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Xian Xinghai Yellow River Piano Concerto

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Xian Xinghai Yellow River Piano Concerto KSKS55 Xian Xinghai Yellow River Piano Concerto Alan Charlton is a by Alan Charlton freelance composer and has written numerous lesson resources for Music Teacher, including INTRODUCTION material on the IB set work El Salón México. Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Piano Concerto is one of the two prescribed set works for IB HL and SL for exami- nation in 2013–14, the other being Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. As the Yellow River Piano Concerto is a new set work – and quite unusual in style and structure – this resource builds on Music Teacher’s April 2012 resource, offering more detailed analysis of the work. Knowledge and understanding of the set works is tested in Section A of paper 1 (the listening paper). In this section, three questions are set, from which students have to answer question 3, comparing the two set works, and then choose from either question 1 or 2, which are on the respective individual works. Students have clean scores of the set works with them in the examination. Each question carries 20 marks, so the set works account for 40 out of 140 total marks for the paper at higher level and 40 out of 120 marks for standard level. IB set works tend to be selected to highlight links between different musical traditions and Xian’s Yellow River Piano Concerto, with its strong Chinese and European influences and inseparable relationship to Chinese political and social concerns, is no exception. This resource will therefore approach the work from this angle, with the musical elements being explained in this context. BACKGROUND China in the Twentieth Century As with its neighbour Russia, China experienced great political and social upheaval in the twentieth century that encompassed war, revolution, famine and political repression. Since the 17th century, China had been ruled by the Qing dynasty, whose vast empire included Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan. Its power had gradu- ally waned, with Western powers gaining considerable influence over trade in the nineteenth century. Further weakened by the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901, China became a republic in 1911-12 with the abdication of the last emperor. This gave rise to a period of instability during which rival groups sought to wrestle power from Sun Yat-sen’s leadership, with the Communist Party in particular becoming a growing threat. In 1925, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, gained control, initiating a civil war with the com- munists. Then in 1931, Japan invaded, starting a gradual occupation that lasted until the end of the Second World War. During this period, Mao Zedong became the Communist leader (1934), establishing a base in Shaanxi Province, before temporarily uniting with the Kuomintang against the Japanese in 1937. After Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War, (1945), the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists resumed, with Mao declaring victory in 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China. As Stalin had in Russia, he established an authoritarian regime and set about forcibly redistributing land from landlords to people’s communes, and developing huge infrastructure projects. The first such economic drive (the “Great Leap Forward”) in 1958 had to be abandoned after it resulted in famine and millions of deaths. Political isola- tion, followed with growing threats from both Russia and the West. Concerned that China was increasingly becoming ruled by an intellectual elite, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution of 1966, in which intellectuals were moved out of the cities into the countryside to be ‘re-educated’ by the peasants, or in other words forced to carry out hard manual labour. This period saw the closure of schools amid a climate of fear presided over by the violent groups of young men known as Red Guards. The worst period of violence ended in 1969, but 1 Music Teacher June 2012 the Cultural Revolution lasted until Mao’s death in 1976. After this, Deng Xiaoping assumed control, bringing with it a less repressive climate and opening the country up to the outside world. Although human rights con- tinued to be a considerable issue, the Tiannamen Square massacre of 1989 caused worldwide outrage. Since then, China has continued to become more open, prosperous and Westernised and is now one of the leading economies and superpowers in the world. Why is the above history lesson important? Because the Yellow River Piano Concerto is inseparably linked to political events in China, in an even more extreme way than Shostakovich’s works were affected by Stalinist Russia. Unlike most western classical works, it was composed by no fewer than five people over a period of over 32 years. The original version (Yellow River Cantata) was completed by Xian Xinghai in 1939, when China was at war with Japan and still divided by civil war between the Communists and Nationalists. This music was then reworked into the Yellow River Piano Concerto (the IB set work) by four musicians in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution, when Western culture was considered dangerous and subservience to Chairman Mao and his entourage was paramount. The influences of these two different periods can be seen very clearly in the music, so a knowledge of them is essential to it. MUSIC AND POLITICS IN 20TH CENTUry CHINA The political upheaval affected the performance and creation of music in a profound way. Two main strands of music were involved, which went in and out of favour according to the politics of the time. Populist music: mass songs, e.g. political songs, workers’ songs Cosmopolitan music: Western classical music, e.g. Beethoven, Chopin Chinese musicians were torn between the last two of these, not least because the Communist Party frequently changed its stance on the type of music it wanted to promote. At the time of the composition of the Yellow River Cantata (1939), the Communists tolerated cosmopolitan musicians; musicians who were influenced by Western music and who sought to emulate Western compositional techniques into their own music. However, they also wanted to use music as a means of educating the masses in Communist ideals and ultimately to at- tract their support. In order for this to happen, it had to be popular. Xian Xinghai, composer of the Yellow River Cantata was widely regarded as the Chinese composer who most successfully combined these two strands. When the Communists came to power in 1949, the role of music changed from being a revolutionary force to a means of maintaining order and establishing loyalty towards the regime. The party wanted to create a new type of music to mark the beginning of a new era and help to define China as a great nation; traditional music had two many associations with China’s past to be used. Initially, it was thought that the answer lay in combining political music (Communist songs, marches and so on) with a Western classical music-influence technique (i.e. western-style harmonisation, instrumentation, forms, etc.). Cosmopolitan musicians, who had perhaps been musically educated in Europe, were best placed to write this sort of music as they were the most skilled. Additionally in the 1950s, cosmopolitan Chinese musi- cians such as the pianist Fou T’song received great acclaim outside of China for their performances, and were thus valued by the regime, since they enhanced its influence and prestige. At the time, China had close ties with its communist neighbour Russia, so its artistic influence extended to Eastern Block countries such as Poland, where Fou T’song won third prize in the Chopin Competition. However, China fell out with Russia, and this, coupled with Mao Zedong’s movements of Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, led to an anti-cosmopolitan climate and the repression of intellectuals, who includ- ed musicians. During the Cultural Revolution, the heads of China’s musical conservatoires were persecuted by the Red Guards, with for instance the Shanghai Conservatoire president He Luting, known for his championing Music Teacher June 2012 2 of European music and criticism of mass song, having his home ransacked and being publicly beaten by Red Guards. Traditional Chinese music was also attacked. This led to a musical problem: as European music was effectively banned, many Chinese musicians were out of work, having nothing to play. There was thus a need to create new works that could be performed but which also conformed to the ideals of the regime: for a while the only works that had official approval were ‘model operas’ combining Beijing opera singing and western instruments, such as Yin Chengzong’s ‘The Red Lan- tern’. It was to provide additional party-approved music that the Yellow River Piano Concerto came into being. THE GENESIS OF YELLOW RIVER PIANO CONCERTO Xian Xinghai (1905 –1945) Xian Xinghai composed the original incarnation of the work, called Yellow River Cantata. This was a choral work in eight movements composed from 1938 –9 during the war with Japan while Xinghai was based at the Communist headquarters in Yan’an. Xian had humble origins, being born into a family of boat people. After being introduced to western music and taking up the clarinet and violin during his time at a school attached to Lignan University, he went on to study at various Chinese music conservatoires, including Canton, Beijing and Shanghai. In 1930 he travelled to Paris, where he studied with the French composers Paul Dukas (Composer of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’) and Vincent D’Indy. Living in extreme poverty, he nevertheless encountered the impressionistic musical style of Debussy and others, which must have influenced his approach to orchestration and harmonisation. Returning to China in 1935, where he became involved in the Communist-backed ‘National Salvation Song Movement’, whose purpose was to create mass songs with political messages, designed to politicise the workers and thus gather support and influence for the Communists.
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