BEIJING - The bright-red lettering on the banner, in the form of a half-crescent, proclaims "1949-2007." Decorated mostly with Chinese writing, the banner announces the reason for the festive concert: It will commemorate the 58th anniversary of Mao Tse-tung's seizure of power and the declaration of the Chinese Republic. Hundreds of singers and musicians are already seated on the stage, facing the conductor: There is a choir and a large symphony orchestra that, on second glance, appears to be quite different from its Western counterparts. Most of its musicians are holding authentic Chinese musical instruments: erhu violins, whose resonance box is a small cylinder; long dizi flutes; sheng reed instruments; trumpets with short pipes pointing downward; pipas, similar to lutes, which are plucked; suonas, like Western oboes; the guzheng, a zither-like instrument; and percussion instruments. In the center, spoiling this traditional picture, is an elegant grand piano.
This hybrid ensemble, with its Western appearance and Chinese content, performs music that is consonant with its character: symphonic music of immense dimensions - a piano concerto suffused with pathos that is sometimes reminiscent of the classic work on which it is based, Frederic Chopin's Concerto No. 2. Nevertheless, the orchestra does not forget the Chinese pentatonic (five-tone) scale, while trying to create a local musical idiom and simultaneously satisfying two conflicting forces, tradition and innovation.
According to American composer Kenneth Fields, this is only one aspect of Chinese concert music today. Fields is professor of composition at the China Electronic Music Center (CEMC) in Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music, and associate professor in the department of digital art and design at Peking University's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Most of the music he hears is clearly Western. The conservatory's students follow a Western curriculum - learning harmony, solfege, orchestration, counterpoint; the only influence they evoke from their tradition is a tendency toward melodic style. They cannot connect with Western music's multivocal complexities, says Fields.
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I ask him whether China's academic world today welcomes innovative art. The welcome, he replies, is lukewarm at his university, where people don't feel comfortable with digital art, while in the conservatory and the plastic arts academy, students are more open-minded. Field's contribution is primarily the merging of computers, communication and art; indeed, an important aspect of digital art is communication.
Tight censorship
Communication is subject to tight censorship in China and Internet users confront the totalitarian regime's censorship and power. Phrases like "Falun Gong" and "Tibet" are inaccessible via a search engine; if you type in "Tiananmen Square" on Google here, you will be directed to sites dealing with the 1989 massacre, but will be unable to enter them.
Nevertheless, for a course he gives at the conservatory, Fields has set up a social network. All of his students have their own Web page, and he uses his cell phone to show me their students blogs - in English. In the forum they have created, nothing is taboo. He says this is China's only social network and he was able to set it up because it was part of the curriculum.
CEMC reflects the great interest in Beijing in innovative music, Fields observes: Contemporary music is performed in the Chinese capital, which boasts, for example, the Beijing New Music Ensemble, with Chinese and Western musicians who perform 20th-century classics by John Cage, John Zorn and Steve Reich. And there is the ongoing creative work of his department's students and alumni. The conservatory is the best of China's few such institutions (there are nine), which is why only the brightest are admitted.
What kind of music do his students write, I ask. Until recently, the preferred style was in the spirit of the mid-20th century - not reflecting the influence of Arnold Schoenberg so much as that of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Chinese composer Tan Dun exerts a powerful impact on students, who especially admire him because he is a graduate of the conservatory.
It is widely assumed that China is the best hope for classical Western music because of the millions of young people studying performance in its music schools. Pianist Lang Lang is a striking example of this, although Fields believes that if China is truly the best hope in this realm, the process must be protracted: Classical music has already passed one phase by reaching America from Europe, but Chinese culture is a different matter and has a long history of opposition to innovation. Fields admits the Chinese government supports classical Western music, rather than traditional Chinese music: It is more sensible today for a Chinese music student to learn violin and join one of the local symphony orchestras that are springing up, than to specialize in authentic Chinese music, which is dying out and had a slight revival only thanks to Western musicians who take an interest in it. Nonetheless, notes Field, classical orchestras and musicians still have a long way to go.
Walls of peace
A visit to the Street of Musical Instruments in Beijing, where breathtaking authentic instruments are displayed, only reinforces Field's assessment. The owner of one shop tells me that business has begun to pick up. The reason is far from encouraging, however: Many foreigners have begun taking an interest in traditional Chinese music; some 10 percent of his customers are foreigners.
"Many years ago, a woman named Meng Jiang lived in a small village in China" - that is the opening of the Chinese opera "Lady Meng Jiang," based on a folk legend. It is the story of a brave woman whose husband is taken from her one day by order of the emperor to work as a forced laborer on the construction of China's Great Wall, the fate of most Chinese men at one time. Years pass and Meng Jiang receives no word from her husband. She sets out on a long journey in search of him. After months she reaches the Great Wall, where she bursts into tears. Her tears melt the stones; the wall crumbles and collapses. To this day, visitors can supposedly see the devastation her tears caused, which workmen could not repair.
Meng Jiang is a true heroine, not just the protagonist of an opera, remarks one Chinese colleague, a Ph.D. student, while standing atop the Great Wall. The reason is that, according to a folk saying, you cannot call yourself a hero until you have been to the wall. As he talks, he points to this indescribable structure that stretches across the entire horizon, meandering along mountain tops.
On this rainy day, clouds envelope the wall. My colleague informs me that it took 2,000 years to build and countless people died during its construction. No one has ever been able to precisely measure its length, estimated at more than 6,000 kilometers; the Chinese government, he tells me, has spent two years trying to map it. Why was it built, I ask. Laughing, he replies that walls are never built for wartime because they are useless - anything built by mortal hands can also be stormed by mortals. Walls are for peacetime, to give an illusion of security.
On Beijing's streets, government shops already offer souvenirs of the 2008 Olympic Games, which are just around the corner and have already caused this mighty nation to adopt a dizzying pace of activity. The media are proud of the forthcoming Olympics, already offering extensive coverage of preparations for it, although they do not, naturally, report on the stiff resistance to the games from opposition groups and human rights activists.
China's government-run English-language television station, CCTV, is reminiscent of Romanian TV under Nicolae Ceausescu: interviews with happy farmers and reports on economic growth, successful reforms in the education system and artists putting China on the map - without a word about the regime's opponents and the growing AIDS epidemic, or about the thousands still being sent to "re-education through labor" camps.
China's recent week-long national holiday celebrations were marked by raids by security forces, which can be seen as symbolizing the stifling of dissent that can be expected next year: Social activists were attacked in the middle of the night, and police arrested opponents of the Olympics, including Christians and others, who protested the injustices inflicted on them. Many of those arrested have since disappeared, as reported recently by the South China Morning Post, published in Hong Kong.
Bulldozers and building sites are everywhere, attesting to Beijing's efforts to spruce itself up for the Olympics. Although the Beijing municipality is renovating residential areas, it despairs over the hutongs - the maze of lanes and alleys overshadowed by the huge main thoroughfares. Each such lane is a self-contained neighborhood, with shops selling a myriad of items, barbershops and tiny eating establishments whose clients eat outside, on muddy paths strewn with garbage. These eateries are generally located in the front of apartments on the verge of collapse. Visitors will find rooms with TV sets and PCs inside. Everything has been purchased dirt cheap; from every possible direction you hear sounds of laughter and music, and echoes from people playing mah-jongg, the Chinese version of dominoes.
Only one place is desolate
If you negotiate this maze and proceed southward, you will come upon a central Beijing attraction, the Temple of Heaven Park, where imperial ceremonies were once held. During the recent national holiday, Chinese vacationers filled its temples, spacious gardens and souvenir shops. Only one place is desolate: the museum of the Divine Music Administration. It was formerly responsible for singing and musical accompaniment during prayers and in religious ceremonies.
The museum was renovated to look like the original, built in the 15th century, and it presents the history of the Divine Music Administration up to the oppressive Japanese occupation during World War II, when the Japanese seized control of the place, converting it into a factory for chemical weapons that were used against Chinese resistance fighters. In the museum visitors can hear explanations about Chinese music during various eras. Instruments are displayed, arranged by the type of sound they make and by the material used to construct them. They thus symbolize the bond linking music and humanity to nature: wood, stone, leather, clay, bamboo and the materials used for strings. All these are employed to construct drums, bells, flutes, string instruments and percussion instruments.
Why do visitors not frequent this site? The usherette softly playing one of the stringed instruments on exhibit conjectures that the special surcharge (equivalent to NIS 5) for entry to the Temple of Heaven keeps visitors away from the museum. Granted, I admit, some people might be deterred, but would that keep everyone away? She reluctantly concedes that traditional Chinese music does not interest many people today.
Outside the ancient bells begin chiming: Someone is practicing, perhaps for some ceremony. Suddenly, the tune seems familiar. After a few seconds, I discern the opening phrase of "Oh, Susanna," which, like many other melodies around the world, is actually based on the same musical scale. Apparently, the anonymous performer has also chosen to momentarily ignore the tradition of his cultural heritage.
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