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Great productions – Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Music by composers whose youth fell during Mao’s “cultural revolution” will open the 14th Ludwig van Beethoven Easter Festival, on Sunday, 21st March under Long Yu. The most influential composers in today’s China are those who were born in the 1950s. Take Tan Dun for instance, who became famous as the author of the soundtracks for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Hero and the opera First Emperor. Merging the traditions of China and the West became their hallmark.
The hardened generation
They were called the generation of ’78, as it was in that year, after the decade of the brutal “cultural revolution” in China (1966–1976), that the Central Conservatory was opened in Beijing. As many as 18,000 candidates applied for the 100 places at the school. Small wonder, then, that the first intake was loaded with great talents and determination. During the Cultural Revolution, attempts were made to turn these people into Maoist “cogs in the machine”. They were to work, think in slogans, and hate Western imperialism, Soviet revisionism, and Chinese feudalism. The only standard available to them was the revolutionary opera, developed by Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong. They went through exile from cities to the distant provinces, and to so-called “reeducation” in the days of the revolution; Tan Dun had to clean latrines in Chinese villages. As he dreamt of music, he learned the local songs. At the entrance exam to the conservatory he admitted that he had no idea who Mozart was, yet he knew 500 folk pieces by heart.
Chinese rhythm, Western scale
Much like Chinese filmmakers and men of letters of the same generation, the young composers took a liking to folklore. The native official tradition, on the other hand, remained partially alien to them due to the fact that, towards the end of the 1950s, the communists simplified Chinese writing. In this way, ancient treaties in musicology ceased to be comprehensible for successive generations, who knew only the new way of writing. While in exile, they were in touch with folk. For the boys from families of the intelligentsia, this was a touching experience. They assumed Béla Bartók as their artistic master, as he transformed authentic Hungarian folk in an innovative manner. As mature composers, they would reach for folk melodies and ancient Chinese instruments, such as the erhu, a two-stringed violin, the pipa – four-stringed mandolin, and the guqin – the three-thousand-year-old folk plucked instrument. Born in 1953 and settled in the United States, Zhou Long is also inspired by the music that he came to know while in exile in the interior of Mongolia. Composers also tried to use traditional Asian metre, which assumes that the accent in each bar falls on the last and not on the first note; the Asian rhythm, for example, makes an appearance in Guo Wenjing’s piece entitled The Hanging Coffins (on the Cliffs of Sichuan). Interestingly, even though the traditional Chinese scale is pentatonic, the generation of ’78 rarely reached for it, as the composers were inspired by the Western system of major-minor. Strung between the East and the West, they draw from the treasuries of the two heritages, writing eagerly for European instruments, including great symphonic orchestras.
Composers-provocateurs
Members of the generation of ’78 include Qigang Chen and Xiaogang Ye, whose works (To the West End and The Song of the Earth) we shall hear at the festival. Qigang Chen (b. 1951) saw with his very eyes how his colleagues from the musical school killed the “landowners” and “bourgeois pigs” at the beginning of the revolution. Later, for three years he was re-educated in the military barracks near Beijing. After studies in China, he left for a scholarship in France, where he became naturalised and lives to this day. He received his education in Paris under the guidance of Olivier Messiaen, who was fascinated by the music of exotic countries. His work To the West End is inspired by Zou Xikou, a folk song from north-western China. One of the meanings of “Xikou” is “the western pass”: one of the few in the Great Wall, through which you could go forth into the steppes of Mongolia and for trading expeditions to Xinjiang. Today 54 years old, Xiaogang Ye saw a furious crowd drag his father from home. His father was later sentenced to work in the fields, and the future composer to work on the rice fields and in the factory. In the 1980s, he left for the United States, where he studied at the Eastman School of Music. Today he is the Dean of the Composing Department at the Beijing Conservatory. The number of his compositions includes the Great Wall Symphony (2002). The Chinese know him as the author of the music to the documentary series entitled Rise of the Great Powers, provocative towards the government. His The Song of the Earth was composed to the order of the China Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005, and makes a conscious reference to Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler, who based his six-movement vocal and instrumental work of 1908 on the old Chinese poetry from the ninth and eighth centuries BC (with lyrics in the German translation). Ye preserved the structure of Mahler’s work and used lyrics by the same poets.
Konrad Godlewski, Beethoven Magazine, No. 4
The hardened generation
They were called the generation of ’78, as it was in that year, after the decade of the brutal “cultural revolution” in China (1966–1976), that the Central Conservatory was opened in Beijing. As many as 18,000 candidates applied for the 100 places at the school. Small wonder, then, that the first intake was loaded with great talents and determination. During the Cultural Revolution, attempts were made to turn these people into Maoist “cogs in the machine”. They were to work, think in slogans, and hate Western imperialism, Soviet revisionism, and Chinese feudalism. The only standard available to them was the revolutionary opera, developed by Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong. They went through exile from cities to the distant provinces, and to so-called “reeducation” in the days of the revolution; Tan Dun had to clean latrines in Chinese villages. As he dreamt of music, he learned the local songs. At the entrance exam to the conservatory he admitted that he had no idea who Mozart was, yet he knew 500 folk pieces by heart.
Chinese rhythm, Western scale
Much like Chinese filmmakers and men of letters of the same generation, the young composers took a liking to folklore. The native official tradition, on the other hand, remained partially alien to them due to the fact that, towards the end of the 1950s, the communists simplified Chinese writing. In this way, ancient treaties in musicology ceased to be comprehensible for successive generations, who knew only the new way of writing. While in exile, they were in touch with folk. For the boys from families of the intelligentsia, this was a touching experience. They assumed Béla Bartók as their artistic master, as he transformed authentic Hungarian folk in an innovative manner. As mature composers, they would reach for folk melodies and ancient Chinese instruments, such as the erhu, a two-stringed violin, the pipa – four-stringed mandolin, and the guqin – the three-thousand-year-old folk plucked instrument. Born in 1953 and settled in the United States, Zhou Long is also inspired by the music that he came to know while in exile in the interior of Mongolia. Composers also tried to use traditional Asian metre, which assumes that the accent in each bar falls on the last and not on the first note; the Asian rhythm, for example, makes an appearance in Guo Wenjing’s piece entitled The Hanging Coffins (on the Cliffs of Sichuan). Interestingly, even though the traditional Chinese scale is pentatonic, the generation of ’78 rarely reached for it, as the composers were inspired by the Western system of major-minor. Strung between the East and the West, they draw from the treasuries of the two heritages, writing eagerly for European instruments, including great symphonic orchestras.
Composers-provocateurs
Members of the generation of ’78 include Qigang Chen and Xiaogang Ye, whose works (To the West End and The Song of the Earth) we shall hear at the festival. Qigang Chen (b. 1951) saw with his very eyes how his colleagues from the musical school killed the “landowners” and “bourgeois pigs” at the beginning of the revolution. Later, for three years he was re-educated in the military barracks near Beijing. After studies in China, he left for a scholarship in France, where he became naturalised and lives to this day. He received his education in Paris under the guidance of Olivier Messiaen, who was fascinated by the music of exotic countries. His work To the West End is inspired by Zou Xikou, a folk song from north-western China. One of the meanings of “Xikou” is “the western pass”: one of the few in the Great Wall, through which you could go forth into the steppes of Mongolia and for trading expeditions to Xinjiang. Today 54 years old, Xiaogang Ye saw a furious crowd drag his father from home. His father was later sentenced to work in the fields, and the future composer to work on the rice fields and in the factory. In the 1980s, he left for the United States, where he studied at the Eastman School of Music. Today he is the Dean of the Composing Department at the Beijing Conservatory. The number of his compositions includes the Great Wall Symphony (2002). The Chinese know him as the author of the music to the documentary series entitled Rise of the Great Powers, provocative towards the government. His The Song of the Earth was composed to the order of the China Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005, and makes a conscious reference to Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler, who based his six-movement vocal and instrumental work of 1908 on the old Chinese poetry from the ninth and eighth centuries BC (with lyrics in the German translation). Ye preserved the structure of Mahler’s work and used lyrics by the same poets.
Konrad Godlewski, Beethoven Magazine, No. 4
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