SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra –New Chinese Music :  Music by Wang Ning, Zhao Jiping, Law Wing-fai, Sui Lijun and Peng Xiuwe, Feng Shaoxian (sanxian and yueqin), Wong Chi-ching (pipa) Yan Huichang (conductor), Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London 14.3.2008 (AO)


The Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra brought to London a concert that contradicted western clichés about Chinese music.  As a cultural event it was far more significant than most people realise  and while no doubt there will be snide clichés about restaurants and kung fu movies, that’s all that some people know about China.  It’s not overtly racist, but ill-informed.  Sadly, it springs from a failure to recognise that other cultures exist beyond one’s own experience.  Chinese music has been around for thousands of years. This concert was a unique opportunity to hear music from a very different milieu, but needed to be appreciated on its own terms, with some basic understanding.

This certainly isn’t tacky “fusion” music.  Most Chinese grow up rooted in western music : in Hong Kong schools, music is part of the curriculum and the arts are fairly well subsidised. Chinese culture has always valued learning and self-improvement, so a good musical education is a normal part of life.  Children grow up thinking in terms of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin.  Many play instruments, especially the piano.  Chinese musicians are naturally multi-cultural, in a way people raised in a single environment find difficult to understand.

The Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra is a sophisticated, upmarket ensemble which has pioneered the surge in new music for Chinese instruments.  Modern Chinese music is the result of 200 years of change  - which is not quite so surprising when we remember that the western symphonic tradition itself isn’t particularly ancient. Before the late 18^th century, ensembles in the west were small and events were private.  It’s only with the growth of the urban middle class that the  music explosion of the 19^th century takes place. So it’s the same in China, where “art” music was essentially either chamber music, popular folk music or ceremonial. The modern Chinese orchestra is therefore no more alien to tradition than a modern western orchestra is to, say, Bach. It simply allows for a greater range of possibilities, inspiring new ideas and new composition.

Modern western composers, such as Britten and Messiaen, were fascinated by the new sound worlds open to them through gamelan and Japanese music. Had they but known Chinese instruments! Just as western music expanded the range of its instruments, so has there been the development of Chinese instruments and it was a joy to hear different kinds of sheng, ranging from a tiny, metallic version to a huge bass with reeds a metre high. Each is distinctive, allowing for huge variation.  The sheng is basically a mouth blown bundle of reeds but it can produce sounds like a hand held organ, or a bassoon or even pan-pipes. Similarly, this was a great opportunity to appreciate the difference between types of bowed instruments, such as the erhu, gaohu, zhonghu and gehu. Some are delicate as an early music violin, others with the range and depth of a double bass. Each instrument can be extended by different tuning and playing techniques. The palette is so diverse that it requires real expertise, both in terms of playing and orchestration.  Why wasn’t London’s new music community out in force for this performance ? They could have learned so much. Fortunately, there is hope yet, as The Royal Academy of Music is currently running an exhibition showing how the sheng influenced western music.

Music played an important role in the modernization of China. New, through-composed music (as opposed to folk tradition) was written from the beginning of the 20^th century, and was well established long before 1949. Chinese musicians often studied in Europe and were well aware of western musical values. New music for Chinese instruments was a statement of faith in the re-energising of Chinese culture. It certainly wasn’t ersatz but a conscious attempt to create new music for a new era. New music for Chinese instruments has a significant heritage of its own, even if it’s not known outside China. This is the background to the upsurge in new Chinese music pioneered by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra from the 1970’s. This is proper art music, created by serious and sophisticated musicians, even if it seems alien to western ears.

Wang Ning’s Festivities was a 2006 commission by the HKCO. Wang is one of the revered figures in Chinese music and this shows why. In some ways, it’s recognisably “traditional” because it describes folk celebrations, yet this conceals innovative ideas like a magnificent long cadenza for solo suona. Part-trumpet, part-oboe, the suona is traditionally used in public music, hence the title of the piece. Here, though, it’s a virtuoso triumph, the soloist demonstrating the instrument’s astonishing range. It’s a cadenza because it also allows the soloist to improvise flexibly in the spirit of the composition, giving the piece great freedom of spirit.  Chinese music, like western music only a few centuries ago, wasn’t notated, so improvisation figures strongly.  Wang, (b. 1954) is at once linking past and future.  Perhaps western music will regain this kind of inventive personality. It’s also interesting because it combines several different regional styles. I was thrilled to hear the “southern” guzheng, for example, providing a lovely counterbalance to the northern suona.

In Zhao Jiping’s Tracing our roots with the old Pagoda tree the massed strings shimmered together as they might in a western orchestra : only this time the cadences were different.

Law Wing-fai’s A Thousand Brushstrokes is another 2006 HKCO commission.  Law (b 1949) was raised in Hong Kong, so he is a genuinely cosmopolitan personality, for whom modern Chinese music is totally natural.  He writes in the western idiom, too.  He’s interested in the dynamics of fluid movement, which is a characteristic of Chinese music where form is created by changes of volume, rhythm, direction and tempo.  A Thousand Brushstrokes refers to calligraphy, which is a much greater art form in China than it is in the west. In Chinese calligraphy, what’s valued isn’t rigid uniformity, but freedom and fluidity, the movements of the brush created swiftly, after a period of contemplation. Each of the four sections of this piece builds on a  single mood, flowing like an uninterrupted brushstroke, lifting off suddenly at the end. It’s a striking piece for pipa, played beautifully by the HKCO’s pipa principal, Wong Chi-ching.

Sui Lijun’s Song of the Black Earth, written in 1988, is altogether darker, referring to the harsh life of peasants in north-east China. The composer encountered this life first hand, when he was sent for “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution.  Although the piece is a complex cantata featuring sanxian and voice, it’s also scored using farming implements, like paddles and threshing baskets. This is no mere gimmick because in rural communities, people made do with what they had to hand.  Sui creates music that evokes suffering and hardship, yet also gives a sense of the powerful connection between the farmers and their solid, black soil. Like so much Chinese music, it’s based on steady, percussive rhythm, countered by free-flowing solo instrumentation.  It was written especially for this soloist, Feng Shaoxian, master of the sanxian and yueqin.  This was about as definitive a performance of the piece as we’ll hear in Europe. The sanxian has a dry, percussive voice, like a banjo, but Feng coaxes slides and tremelos so it speaks eloquently.  Then he launched into the vocal part, a stylised declamation, rather like Sprechgesang, with distinctive trills, guttural gasps and clicking noises. It’s not simply speech.  This again is an ancient style, used in story-telling and folk opera. This piece is something of a classic. There’s a recording which is worth tracking down. Feng added an encore in which he played the yueqin, another of his specialities, with a more resonant, lyrical tone.

Peng Xiuwen (1931-96) was a respected conductor who did much to promote modern Chinese orchestras, so it’s fitting that this concert paid him tribute by ending with his The Terracotta Warriors Fantasia. No-one knows what Qin dynasty music sounded like, even though some of the instruments survive, so Peng conjures up what it might have felt like to have been one of those warriors, exiled from their homelands to serve a brutal Empire. Naturally it’s a big piece, scored for the whole large orchestra, complete with gongs, cymbals and fanfares on suona. Peng uses sound images to evoke the huge distances the soldiers would have crossed, sometimes marching, sometimes on horses. If this sounds, at times, like Bartòk, it’s understandable since both composers were describing great, desolate plains.  Distance and barren frontiers feature a lot in the Chinese imagination. More subtly, he focuses on simple sounds like the ocarina solo, and the simple, plaintive plucking of the quzheng and pipa, both instruments often associated with women and Chinese chamber music. This symbolises the life the soldiers left behind.

In some ways, the best was yet to come, as the conductor, Yan Huichang, proceeded to give the London audience a basic masterclass in the fundamentals of Chinese music.  He instructed the audience to shout “Hu!” or “Ha!” on different strokes, then conducted a tricky, unpredictable rhythm which demonstrated just how much Chinese music depends on an instinctive grasp of changing direction and tempi. It also reflected its improvisatory, informal freedom. Then audience sang along with the orchestra in a reprise of the last movement in The Song of the Black Earth. It evoked quite vividly the communal character of Chinese music, so very different from the often pompous sterility that we’ve become accustomed to assume as the norm in western performance. This was so refreshing !  Part of the reason western classical music is saddled with a negative image is because audiences are expected to live up to certain “standards” which don’t have anything to do with the vitality of music itself.  Yet descriptions of concert behaviour in the past show that solemnity wasn’t always the norm.  That’s yet another lesson to learn from the Chinese approach. Good music doesn’t need to be heard in tense, pretentious situations.  It’s not music that excludes sections of the potential audience but artificial social conventions.

Because classical music audiences in China are enormous, it’s fascinating to think what this new century may bring in music terms. Since the western orchestral tradition is far less ancient than one assumes, that’s all the more reason that western musicians and audiences take heed of what’s happening in China.

Anne Ozorio


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