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TRADEWINDS FROM By Joseph Horowitz Artistic Advisor, Pacific Symphony Orchestra

“World music” is a central cultural phenomenon of our time. More than ever before, we listen to the music of other places – places, like Peru or India or Indonesia, once inconceivably far away. The bins at Tower Records bulge with sounds from Africa and Asia. And American classical draw eagerly on the timbres and techniques of Ghanaian drumming, or Balinese gamelan, or Indian ragas. For ethnomusicologists, Western music’s broad interface with rest of music is the most important and representative development of the last quarter century – a development in which Americans have taken a leading role. In fact, among the most exciting mid- generation composers in the today are Chinese-Americans forging a synthesis between Asian folk traditions and Western modernism. The ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman remarks that “musical borders can be crossed, but the value of crossing them depends on the degree to which you respect them.” Some hybrids are exploitative or slapdash. The music we hear on this year’s American Composers Festival is neither. Our four festival composers – Chen Yi, , Bright Sheng, and Tan Dun – explore a remarkable kaleidoscope of colorful soundworlds, by turns subtly aromatic and starkly dramatic. Of our featured festival performers, Karen Han and Min Xiao-Fen are dazzling exponents of the erhu and – the former bowed, the latter plucked.. Our third soloist, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, is the most internationally celebrated of all Chinese –American musicians, and an inspired proponent of crossing musical borders.

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It is now 15 years since the premiere of Bright Sheng’s H’un, in , sent notice that China would have something vital to say to classical musicians of the West. Two things were instantly apparent about its , who had left China xx years before: his mastery of the orchestra, its colors, textures, and sonorities; and the urgency of his message. At the age of 33, he had achieved what many a seasoned composer never learns, and cannot be taught in any school: musical expression as a seeming act of necessity. Here was something Bright Sheng had to say, supported by the means to say it. In the years following, other Chinese of the same generation made their mark in the United States, including Chen Yi and Zhou Long – with Bright Sheng, our resident composers for this season’s Pacific Symphony American Composers Festival. A fourth Chinese, Tan Dun, has also become a dominant creative presence on the American scene. Abroad – in Europe, in Australia, in China itself – there are dozens more Chinese composers of consequence. This international explosion of Chinese concert music, while wholly unpredicted, is not incongruous. Rather, it is marvelously explicable. China’s seismic political and cultural upheavals have quite obviously produced an earthquake of creativity. www.josephhorowitz.com

All the composers share the same incredible story. Raised in westernized city homes, they were forced onto the countryside during the , with its witch hunts and youth gangs. In rural China, they became immersed in folk and traditional customs they might otherwise never have known. Later, they studied composition in the United States and Europe, and forged a stylistic synthesis merging Chinese and Western musical means and aesthetics. Because they were born in the 1950s, they directly experienced the destruction of China’s educational system. Intent on maintaining monolithic power, Mao Zedong and his followers had declared war on professionals and intellectuals. Chinese high schools and colleges were simply eliminated. Millions of young urban Chinese were forced to leave school at 15. Otherwise unemployable, they were sent to remote regions for “re-education.” For Bright Sheng, the Cultural Revolution meant relocating to the Tibetan border and joining a music and dance troupe. For Chen Yi, it meant carrying 100 pounds of stone and mud up a mountain 22 times a day – and, later, becoming concertmaster of a touring Peking Opera company. For Zhou Long, it meant driving a tractor at a state farm – and subsequently playing the accordion for folk songs and dances. The wrenching impact of Bright Sheng’s H’un, subtitled “In Memoriam 1966-76,” is a product of these years of indoctrination – a harrowing political crucible that fired an urgency of artistic vocation unknown in societies less turbulent. Chen Yi speaks of learning to cope with anger, fear, and humiliation – and of learning, as well, “to hope, to forgive, to live optimistically, strongly, and independently.” How must the resourcefulness and stamina of these young Chinese have been tested? Chen Yi played her violin for soldiers and farmers; as only revolutionary songs were allowed, she applied to her renditions the double stops and harmonics she had absorbed playing Paganini as a young virtuoso. “I felt a big release being able to exercise some creativity in making something out of these circumstances.” Bright Sheng discovered himself the best pianist in province. “There was no one to teach me. I would watch and listen when I visited other places, and learned to grasp quickly whatever might help me as a musician. This becomes a very good habit. One is always one’s own best teacher.” However incidentally, these sophisticated offspring of the Cultural Revolution were prepared for many things, not the least of which were musical. In Qinghai, Bright Sheng discovered “a special and beautiful type of music, simultaneously savage and sensual.” In Mongolia, Zhou Long discovered himself among herdsmen “who rode horses and drank wine made with horse milk.” The herdsman also sang far into the night. Chen Yi says: “Frankly, it was not until the Cultural Revolution that I found my roots, my motherland, and really appreciated the simple people of the earth. I found my own language when I realized that my mother tongue really is the same as what the farmers speak. For this reason, I believe that I really need to find a way to express myself through a fusion of Eastern and Western musics.” When Igor Stravinsky died in 1971, Pierre Boulez, commented in a eulogy that he envied Stravinsky’s generation of composers: challenged to fashion a new language to succeed Romanticism, they knew the task at hand. Today’s Chinese, in vigorous transit, tumbling into view, are likewise beneficiaries of an historic opportunity. They know what they need to do. www.josephhorowitz.com

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If today’s Chinese composers recognize a model, it is not Bach or Beethoven but Hungary’s Bela Bartok (1881-1945), who spent a good part of his professional life collecting and analyzing peasant tunes. During his most intensive period of field research, before 1920, he transcribed nearly 10,000 of them. The studios of famous musicians have typically displayed pictures and busts of other important musicians. Bartok’s workplace contained a single portrait of Beethoven amid peasant embroideries, pottery, instruments, and furnishings. Bartok not only insisted on the significance of peasant music; he insisted that it be experienced at first hand: “In order to really feel the vitality of this music, one must, so to speak, have lived it – and this is only possible when one comes to know it through direct contact with the peasants.” Bartok admired individual peasants for their organic relationship to nature, feeling, and expression. With his string quartets, a savage intensity invaded the concert room – and also dissonant and percussive effects evoking the harsh twang and intonation of peasant fiddling. Even more significant was that the rustic dances and songs he transcribed, and the scales and rhythms he analyzed, furnished him with musical materials that challenged and refreshed the cultivated style he had inherited. A national Hungarian music was born in which an exotic indigenous culture merged with an elite cosmopolitan tradition. The music of Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long embodies a comparable fusion. They by no means comprise the first significant generation of Chinese concert composers; but they are the first to attain international attention and influence. The transplantation of Western to China is in fact about a century old. (See the TIMELINE on this page.) had an orchestra beginning in 1907; for decades, its conductor was an Italian. The Shanghai Conservatory was founded in the 1920s. Xian Xhinghau, born in 1905, was a prominent Chinese composer who studied in Paris and later joined Mao in Yenan, where he wrote mass songs for singing teams. Ying Chengzong, born in 1941, co-composed the Yellow River Concerto – for a time during the Cultural Revolution, the only concert work Chinese audiences were permitted to hear. The touring London Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestras in 1968 were signposts in the gradual return of European music. By the time the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, a considerable body of concert music had been amassed by Chinese composers. Taken as a whole, it sounds western and Romantic; the “Chinese” ingredients are an exotic topping. With the exception of Chou Wen Chung, who left China in the 1940s (and later taught Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long at ), no Chinese composer influential in the pre-Cultural Revolutionary decades could remotely be considered a modernist. This was the context in which the remote of China was discovered, recorded, and transcribed by the young exiles of the Cultural Revolution. It revealed the possibility of a concert style less colonialist, more truly “Chinese” than anything composed by their conservatory teachers in Shanghai or Beijing. Though the regional variety is daunting, certain generalizations about Chinese folk music may be attempted. Its gongs and cymbals, plucked lutes and zithers are distinctive. It ranges high in pitch but never very low. Instead of pursuing anything like the harmony and www.josephhorowitz.com polyphony of European music, it subtly explores timbre: tone color. And – following Chinese speech, in which tonal inflections affect meaning -- Chinese tunes subtly manipulate pitch, sliding in between notes that are separately voiced by keyed Western instruments. These traits, then, became hallmarks of a new musical hybrid in which even the instruments – including , zhangs, and erhus alongside violins, flutes, and clarinets – are part Western, part Chinese. A work such as Zhou Long’s Tales from the Cave (which we hear on March 7), a gripping musical kaleidoscope, will sound “Asian” to American ears for its sighing speech-song and taut drum and cymbal patterns; but a Chinese audience might well find its harmonic idiom equally foreign. As Bright Sheng observes: “What makes Bartok great is not simply his use of Hungarian folk tunes – many composers had done that already -- but that he managed to retain the beauty and savagery of these folk elements while blending them to the art of Western classical music. So the listener realizes that both are equally great, that one doesn’t borrow from the other.”

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Though Bartok is more than half a century dead, his example has never seemed more timely. The contemporary postmodern moment minimizes distinctions between high and popular art, and globalizes cultures once distinct. Think of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, who learned more from African drumming and Indian ragas than from Beethoven or Wagner; or of , from last season’s American Composers Festival, deeply versed in ragtime and reggae. Bartok dedicated much of his professional life to rural field work. The influential Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee lived for years in Indonesia, studying Balinese gamelan music – an inheritance passed on to Glass and Benjamin Britten, among others. Today’s Chinese, too, were not mere interlopers in new places. Zhou Long: “The herdsmen I lived with in Mongolia were really honest, really passionate. I was touched by their lifestyle, their character, their music. Afterward, in other rural areas, I even began to accept Chinese opera. Previously, I had been influenced by my mother, a singer for whom opera meant Verdi and Puccini.” Chen Yi: “I really listened to the voices of simple farmers, and I realized that they spoke in my native language, which could be transposed directly into Chinese music. It was quite different from the Western musical language that I had been learning since I was three years old. It was my mother tongue.” A young African American tenor of my acquaintance, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, used to sing in New York subway stations – not for the income, but for the opportunity to interact directly with an everyday audience. He now recommends that all Manhattan vocal students sing in the subways. For the composers from China, this is a lesson they do not need to learn.

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“Tradewinds from China” opens with a chamber orchestra concert on March 1 featuring the galvanizing music that put our composers on the map: Bright Sheng’s H’un. Further exploring the Cultural Revolution, we also hear two revolutionary songs, testimony, and commentary from our resident festival scholar, Wang Feng. And we hear two www.josephhorowitz.com extraordinary virtuosos. The double-bass player DaXun Zhang joins Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony in one of the most popular of all Chinese folk tunes: Moon Reflected in the Erquun Pool. And Min Xiao-fen (who, like Bright Sheng, will share personal memories of the Cultural Revolution) is our soloist in Tan Dun’s Pipa Concerto. Our March 7 concert, in Founders Hall, is an intimate, interactive program of commentary, discussion, and music in live performance – ranging from folk songs arranged by Chen Yi (with the chorus of the Orange County High School of the Performing Arts) to chamber works by Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, and Zhou Long. The evening, also sampling Chinese works from the 1930s and 190xxs, will survey the rapid evolution of Chinese concert music over the past half century. And, with a slide presentation by Judy Ho of UC- Irvine, we’ll survey parallel developments in Chinese painting: a fascinating second perspective on the impact of Chinese political upheaval on art. The main orchestral program, given March 10 and 11, features premieres of two commissioned compositions: Yo-Yo Ma in a new cello concerto by Chen Yi, and a new version -- with solo parts for pipa, erhu, violin, and cello -- of one of the most aromatic and vividly descriptive of all Chinese concert works: Zhou Long’s Poems from Tang. Chen Yi’s YangKo, and the California premiere? of a major work by Bright Sheng, China Dreams, complete the program. “Tradewinds” continues the Pacific Symphony’s festival explorations of major currents in the history of American classical music. We began, in 2000, by commemorating the centenary of Aaron Copland’s birth, paying special attention to his contributions as a film composer. Our 2001 festival, “Dvorak in America,” celebrated the too-little-known early achievements of American composers before World War I. Last season’s festival centered on an American musical landmark from 19xx: William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – which, with its amazing stylistic range, introduced the larger topic of American musical pluralism in the late twentieth century. “Tradewinds from the East” – the first in a series of three American Composers Festivals that will explore the impact of non-European music on Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, and other Americans -- pursues the same topic as embodied by a new generation of American composers from China: American citizens who retain strong ties to their Chinese homeland, and whose odyssey from East to West is inherently poly-cultural. These are artists whose life experience has quite necessarily made them advocates of cultural exchange. “I got a great education from New York City,” Chen Yi reflects. “It was the richest cultural scene I have ever known. I heard steel drums in subway stations, jazz bands in public parks, Mexican songs on the streets. I watched MTV and went to galleries and disco bars and Thanksgiving Day parades.” In an essay, “My Biggest Challenge,” Bright Sheng has written: “I used to think that, ideally, one should be born in one place and live and work in that same place. Now I don’t think it’s terribly important. I’ve decided to accept that. Now I actually enjoy the fact that I can live in, and enjoy and appreciate two different cultures. Because I have lived in both, I cherish them that much more.” Yo-Yo Ma, elsewhere in these pages, reflects on the significance of “trans-national influences,” on the “rubbing action of different cultures coming together” as a core component of the creative process. Whatever purely musical influence Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long may exert in the United States, their trans-national orientation, compassing our ever shrinking world, is part of what makes them timely and important. www.josephhorowitz.com

WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND TWENTIETH CENTURY CHINA: A SELECTIVE CHRONOLOGY

A concert orchestra was founded in Shanghai in 1907. Beginning in 1917, its conductor was an Italian, Mario Paci.

In 1927, the Shanghai Conservatory was founded.

From 1934 to 1937, the noted Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin lived and taught in Shanghai and Beijing. He married a Chinese pianist and took a great interest in Chinese folk music. In 1934 he donated a prize for the best short piano piece “with Chinese characteristics.” The winner, an influential exercise in assimilating Western compositional techniques, was He Luting’s Bamboo Flute Tune by the Buffalo Boy (which we hear at the March 7 Interplay).

Xian Xinghai, born in 1905, was the considered by many the “first genuine Chinese composer.” He studied with Paul Dukas at the Paris Conservatory, later joined Mao in Yenan and wrote mass songs and the .

Pianist Fou T’song, born in 1933, was the first Chinese instrumentalist to attain prominence in the west. His father was a cosmopolitan modernizer, contemptuous of Chinese folk culture. He took third prize in the 1955 Chopin competition in Warsaw. He sought political asylum in London in 1959. His parents committed suicide in 1966. He first returned to China in 1979.

Yin Chengzong, born in 1941, co-composed the Yellow River Concerto in 1969 and performed it throughout China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The concerto embodied Jian Qing’s plan for combining Chinese culture with Western “scientific” techniques of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration; she also advocated modernizing Chinese instruments and protecting Western instruments, including the piano.

In 1973 the London Philharmonic and performed in China – the first time European music was heard there since 1968. The same year, the Shanghai and Beijing Conservatories reopened. Beethoven was rehabilitated beginning in 1977.

(Source: Pianos and Politics in China by Richard Curt Kraus, 1989)