China Embraces Classics

In the opening scenes of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie's 2002 film about rural "re-education" during China's "Cultural Revolution" (1966-76), there is an exchange between the two "bourgeois" city boys who are the subject of the film, one of whom plays the violin, and the mountain-village chief who is in charge of their re-education and some bystanders. When the village chief orders their luggage to be checked, something is found they have difficulty explaining. It went something like this:

Bystander: What's this chief?

Chief: It's silly… save it for the fire.

First boy: It's not a toy. It's a musical instrument.

Chief: What's it for? To amuse bourgeois kids? Into the fire!

Second boy: It's not a toy, chief. It's a musical instrument. It's called a violin. It has a pretty sound.

First boy: You could play a Mozart sonata for the chief?

Chief: What's a sonata?

Second boy: It's a…mountain song.

Chief: What's it called?

Second boy: It's not really a song…uh…Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.

Chief (who, mollified, corrects the boy): Mozart is Always Thinking of Chairman Mao. I like that.

The boy lifts the violin to his chin and begins to play. A sound of almost unbearable longing soon fills the peasant dwelling; the rarefied music of 18th century Europe. The music flows free of the small, crowded space, slips beneath the eaves of the roof, and past the faces of barefoot children with faces pressed against windows, peering out. It swells above the ancient mountain lake on whose water's edge the building rests. As the sonata ends, the sounds of crickets and braying animals merge with the silence that follows, and the countryside is forever altered.

This enchanting and sometimes ironic film portrays an isolated mountain community that is untouched by foreign influences until the Cultural Revolution brings it Mozart in the 1970s.

But as a sharp and engaging new book about Western classical music in China tells it, the truth is a little less poetic.

Rhapsody in Red by Sheila Melvin and Jingdong Cai gives a detailed and engrossing account of how the Western classical music tradition came to play a central role in China's social and political life over the past 400 years.

Challenging the perception that Western classical music in China was a passively received import of both imperialism and the Christian missions, it argues that, in many ways and over the course of a very turbulent history, China made Western classical music its own.

With the depth and rigour of an academic text and the visual clarity and easy page-turning of a social history, Rhapsody in Red is a book rich with intimate knowledge of China's musical history.

It tells of how a gift of a clavichord by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in 1601, which was meant to bestow grace and elicit favour at the imperial court of Emperor Wan Li, began a long association of Western classical music with international diplomacy and religion. In the 20th century this association was extended to include modernity.

As a successful tool of diplomacy, classical music was adopted during the 17th and 18th centuries by the imperial courts of an empire that held itself apart from fashionable European society. It became a focus in those courts where leaders were eager to educate themselves about that other world.

In the course of hundreds of years of learning, it would develop musical traditions and texts it could claim as its own.

In 1741, the educated and energetic Qing Dynasty Emperor Qianlong reawakened classical music at court by seeking out Jesuits to teach the imperial eunuchs to sing and play in the Western style. With music teachers installed in the palace, the emperor soon had an 18-person European singing chorus and music ensemble performing at his court.

Gifts from many years of Western diplomatic missions put at his disposal a rich variety of Western classical musical instruments. The ensemble included ten violins, two cellos, one bass and eight woodwind instruments, a mandolin, guitar and harpsichord!

In the early 1700s, Emperor Qianlong's grandfather Emperor Kangxi had commissioned The True Meaning of Pitch Temperament, an encyclopaedia of music theory that devoted a third of its length to Western music theory.

There is no disputing the contribution Christian missions made to musical education. Throughout the 19^th century missionaries taught singing, music theory and instruments such as the piano and the violin. By 1915, Protestant mission schools in China had slightly fewer than 170,000 students.

From the early days of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra in 1919 to the revolutionary fervour of the communist base in Yan'an in the 1930s, Western classical music was indistinguishable from the sounds of a country struggling to come of age in an industrial, nationally defined modern world.

The first public performance of Xian Xinghai's Yellow River Canata, written for both Western and Chinese instruments, orchestras, choruses and soloists, captured the spirit of revolutionary communism when it premiered in Yan'an in 1939. The premier was attended by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and an audience of students, peasants, soldiers, foreign journalists and dignitaries.

When the Yan'an Central Orchestra arrived in Beijing on the eve of liberation nearly a decade later, after taking two years to get there, it did so because of Chairman Mao's insistence that the orchestra motivate peasants to participate in the revolution, not simply play symphonies.

The school song movement, ironically imported from Japan by overseas Chinese students, harnessed national motivation through song from the turn of the century. Adopting a 19th century American educational system that used songs to successfully impart correct ideas of morality, nationhood and behaviour, the movement set to music -- often Western and classical in origin -- the rallying cries of the country's struggle.

The Cultural Revolution was a dark period in China's history when art, literature and music, subordinated to the cause of achieving proletarian aims, was used to target the objects of its shifting gaze. Music - including classical music - came under fire for being connected to an imperial past or to a Western "bourgeois" understanding.  

A roll call of musicians and performers suffered during this time, including Mario Paci, He Luting, Li Delun, Tan Shuzen and Ma Sicong.

The years that followed the Cultural Revolution brought a gradual loosening of restrictions in the arts. Effective sponsorship by the government ensured that classical music would continue to be central to the social, political and cultural life of the nation. It was used, as it almost always was, to support diplomacy and the country's modernization and growth.

By the 1970s there was hardly a village left in China that hadn't had some experience of Western classical music -- even those remote and sparsely populated villages in the mountains near the clouds.

Today, China is a world where children and parents carry violin and flute cases on the streets and in the subways; a world where taxi drivers and construction workers, waitresses and street musicians sing folk songs with Western classical melodies; a world where advertisers use classical music in television advertising; where the voice of a loud basso profundo can be heard singing Western opera in a traditional Chinese bath house.

Early on a summer evening, walking leisurely through a hutong, a lone male voice can be heard singing something like a lullaby; a violin practice ends with a head hitting a pillow and sleep.

Rhapsody in Red is for sale at the Chinese Culture Club and Beijing Bookworm.