by Alex Ross
Near-capacity crowds attended Turandot and other events I saw at the Egg. This was noteworthy, considering the cost of the tickets; for a seat in the uppermost gallery of the opera house, I paid 480 yuan—about seventy dollars. That price is considerably higher than for an equivalent seat at the Metropolitan Opera, and vertiginously high when you consider that a low-level white-collar worker at a Chinese firm earns only about four hundred dollars a month. But not everyone has to pay to get in. Large blocks of tickets are set aside for politicians, diplomats, CEOs, and corporate clients; some fail to show up, resulting in rows of empty seats at allegedly sold-out events, and others make an early exit to attend another function or to escape boredom. One Beijing composer told me scornfully that much of the audience was “scouting real estate,” and that it would disappear once its curiosity had been satisfied.
It was encouraging, however, to see so many young people in the house—many more than you see in most American concert halls or opera houses. At a performance by the China National Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Michel Plasson, I watched as a cluster of teenagers, outfitted with bejeweled BlackBerrys, A.P.C. jeans, and other tokens of new wealth, grew excited by the orchestra’s noisily energetic rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, leaving aside their text-messaging to applaud each movement. In general, listeners behaved more informally than I was used to: some older people, following the looser etiquette of Peking opera, talked among themselves, pointed at the stage, or read newspapers. The hubbub was distracting at times—ushers largely failed to prevent the taking of pictures and videos—but it was refreshing in comparison with the self-conscious solemnity that encroaches on Western concert halls. The music wasn’t taken for granted; Berlioz still had shock value.
The youthfulness of the audience at the Egg reflects the real wonder of the Chinese classical scene: the staggering number of people who are currently studying music, whether in schools or with private tutors. The Sichuan Conservatory, in Chengdu, is said to have more than ten thousand students; Juilliard, by contrast, has eight hundred. An American high-school student who practices piano several hours a day is apt to be pegged something of a freak; in China, such a routine is commonplace.
The violist Qi Yue, a young professor at Renmin University, explained to me the various factors that are driving the surge in music lessons. For one thing, students who demonstrate musical gifts can get away with scoring fewer points on the gaokao, China’s college-admissions test, not unlike athletes in the United States. Also, the conservatory system has a history of fostering pop stars, who prompt legions of imitators. Cui Jian, the founder of Chinese rock, played trumpet in the Beijing Symphony in the 1980s before embarking on a pop career. The Sichuan Conservatory produced the pop singer Li Yuchun, who, in 2005, entered as a contestant on Super Girl, a Chinese version of American Idol, and won the competition with a hip-hop-flavored, gender-bending style. (With hundreds of millions of votes cast in the form of text messages, Super Girl has been called China’s largest democratic election. Perhaps for this reason, the show was canceled after the 2006 season.)
Qi took me on a tour of the Central Conservatory, China’s flagship music school, in the company of his former teacher, the violist Wing Ho. Familiar airs wafted out of the practice rooms—Chopin from the pianists, Rossini from the singers, Tchaikovsky from the violinists. When I looked in on a composition class, though, it turned out to be a lesson in pop-music arranging. A shaggy-haired, T-shirt-clad student named Zhang Tianye was leaning over a computer terminal, working on a mix of drums, guitar, piano, and bass. When I asked him what music he likes, he said he listened “mostly to pop, sometimes classical.” Another student, Qu Dawei, sat down at the piano to execute a half-Romantic, half-jazzy solo somewhat in the manner of Gershwin. In other words, attending a conservatory in China doesn’t automatically equate with interest in classical music. Yet the intermingling of genres may have the healthy effect of integrating European tradition into the wider culture.
Like most serious Chinese musicians, Qi Yue politely rejected the notion of China as a classical paradise, although he predicted that it would become a major market in twenty or thirty years. Long Yu, China’s most prominent conductor, felt much the same way. “On the outside, newspapers are saying that China is the largest musical country in the world, or that millions of kids are learning piano,” he told me. “I’m not that optimistic. The thing is, I do my best to serve the people who really need fine arts and classical music. I do not have the duty to make everyone like it.” A German-trained musician who operates with a kind of bulldozer charm, Long Yu directs the Beijing Music Festival, has built the China Philharmonic into China’s finest orchestra, and holds posts in Guangzhou and Shanghai. To maintain political connections, he serves on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Yet he keeps a certain distance from the notion of classical music as “official culture”; he has sought funding from private sources and tried to keep ticket prices down. Notably, he had yet to appear at the Egg.
For a musician on Long Yu’s level, politics is unavoidable. Since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Party has discouraged dissent not just by clamping down on rebellious voices but by handsomely rewarding those who play it safe. Richard Kraus, in his book The Party and the Arty in China, writes, “By 1992, the Party had given up trying to purge all dissident voices and opted instead for the strategy of urging all arts organizations to strive to earn more money.” Those who work within the system may be expected to reach a stage where they can win prizes, obtain sinecures, hold illustrious posts, and be well paid for teaching. Artists end up censoring themselves—a habit ingrained in Chinese history. Behind the industrious façade is a fair degree of political anxiety. Reviews often read like press releases; indeed, I was told that concert organizations routinely pay journalists to provide favorable coverage. Critics feel pressure to deliver positive judgments, and, if they don’t, they may be reprimanded or hounded by colleagues. One critic I talked to got fed up and quit writing about music altogether.
“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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
For a time, Guo ch
aired 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?”