CHINA: Strong Western interest has led to a renaissance for traditional Chinese music, which has a rich heritage, writes Mark Godfreyin Beijing
Classically trained musician Zhisheng Zhang has become a source of hurt pride in China after being pictured in the New York Times busking in a Times Square subway station. A familiar figure to those who had been to his concerts in Beijing, he was shown sitting on a fold-out stool on one of the platforms of the bustling underground transport hub. Zhisheng is the 10th-generation descendant of a Chinese court musician. His music draws passers-by, even at rush-hour, and he usually collects fifty dollars a day for his tunes, Chinese traditional favourites played on a mouth organ called a sheng. Playing since childhood for poorly funded state musical troupes, Zhisheng left his family and the dwindling audience of Beijing's salons for Manhattan.
Their journeys to the West have garnered Chinese musicians like Zhisheng Zhang an audience. These wandering minstrels have also created an audience for Chinese music in the West. Inspired, fans of the Chinese canon and musicologists are now coming to China to study the nation's vast ethnic musical heritage and to buy traditional musical instruments. Despite a comparative shortage of places for foreigners to study traditional music in Chinese cities, some have made the trip and have even studied the Chinese language to make the learning process easier.
Foreigners are good customers, says instruments salesman Deng Guo who runs a musical instrument shop on the fourth floor of Yashow, a popular indoor market in Beijing's Sanlitun area. His top seller is the erhu, China's two-stringed violin. "Many people buy them for ornamentation. They also buy the zheng [Chinese zither] for this purpose. They're oriental looking and easy to carry home." Local musical instruments are separated into eight classes, explains Deng, according to the materials from which they are made: gourd (sheng); bamboo (pan pipes); wood (chu, a trough-shaped percussion instrument); silk (various types of zither, with silk strings); clay (globular flute); metal (bell); stone (sonorous stone); and skin (drum).
Most visitors to his shop are hardly aware of the complexity of each instrument: there are four variants of the erhu, each of them unique in tone. The better known pan pipes sell well, so too the di-zi (flute) and xiou (recorder). The ruan, or Chinese guitar, is a harder sell, says Deng. Tourists spend a lot of money in his shop but Deng's best customers, he says, are expats who return regularly to purchase instruments for collections and for study.
Not everyone plays Chinese traditional instruments in traditional settings. Several well-known Chinese rock groups built a career out of integrating traditional instruments into a hard-rock sound. Foreigners buy for similar reasons. "I looked for something that maybe I can incorporate into the rock group I play in back home," said Brazilian tourist Hans Cavalera, who recently bought a bangu, a bell-mouthed drum built on a wooden frame which is used in Peking opera.
The drum's frame is constructed of thick wedges of hard wood glued together in a circle, wrapped with a metal band. "It produces an awesome sound and even looks so interesting on stage," said the drummer, who spent RMB400 (€40) on the drum in a shop in Beijing's Lulichang district.
Chinese music has produced an enormous variety of percussion instruments, ranging from large barrel drums to castanet-like clappers. An elegant-looking percussion instrument, the muyu, caught the eye of Briton Paul George, an English teacher at a public middle school in Fengtai district. "The muyu is carved from a block of wood into the shape of a fish. Then its interior is hollowed out. I walked into a music shop down in Xuanwu district one Saturday. I was browsing, I wasn't interested in anything really. But when I saw it I couldn't resist buying the muyu. It looked amazing, and the price was good. I paid 300 yuan for it and I was determined to get my value's worth. Luckily the music teacher at my school knew something about the muyu and taught me the rudiments."
George persevered, despite having to conduct his lessons through a local English teacher at the school. For those serious about learning Chinese musical instruments, the Central Conservatory of Music in central Beijing offers short-term programmes which normally start at the beginning of winter and summer vacations, and last from two to 16 weeks. Located on the site of the former Prince Chun's residence, the conservatory expects students to be in class 18-20 hours a week. Individual lessons are offered in more than a dozen instruments, including the guqin, guzheng, pipa and erhu. Classes are given in Chinese music history, Chinese drama and Chinese folk songs. Teaching foreigners has become a handy earner for the conservatory: tuition fees come to RMB7000 (€700) for four weeks, the equivalent of a whole term for local students, and international students live in on-site dorms.
Foreign students at the Central Conservatory will learn that Chinese music can be traced back as far as the third millennium BC. The music and philosophy of China have always been inseparably bound: music was believed to have cosmological and ethical connotations comparable to those associated with Greek music. China's traditional music is built on a specific harmonic system which is very different from that of Western music. "I was playing the erhu for ages but I couldn't get the proper tone. It didn't sound Chinese," said Paul George.
The Spirit of China and Ireland Concert at Beijing's National Library Concert Hall in late May was proof of how disparate but potent a combination of the Chinese and Western musical styles can be. A group of Chinese and Irish musicians played a specially commissioned new piece of contemporary music from Prof Jia Daqun of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music composed for Irish and Chinese traditional instruments and voices. Jia Daqun, a painter by training and a respected composer of contemporary music, imported the principles of form, line and colour from Chinese calligraphy into his musical compositions. And so it sounded. Incredibly ambitious, the piece was stunning in its melding of the picks, flicks and gongs of instruments native to the two countries.
Zhisheng Zhang, meanwhile, is still in New York, mixing traditional Chinese tunes with pieces from Western operas on his mouth organ in the New York subway stations. Ironically, US pop music has saturated the Chinese music market to the extent that trained musicians like him have a tough time competing for audiences back home. Zhisheng's hope, if he returns home, may lie in the very Westerners whose musical imports include his native canon.