by Alex Ross
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.
Yan Jun, who was born in Langzhou in 1973, is the genial, laid-back leader of Beijing’s modestly scaled but thriving experimental-music scene. Specializing in creating electronic soundscapes from the noises and voices of the city, he releases recordings on two labels and presents music once a week at a bar called 2 Kolegas, on the grounds of a drive-in movie theater. The night I went there, the bill included Li Zenghui, a twenty-four-year-old saxophonist in a bebop getup, who delivered a breathy, growling solo, and a Japanese-Korean duo called 10, whose female lead singer alternately sang and shrieked into a microphone while sporting oversized heart-shaped sunglasses.
In his mission to cultivate a “downtown” scene comparable to New York’s or Berlin’s, Yan has been almost too successful. If the bar and everyone in it had been plopped down in Brooklyn, nothing would have seemed amiss. Out of a crowd of some twenty people, fewer than half were Chinese. Another night, I went to see a flock of indie-rock bands at the alternative club D-22, and found myself engulfed by moshing mobs of American college kids on their semester abroad. Yet the expatriate presence is having a dynamic effect on native musicians. The city is still cheap by Western standards, and, like Berlin after the fall of the Wall, it has become a mecca for artists in search of low rent and new audiences. The expat community includes the young American composer Eli Marshall, who leads the Beijing New Music Ensemble, and Michael Pettis, a former Wall Street investment banker, who founded D-22 in 2006.
The pride of Beijing’s underground—No Beijing, Yan Jun calls it—is an indie-rock wunderkind named Zhang Shouwang, who also goes by the name Jeffray Zhang. Pettis saw him one day in the Houhai district wearing a Velvet Underground T-shirt and struck up a conversation. Zhang turned out to be a fast-fingered guitarist with a wide-open musical mind. Pettis gave Zhang a vintage Gibson SG electric guitar and promoted his bands and side projects, which include Carsick Cars, a locally popular group that has opened for Sonic Youth. The first night I went to D-22, Zhang, who was then twenty-two, performed a solo piece that featured minimalist patterns over steady drones, moving purposefully from clean, simple harmonies into duskier, more chromatic regions. In time-honored Led Zeppelin fashion, Zhang played the guitar strings with a violin bow, to which he diligently applied rosin beforehand.
Afterward, in hesitant but idiomatic English, Zhang spoke to me about his New York—centric interests, which range from alternative rock to minimalist composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Glenn Branca. In 2006, he went to New York to participate in a recording of Branca’s Haillucination City, the electric-guitar symphony that played at Disney Hall at around the same time. Zhang was working on a piece for Marshall’s Beijing New Music Ensemble. “I’ve never composed before, so it’s going slowly,” Zhang said, sipping a beer at a back table in D-22. He’d looked at an orchestration manual for clues on how to write for the instruments, but, he said, the book told him only how to pass a test. Eventually, he came up with Xizhimen Traffic Lights, a fluent, mellow study in slowly changing patterns, in the spirit of Reich.
Zhang’s premiere took place after I left Beijing, but I later heard the piece on the website of the BBC, which underwrote the concert. I also checked Yan Jun’s blog to find what sounds he had lately collected, and listened to an audio portrait of Tiananmen Square during a moment of silence in honor of victims of the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008. A voice is heard saying on a loudspeaker, “It is now two twenty-eight p.m., Beijing time. All please stand to attention facing the flag for three minutes of silence.” This being Beijing, the silence was loud. Thousands of drivers leaned on their horns to create a vast, dreamily dissonant harmony, a fundamental chord of the city.
The curious thing about the Chinese enthusiasm for Western classical music is that the People’s Republic, with its far-flung provinces and myriad ethnic groups, possesses a store of musical traditions that rival the proudest products of Europe and go back much deeper in time. Holding to core principles in the face of change, traditional Chinese music is more “classical” than anything in the West.
In many of Beijing’s public spaces, you see amateurs playing native instruments, especially the dizi, or bamboo flute, and the erhu, or two-stringed fiddle. They perform mostly for their own pleasure, not for money. But it’s surprisingly difficult to find professional performances in pure classical style. In concert halls, the instruments are often deposited, as a sonic spice, into Western-style arrangements, as in the Genghis Khan symphony I heard at the Egg. Institutionalized “Chinese orchestras” imitate the layout of Western ensembles. Music intended for small spaces has been beefed up, amplified, and transformed into spectacles suitable for national television. A colleague reports that an alleged evening of authentic Chinese music in Shanghai ended with a chunk of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Those who remain devoted to the ancient traditions often struggle to show their relevance in the age of Super Girl. Some master instrumentalists teach at the conservatories but seldom play in public. Even Peking opera, which attracts sizable crowds, feels the pressure. When, in early 2008, the Ministry of Education introduced a new program to foster interest in Peking opera among the young, a poll found that more than 50 percent opposed the initiative as a waste of resources.
The project of revitalizing Chinese tradition has fallen to younger artists like Wu Na, who wields what some consider the aristocrat of instruments: the guqin, 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 guqin has become somewhat esoteric, though interest is growing again. With the support of an elderly Taiwanese couple, Wu runs a guqin school at a teahouse in Zhongshan Park, in Beijing. When I 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. After I returned home, I visited her at her temporary apartment, in Chelsea. When I 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, meditati
ve pauses.
“Liu Shaochun came from a wealthy family,” Wu told me. “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.”
Despite her fastidious attention to guqin technique, Wu also loves avant-garde music and jazz. She is friends with Yan Jun and goes almost every week to 2 Kolegas. There is a vague likeness between the art of guqin and Western experimental music: the scores indicate tunings, fingerings, and articulations but fail to specify rhythms, resulting in markedly different interpretations by performers of competing schools. Wu plays in the “old times” style, as she calls it, but she has also explored a kind of cool, modal jazz approach; either way, she shows profound sensitivity to her instrument.
Wu Na spoke of developing a cross-cultural exchange that would bring traditional Chinese masters to New York and jazz and blues musicians to Beijing. She noted that audiences in Beijing have little grasp of African-American music in its classic, early-twentieth-century forms. And I realized that, while I had gone around Beijing looking for “authentic” Chinese music, she had been doing the same in New York, searching, with little success, for old-time jazz and blues.
On a day when the center of Beijing was overrun by Olympic hullabaloo—in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, President Hu Jintao was lighting the Olympic torch, to the accompaniment of Hollywoodish fanfares—I went for a walk in the august sprawl of the Temple of Heaven, and saw a sign pointing to the “Divine Music Administration.” No such place was listed in my guidebook, but I followed the arrows all the same. After going around in circles for a while, I came upon a series of buildings where court musicians of the Ming dynasty once rehearsed. The buildings had recently been renovated, most of the rooms filled with exhibitions on Chinese musical history. One could bang replicas of ancient bronze bells and strum on a guqin. A young attendant was standing by. When I asked a question, she proceeded to play the guqin with expert grace. She seemed grateful for the attention; in the past hour, I had been the museum’s only visitor.
Then I heard music—not recorded music but the real thing, a slow, grand, impeccably austere procession of sonorities. It emanated from behind the closed doors of a hall in the center of the complex. I cracked open the door, but an attendant shooed me away. “Not allowed,” she said. I walked over to the box office and asked if a public performance was scheduled; the man behind the counter shook his head vigorously and said, “No music.” Just when I was preparing to give up, I saw a van approaching. Twenty or so well-dressed Chinese tourists piled out. Guessing that they were headed into the hall, I slipped into their midst, and made it through the doors.
A half-hour performance ensued, with a full complement of Chinese instruments, and players dressed in vivid courtly garb. It was a sound at once rigid and brilliant, an eruption of color within a strict frame. It was the most memorable musical experience of my trip. At the time, I didn’t quite know what I was hearing, but I later surmised that I had witnessed a re-creation of zhonghe shaoyue, the music that resounded at the temple while the emperor made sacrifices to heaven. Confucius, in the Analects, calls it yayue—“elegant music”—and laments that the people are discarding it in favor of vernacular tunes. Now it is a ghost in a phantom museum.
I walked for another hour in the temple park, thrilled to have had an aural glimpse of what I took to be the true music of China. A little later, I heard a plaintive melody coming from an unseen bamboo flute, and went in search of its source, hoping for another revelation. After making my way through a maze of pine trees, I found a man of great age and haunted visage, playing the theme from The Godfather.
10
SONG OF THE EARTH
THE ARCTIC SOUND OF JOHN LUTHER ADAMS
When I took a trip to the Alaskan interior several years ago, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did manage to hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen—kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that idea, the mechanism of The Place translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into a luminous field of electronic sound.
The Place occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series-the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the highest registers-the Aurora Bells-are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.
The first day I was there, The Place was subdued, though it still cast a spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic episodes in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left The Place, and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.
When I arrived the next day, just before noon, The Place was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, The Place, if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27 Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds coming down from speakers on the ceiling. On the website of the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, aurora activity was rated 5 on a scale from 0 to 9, or “active.” This was sufficient to make the Aurora Bells come alive. The Day and Night Choirs follow the equal-tempered tuning used by most Western instruments, but the Bells are filtered through a different harmonic prism, one determined by various series of prime numbers. I had the impression of a carillon ringing miles above the earth.
On the two days I visited The Place, various tourists came and went. Some, armed with cameras and guidebooks, stood against the back wall, looking alarmed, and left quickly. Others were entranced. One young woman assumed a yoga position and meditated; she took The Place to be a specimen of ambient music, the kind of thing you can bliss out to, and she wasn’t entirely mistaken. At the same time, it is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams’s long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are playing out at independent tempos.
The Place, which opened on the spring equinox in 2006, confirmed
Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. He has become a standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form. Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular—by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of Nixon in China and the most widely performed of living American composers—and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, “It’s not nothing.”
Above all, Adams strives to create musical counterparts to the geography, ecology, and native culture of Alaska, where he moved in 1978, when he was twenty-five. He does this not merely by giving his compositions evocative titles—his catalogue includes Earth and the Great Weather, In the White Silence, Strange and Sacred Noise, Dark Waves—but by literally anchoring the work in the landscapes that have inspired it.
“My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place,” Adams said of his installation. “I have a vivid memory of flying out of Alaska early one morning on my way to Oberlin, where I taught for a couple of fall semesters. It was a glorious early-fall day. Winter was coming in. I love winter, and I didn’t want to go. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mount Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place—an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. Over the next fifteen minutes, I found myself furiously sketching, and when I came up for air I realized, There it is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real-that I couldn’t fake this, that nothing could be recorded. It had to have the ring of truth.