the comparison is not entirely fair. October 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic; the “Butterfly Lovers” was written 50 years ago to mark the PRC’s 10th anniversary. Anniversaries rule programming everywhere, it seems, but the piece’s blend of Chinese operatic fiddling and faux-Tchaikovsky orchestration still quintessentially illustrates Chinese musical values (prizing melody and timbre well above rhythm and harmony, and forgoing musical consistency in favor an extra-musical story).

Not featuring the “Butterfly Lovers”—particularly when international artists like Gil Shaham have begun championing the piece—is actually like presenting a festival of American music without Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The message is clear: the “Butterfly Lovers” (or for that matter, the equally omnipresent “Yellow River” Piano Concerto, which is likewise missing from the festival) is hardly a definitive statement. Rather, it marks a transitional moment in an ongoing tradition. Welcome to China’s musical life after—and before—butterflies.

Posted by Ken Smith

Not all Stars

There are times when musical life in China feels like an ongoing Class of 1978 reunion; that was the Central Conservatory graduating class that stood Chinese music on its head. The Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, for one, opened its season on September 13 with world premieres by ‘78 grads Guo Wenjing, Zhou Long and Chen Yi, conducted by Long Yu. Tan Dun arrived in town later that night.
Circulating a third-year class photo has generated almost as much excitement among the composers as would a new commission.

When it comes to keeping in touch, few class members have been as diligent as Chen Yi and Liu Sola, who offered the photo to Carnegie Hall. With the help of those two women, we were able to locate most of the class. Roll your cursor over the faces and you can find out what these Bright Young Things have done with their lives.

Click to enlarge

Some became internationally famous; others wrote fine music that no one has heard outside of China. Quite a few became teachers. Some even became music critics. Yin Ganwei, after graduate studies at UC San Diego, turned to finance and became a vice president at Merrill Lynch.

Their stories range from the quirky (check out tai chi master Wang Yanji’s YouTube videos of Bach fugues and martial arts) to the tragic, such as Sun Yi’s death in an automobile accident in 1993. Perhaps saddest of all is the disappearance of Lin Dehong, who received the highest score on the Central Conservatory’s entrance exam but lost all contact with his classmates in the late 1980s. Calls to his extended family in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shanghai have turned up nothing. If anyone knows his whereabouts, please contact Carnegie Hall. We are all very curious.

Posted by Ken Smith

Shanghai Surprise

Having already seen Guo Wenjing rooting through his photos in an old shoebox last spring, I was a bit wary of visiting the Shanghai Symphony a few days later. This was, after all, the most established of China’s classical music institutions and (I’d thought) probably one of the most victimized by the Red Guards’ purge of Western culture. To my surprise, the orchestra’s archivist, Yang Zhaoying, was very much in touch with both the institution’s history and the latest technologies. When I asked about using some specific photos from her files, she looked up and asked, “JPEG okay?”

Clearly, this is not the old Shanghai Symphony. The orchestra, which just opened its 130th concert season on September 26, is now in the midst of a major overhaul under its new music director, Long Yu. More on these changes later; for now, check out the SSO slideshow and (starting from photo 13) see how the orchestra functioned during the Cultural Revolution, when concert halls were effectively shut down and the orchestra took music “to the people,” playing for peasants in the villages, soldiers in the fields, and a variety of what today we’d call “alternative venues,” including a shipyard and various sites of political rallies.

View an annotated photo album, courtesy of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. »

Posted by Ken Smith

I Love “I Love Beijing Tiananmen”

Whenever I need a quick pick-me-up, I click on the song “I Love Beijing Tiananmen.” Really, how can you not get excited hearing dozens of cheerful schoolkids calling for Chairman Mao to guide them forward? I’d first heard it in the opening credits of Cina Chung Kuo, a 1972 documentary by Michelangelo Antonioni, whose music consultant Luciano Berio apparently liked the song as much as I do. (I like this film so much I actually saw it twice last year, once in New York during the Asia Society’s Cultural Revolution retrospective and again at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.)

By writing this tune, composer Jin Yueling was fast-tracked into the Central Conservatory’s Class of 1978, bypassing all entrance requirements. Although Jin Yueling’s colleagues may well share Noel Coward’s unflattering swipe at the “potency of cheap music,” I’m sure many of them would have traded a future award or two to have written any kind of tune—propaganda or otherwise—as catchy as this one. It’s still a karaoke hit in China, and Jin is now the music editor of the Shanghai Record Company.

Posted by Ken Smith

Some Adorable Baby photos

If nothing else, Carnegie Hall’s Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival at least gave some composers an excuse to root through their old photographs. Click on the slideshow on Chen Yi's page and see if you’ve ever seen anything cuter than this three-year-old in pigtails at the piano. Well, maybe a three-year old Bright Sheng already looking like he’s waiting for a conductor’s cue. Study the detail in these photos (the tiles on the Chen’s floor in Guangzhou, the doily atop the Sheng family piano in Shanghai), and their educated, middle-class background is immediately obvious. These are precisely the kinds of families that would later be targeted by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

Contrast those images with early shots of Chen Qigang, whose family was no less educated (his father was the administrator of the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts), but whose home was much less cluttered by such bourgeois niceties. My own favorite, though, is a shot of the young Guo Wenjing practicing the violin at home in Chongqing. He’s not as young here as the other composers in their earliest photos, but his story is the most memorable: his parents bought him a violin so that he would stay in the house and not watch the Red Guards fighting in the streets.

Posted by Ken Smith