Excerpt from "Rhapsody in Red"

The National Grand Theater currently under construction on the south side of Tiananmen Square has been the focus of much media attention. Supporters have likened it to water pearl and have hailed it as a much-needed world-class performing arts venue.

Detractors have compared it to a duck egg and complained about its cost. But, love it or hate it, the theatre is a powerful symbol of the growing importance that classical music plays in the national and Chinese capital's cultural life. 

"Chinese musicians are so important on world stages, and classical music is such a regular part of cultural life in urban China, that it is easy to forget that classical music is a foreign import."

Beijing has close to a dozen professional orchestras; two conservatories; innumerable music departments and piano schools; a growing number of first-rate concert halls; and a major music festival, the Beijing International Music Festival held here each autumn.

Echoing the growth of classical music in China is the growing importance of Chinese musicians in the global classical music world.  Many of the top performers and composers of classical music now come from China, and it is hard to imagine a major conservatory or orchestra anywhere in the United States or Europe that does not have at least one Chinese musician. 

Chinese musicians are so important on world stages, and classical music is such a regular part of cultural life in urban China, that it is easy to forget that classical music is a foreign import.  It made its first appearance in Beijing back in 1601 when the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci presented an early keyboard instrument called a clavichord to the hermetic Ming Emperor Wan Li.  The clavichord excited Wan Li's interest because it had a keyboard - unlike any Chinese instruments of the time -- and he ordered four eunuchs to take clavichord lessons from the Jesuits and to perform a recital for him.

"Relations with the West began to deteriorate after the reign of Qianlong, and the era of European music lessons in the Forbidden City came to a close."

Wanli did not maintain his interest in Western music, but the two longest reigning emperors of the Qing Dynasty - Kangxi and Qianlong - took music lessons with European priests and commissioned important treatises on Western music.  Kangxi learned how to play the Daoist prayer song "Pu Yen Zhou" on the harpsichord; Qianlong created an ensemble of 18 eunuch musicians who performed Western music while wearing Western-style suits, shoes and wigs!

Relations with the West began to deteriorate after the reign of Qianlong, and the era of European music lessons in the Forbidden City came to a close.

Instead, Western music was spread through the growing number of missionaries who came to China and by the foreigners who settled in the so-called "treaty ports" that China was forced to create after the first Opium War in 1839.  European residents of Shanghai created the Shanghai Public Band - a predecessor of today's Shanghai Symphony Orchestra - in 1879. A few years later, Robert Hart, the legendary Briton who served as inspector-general of the Imperial Chinese Customs from 1863 until 1908, created his own band in Beijing.

"Instead, Western music was spread through the growing number of missionaries who came to China and by the foreigners who settled in the so-called "treaty ports" that China was forced to create after the first Opium War in 1839."

These bands soon drew the attention of reform-minded Chinese who recognized their usefulness in boosting military morale. The great intellectual Liang Qichao, for example, argued that Chinese music had a "lethargic" quality and called for military reforms that would include Western music.  Two of China's most powerful generals, Zhang Zhidong and Yuan Shikai, were of the same opinion, and they both hired German advisers to help them form Western-style bands. On one occasion the bands of Robert Hart and Yuan Shikai were invited to perform in a sort of friendly battle-of-the-bands at the Summer Palace.  Their performances took place between the acts of a European circus in a turnip field that had been harvested just for the occasion - with the Empress Dowager Cixi herself pulling up the first turnip. 

This gradual integration of Western music and instruments into Chinese culture was given a big boost by the school-song movement that began around 1903.

It was initiated by young Chinese who had gone to Japan to study and been impressed by the role that didactic songs - generally set to Western music -- played in the Japanese school system. With the help of the Qing Dynasty government, which was undertaking one of its many belated attempts at reform, these returned students began to spread the school-song practice in China.

While most students just sang their songs and got on with their lives, some were motivated to form choral groups, to learn instruments or to study more about Western music.  This trend accelerated when the May 4th era started in 1919, and ever greater numbers of youths, who were eager to learn from the West, became motivated to listen to Western music, to play Western instruments, and even to explore ways that both could be adapted to China's culture.

"Echoing the growth of classical music in China is the growing importance of Chinese musicians in the global classical music world."     

It was in the spirit of the May 4th Movement that Cai Yuanpei, the much-esteemed intellectual and president of Peking University, founded the Institute for the Promotion and Practice of Music at Peking University in 1921 and hired the German-trained composer and musicologist Xiao Youmei to manage it.

Unfortunately, Beijing was then under the control of warlords and did not prove to be fertile ground for music education. So Xiao moved to Shanghai and founded the nation's first conservatory in 1927. Many of the professors he hired were members of the all-foreign Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, which was led by the talented and tempestuous Italian conductor Mario Paci. 

Shanghai, with a conservatory and a professional orchestra, soon gained a reputation as the classical music centre of China, and aspiring musicians from around the country flocked to it.  Among them were Xian Xinghai, who Chairman Mao would later christen "the people's composer"; Nie Er, the composer of "The March of the Volunteers," which was later chosen as China's national anthem; and Li Delun, the future conductor of China's Central Philharmonic Society. 

With so many talented Chinese and foreign musicians gathered in Shanghai in the 1930s, the city's orchestra gained a reputation as "the best orchestra in the Far East" and some of its foreign residents began to call it a "musical Paris of the East."  But when Japanese aggression in China culminated in war in 1937, many of the city's foreign musicians left for safer shores, and many of its Chinese musicians moved inland to lend their talents to defeating the Japanese. The course of Western music in China was permanently altered.

Sheila Melvin is a music journalist and a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. Jingdong Cai is a conductor and Director of Orchestral Studies at Stanford University.

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Rhapsody in Red by Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai is published by Algora Publishing (ISBN 0-87586-179-2) and can be ordered online at Amazon.com at: http://www.amazon.com, or Barnes & Noble at: http://www.bn.com. Bulk orders may be placed with Algora Publishing at: http://algora.com/, or Ingram Book Group at: http://ingrambookgroup.com/