Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Monday, May 13, 2013
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
China Preparing to Crack Down on Microblogs and Cultural Expression
NYT
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
2011 Hong Kong Opera Censored By Beijing? Opera Canceled Three Weeks Before Debut
SLATE via the Financial Times
Nixing In China
A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing.
Posted Sunday, Oct. 9, 2011, at 9:32 AM ET
For months, public structures in Hong Kong have been draped with dreary sepia-coloured banners, some as large as a small building, publicising a new opera about Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, the architect of the revolution of 1911 that brought down the Manchu dynasty. But the Hong Kong premiere on October 13 of a modern opera about a historical figure had created scarcely a musical ripple in the city, whose attention was turned towards upcoming concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and a sold-out recital by the pianist Murray Perahia.
Then, on September 30, the Beijing premiere of Dr Sun Yat-sen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was abruptly called off for “logistical reasons”, which pitchforked the issue on to the front pages of Hong Kong newspapers amid a plethora of conspiracy theories. The reasons mooted for the cancellation run from reported complaints by the National Council of Performing Arts in Beijing that the music was either not ready or “too modern” to be performed, to speculation that the love story of Sun and his third wife, Soong Ching-ling, who was 26 years his junior, was too racy for Beijing’s censors. Inevitably, there have also been plenty of hypotheses put forward in this technicoloured soap opera that the political content worried the cultural commissars in Beijing. Although Sun is feted in both Communist China and democratic Taiwan, his life is a minefield of sensitivities for Communist Chinese government censors – not least his support for pan-Asian co-operation with Japan, long seen as an enemy of China, his request in 1923 to the US and European governments to take over China’s provincial capitals to modernise them and his attempt towards the end of his life to curry favour with brutal Chinese warlords.
Read the full story HERE.
Nixing In China
A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing.
Posted Sunday, Oct. 9, 2011, at 9:32 AM ET
For months, public structures in Hong Kong have been draped with dreary sepia-coloured banners, some as large as a small building, publicising a new opera about Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, the architect of the revolution of 1911 that brought down the Manchu dynasty. But the Hong Kong premiere on October 13 of a modern opera about a historical figure had created scarcely a musical ripple in the city, whose attention was turned towards upcoming concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and a sold-out recital by the pianist Murray Perahia.
Then, on September 30, the Beijing premiere of Dr Sun Yat-sen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was abruptly called off for “logistical reasons”, which pitchforked the issue on to the front pages of Hong Kong newspapers amid a plethora of conspiracy theories. The reasons mooted for the cancellation run from reported complaints by the National Council of Performing Arts in Beijing that the music was either not ready or “too modern” to be performed, to speculation that the love story of Sun and his third wife, Soong Ching-ling, who was 26 years his junior, was too racy for Beijing’s censors. Inevitably, there have also been plenty of hypotheses put forward in this technicoloured soap opera that the political content worried the cultural commissars in Beijing. Although Sun is feted in both Communist China and democratic Taiwan, his life is a minefield of sensitivities for Communist Chinese government censors – not least his support for pan-Asian co-operation with Japan, long seen as an enemy of China, his request in 1923 to the US and European governments to take over China’s provincial capitals to modernise them and his attempt towards the end of his life to curry favour with brutal Chinese warlords.
Read the full story HERE.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Formerly Imprisoned Artist Ai Weiwei: The City: Beijing
The City: Beijing
Ai Weiwei finds China’s capital is a prison where people go mad.
by Ai Weiwei | August 28, 2011 10:0 AM EDT
Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.
Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.
Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.
Beijing China
For a man imprisoned and conditionally released, neither neighbors nor strangers nor Beijing’s officials nor courts can be trusted.
The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.
To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.
I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.
None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.
There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.
My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.
The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
August 28, 2011 10:0am
Ai Weiwei finds China’s capital is a prison where people go mad.
by Ai Weiwei | August 28, 2011 10:0 AM EDT
Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.
Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.
Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.
Beijing China
For a man imprisoned and conditionally released, neither neighbors nor strangers nor Beijing’s officials nor courts can be trusted.
The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.
To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.
I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.
None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.
There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.
My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.
The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
August 28, 2011 10:0am
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Beijing Opera, a Historical Treasure in Fragile Condition
NYT
August 29, 2010
Beijing Opera, a Historical Treasure in Fragile Condition
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BEIJING — “Watch out for that sword,” the rehearsal director shouted.
“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Lots of weapons were on stage at the Beijing Opera Academy of China here the other day. Teenage future opera stars were armed with lances, spears, swords and daggers as they carried out an elaborately choreographed, intricate, stylized and acrobatic fight scene, all to the clash of cymbals, drums, wooden clappers and a substantial orchestra of Chinese string and woodwind instruments.
Here and there in this ever more steel and glass city where old neighborhoods disappear from one month to the next, there is a glimpse of what the previous city was like — quiet, tree-shaded streets with small storefronts and bicycles, a locust tree leaning over a wall that hides an old courtyard house.
This modest and slightly shabby theater in the academy exists in a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city that has not been entirely torn down and rebuilt yet. The academy occupies the former site of the Beijing Dance Academy and does not seem to have been physically upgraded or modernized. It still has dingy corridors, ancient washrooms, rusting bunk beds (six to a room), a single fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling and an ancient radiator in front of the window.
And, of course, nothing could more suggest old Beijing than Beijing opera, with its masks, its stylized movements, its atonal, strangely modern arias, its fantastically intricate scenes of battle, and, probably most important, its audience of connoisseurs who know when to shout a throaty “hao!” — good! — after an especially well-executed movement or song.
The worry though is that, like the city’s old neighborhoods, Beijing opera could fall victim to China’s rampant commercialism and modernization. If it did, it would be a bit like Italy consigning Verdi or Donizetti to a few small halls in Milan and Rome, or to those folkloric shows for tourists who mostly do not know much about what they are seeing.
“Objectively speaking, right now there are some difficulties,” said Qiao Cuirong, a senior professor at the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, summing up the current state of Beijing opera. “People are interested in money and modernity and Western things, so our own culture has lost something.”
It would be premature to say that Beijing opera has turned into an antique relic, but clearly it is not what it was in the late 18th to early 20th century, when it was northern China’s most popular theatrical entertainment. The big national spectacles of recent years have included the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony, which, while drawing on China’s rich tradition, did not echo the traditional opera. There was also the lavish production of Puccini’s “Turandot,” directed by the celebrated filmmaker Zhang Yimou. That production was a Western import that was once banned in this country because it was deemed insulting to China.
Beijing opera certainly was not helped by the fact that during the turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, the form was deemed feudalistic and reactionary. But then again so was just about every other art form, including Western music and modern dance, both of which have since made vigorous recoveries.
But Beijing opera faces particular difficulties, aside from the aging and fading away of a knowledgeable audience.
“The more you know about Beijing opera, the more you love it,” said Liu Hua, a former performer and now a teacher at the school. “The problem is that it takes a lot to know it, and fewer and fewer people have the time or the inclination.”
Also, Beijing opera is an especially demanding form, both to perform and to witness.
“It takes a very long time to study, at least 8 to 10 years just to get in the door as a performer,” Mr. Qiao said. “And the whole thing is very slow. It’s not like a movie, and right now people want things to be fast. That’s why we’re losing the young crowd.”
Still, there seems, perhaps paradoxically, to be no shortage of students, as all those highly talented and professional-looking teenagers on the school stage the other day indicated. Young people start their training at age 11, going to one of the several Beijing opera academies around the country aimed at producing professional performers.
“Children really like it,” Mr. Qiao said. “Another reason is that some parents love it, and they want their children to learn it, even if they’re not thinking about having them become professionals.”
The early training lasts for six demanding, rigorous years. Given that Beijing opera is fading in popularity, especially among the younger generations, it seems strange that so many young people would want to go through it.
“It’s such good training that the students can go in almost any direction even if they don’t end up in the opera,” Ms. Liu said.
“A lot of our students end up on television or in the movies,” she added. “There are a lot of martial arts movies, and our students are all good at martial arts. Some of them become popular singers or actors. They’re not worried about their future.”
The Chinese Ministry of Culture, anxious about the form’s survival, lavishly subsidizes it, renovating theaters, commissioning new works, paying substantial salaries to the bearers of the tradition, like Mr. Qiao.
This year, for the first time ever, the state-run Chinese Central Television has been holding a national Beijing opera student competition, with the finals to be televised in October. During the preliminaries in Beijing recently, 24 contestants, each with a supporting cast of extremely acrobatic soldiers and others, took the stage in an awesome display of skill and talent.
The emphasis was on what a nonconnoisseur might think of as the best parts — the battle and martial arts scenes, with performers in astonishing costumes leaping and somersaulting in midair, twirling, jabbing, tossing and juggling an arsenal of weapons and batons, singing at the same time.
And there was the knowledgeable audience — theater entry was free, which is perhaps itself a sign of the form’s fragile standing with the public — shouting approval and applauding enthusiastically. “We teachers are doing our job, and the government’s Culture Ministry is supporting us,” Mr. Qiao said. “Everybody’s doing their best to keep this as a cultural treasure, whether people go to see it or not.”
August 29, 2010
Beijing Opera, a Historical Treasure in Fragile Condition
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BEIJING — “Watch out for that sword,” the rehearsal director shouted.
“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Lots of weapons were on stage at the Beijing Opera Academy of China here the other day. Teenage future opera stars were armed with lances, spears, swords and daggers as they carried out an elaborately choreographed, intricate, stylized and acrobatic fight scene, all to the clash of cymbals, drums, wooden clappers and a substantial orchestra of Chinese string and woodwind instruments.
Here and there in this ever more steel and glass city where old neighborhoods disappear from one month to the next, there is a glimpse of what the previous city was like — quiet, tree-shaded streets with small storefronts and bicycles, a locust tree leaning over a wall that hides an old courtyard house.
This modest and slightly shabby theater in the academy exists in a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city that has not been entirely torn down and rebuilt yet. The academy occupies the former site of the Beijing Dance Academy and does not seem to have been physically upgraded or modernized. It still has dingy corridors, ancient washrooms, rusting bunk beds (six to a room), a single fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling and an ancient radiator in front of the window.
And, of course, nothing could more suggest old Beijing than Beijing opera, with its masks, its stylized movements, its atonal, strangely modern arias, its fantastically intricate scenes of battle, and, probably most important, its audience of connoisseurs who know when to shout a throaty “hao!” — good! — after an especially well-executed movement or song.
The worry though is that, like the city’s old neighborhoods, Beijing opera could fall victim to China’s rampant commercialism and modernization. If it did, it would be a bit like Italy consigning Verdi or Donizetti to a few small halls in Milan and Rome, or to those folkloric shows for tourists who mostly do not know much about what they are seeing.
“Objectively speaking, right now there are some difficulties,” said Qiao Cuirong, a senior professor at the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, summing up the current state of Beijing opera. “People are interested in money and modernity and Western things, so our own culture has lost something.”
It would be premature to say that Beijing opera has turned into an antique relic, but clearly it is not what it was in the late 18th to early 20th century, when it was northern China’s most popular theatrical entertainment. The big national spectacles of recent years have included the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony, which, while drawing on China’s rich tradition, did not echo the traditional opera. There was also the lavish production of Puccini’s “Turandot,” directed by the celebrated filmmaker Zhang Yimou. That production was a Western import that was once banned in this country because it was deemed insulting to China.
Beijing opera certainly was not helped by the fact that during the turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, the form was deemed feudalistic and reactionary. But then again so was just about every other art form, including Western music and modern dance, both of which have since made vigorous recoveries.
But Beijing opera faces particular difficulties, aside from the aging and fading away of a knowledgeable audience.
“The more you know about Beijing opera, the more you love it,” said Liu Hua, a former performer and now a teacher at the school. “The problem is that it takes a lot to know it, and fewer and fewer people have the time or the inclination.”
Also, Beijing opera is an especially demanding form, both to perform and to witness.
“It takes a very long time to study, at least 8 to 10 years just to get in the door as a performer,” Mr. Qiao said. “And the whole thing is very slow. It’s not like a movie, and right now people want things to be fast. That’s why we’re losing the young crowd.”
Still, there seems, perhaps paradoxically, to be no shortage of students, as all those highly talented and professional-looking teenagers on the school stage the other day indicated. Young people start their training at age 11, going to one of the several Beijing opera academies around the country aimed at producing professional performers.
“Children really like it,” Mr. Qiao said. “Another reason is that some parents love it, and they want their children to learn it, even if they’re not thinking about having them become professionals.”
The early training lasts for six demanding, rigorous years. Given that Beijing opera is fading in popularity, especially among the younger generations, it seems strange that so many young people would want to go through it.
“It’s such good training that the students can go in almost any direction even if they don’t end up in the opera,” Ms. Liu said.
“A lot of our students end up on television or in the movies,” she added. “There are a lot of martial arts movies, and our students are all good at martial arts. Some of them become popular singers or actors. They’re not worried about their future.”
The Chinese Ministry of Culture, anxious about the form’s survival, lavishly subsidizes it, renovating theaters, commissioning new works, paying substantial salaries to the bearers of the tradition, like Mr. Qiao.
This year, for the first time ever, the state-run Chinese Central Television has been holding a national Beijing opera student competition, with the finals to be televised in October. During the preliminaries in Beijing recently, 24 contestants, each with a supporting cast of extremely acrobatic soldiers and others, took the stage in an awesome display of skill and talent.
The emphasis was on what a nonconnoisseur might think of as the best parts — the battle and martial arts scenes, with performers in astonishing costumes leaping and somersaulting in midair, twirling, jabbing, tossing and juggling an arsenal of weapons and batons, singing at the same time.
And there was the knowledgeable audience — theater entry was free, which is perhaps itself a sign of the form’s fragile standing with the public — shouting approval and applauding enthusiastically. “We teachers are doing our job, and the government’s Culture Ministry is supporting us,” Mr. Qiao said. “Everybody’s doing their best to keep this as a cultural treasure, whether people go to see it or not.”
Monday, May 17, 2010
Shanghai's public pajama tradition runs afoul the world Expo
NYT
May 14, 2010
The Pajama Game Closes in Shanghai
By GAO YUBING
Hong Kong
ONE hundred thousand fireworks lighted the sky over Shanghai on April 30, marking the grand opening of the 2010 World Expo. For the city’s many pajama wearers, it also signified the start of a nightmare.
After pumping $58 billion into staging this mega-event, which is expected to attract more than 70 million visitors over the next six months, city authorities started a campaign to suppress one of Shanghai’s most distinctive customs: wearing pajamas in public. Just as Beijing discouraged men from going shirtless during the Olympics, Shanghai wants everyone to wear “proper attire” for the Expo.
Catchy red signs reading “Pajamas don’t go out of the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo” are posted throughout the city. Volunteer “pajama policemen” patrol the neighborhoods, telling pajama wearers to go home and change. Celebrities and socialites appear on TV to promote the idea that sleepwear in public is “backward” and “uncivilized.”
But many residents disagree. Pajamas — not the sexy sleepwear you find at Victoria’s Secret, but loose-fitting, non-revealing PJs made of cotton or polyester — have been popular in Shanghai since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, sought to modernize the economy and society by “opening up” to the outside world. The Chinese adopted Western pajamas without fully understanding their context. Most of us had never had any dedicated sleepwear other than old T-shirts and pants. And we thought pajamas were a symbol of wealth and coolness.
Shanghainese began wearing them to bed — but kept them on to walk around the neighborhood, mainly out of convenience. At that time in Shanghai, people lived in crammed, communal-style quarters in shikumen — low-rise townhouses in which families shared toilets and kitchens. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the average person had less than 10 square meters of living area. To change out of one’s pajamas just to walk across the road to the market would be too troublesome and unnecessary.
Besides, as a retiree told a news reporter: “Pajamas are also a type of clothes. It’s comfortable, and it’s no big deal since everyone wears them outside.”
Read the whole op-ed HERE.
May 14, 2010
The Pajama Game Closes in Shanghai
By GAO YUBING
Hong Kong
ONE hundred thousand fireworks lighted the sky over Shanghai on April 30, marking the grand opening of the 2010 World Expo. For the city’s many pajama wearers, it also signified the start of a nightmare.
After pumping $58 billion into staging this mega-event, which is expected to attract more than 70 million visitors over the next six months, city authorities started a campaign to suppress one of Shanghai’s most distinctive customs: wearing pajamas in public. Just as Beijing discouraged men from going shirtless during the Olympics, Shanghai wants everyone to wear “proper attire” for the Expo.
Catchy red signs reading “Pajamas don’t go out of the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo” are posted throughout the city. Volunteer “pajama policemen” patrol the neighborhoods, telling pajama wearers to go home and change. Celebrities and socialites appear on TV to promote the idea that sleepwear in public is “backward” and “uncivilized.”
But many residents disagree. Pajamas — not the sexy sleepwear you find at Victoria’s Secret, but loose-fitting, non-revealing PJs made of cotton or polyester — have been popular in Shanghai since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, sought to modernize the economy and society by “opening up” to the outside world. The Chinese adopted Western pajamas without fully understanding their context. Most of us had never had any dedicated sleepwear other than old T-shirts and pants. And we thought pajamas were a symbol of wealth and coolness.
Shanghainese began wearing them to bed — but kept them on to walk around the neighborhood, mainly out of convenience. At that time in Shanghai, people lived in crammed, communal-style quarters in shikumen — low-rise townhouses in which families shared toilets and kitchens. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the average person had less than 10 square meters of living area. To change out of one’s pajamas just to walk across the road to the market would be too troublesome and unnecessary.
Besides, as a retiree told a news reporter: “Pajamas are also a type of clothes. It’s comfortable, and it’s no big deal since everyone wears them outside.”
Read the whole op-ed HERE.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Meet Han Han, the World's Most Popular Blogger
NYT
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
As Chinese art market crashes, many artists applaud
CSM
As Chinese art market crashes, many artists applaud
Chinese contemporary painters hope the collapse will shake out speculators, leaving true collectors.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the April 6, 2009 edition
Beijing
One of the best ways to make a quick buck over the past few years has been to buy contemporary Chinese paintings. The fastest-growing sector of a feverish international art market saw prices leap by multiples of ten or more.
No longer. The global recession is deflating sales. Today, "the bubble is really bursting," says Beijing painter Zhao Gang, as prices tumble by nearly one-third and record-setting Chinese artists watch their works go unsold at auction.
But few people in the art world here are lamenting the end of an overheated era. "Chinese artists were seen as ATMs," says Jerome Sans, director of the nonprofit Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. "Maybe now they'll stop creating for the market and create for the mind."
Maybe too, he suggests, as the internationally fueled boom runs out of steam, local artists will turn their attention to local buyers, who are just beginning to build a collectors' market.
Prices for Chinese contemporary art have skyrocketed over the past five years. In 2004, only one of the top 10 best-selling living artists was Chinese, according to the artprice.com website, But by 2007 five of them came from China.
Among them was Yue Minjun, whose paintings of broadly grinning men in a variety of settings have been imitated widely here. "Gweong Gweong," a painting he made in 1993 and sold a year later to a dealer in Hong Kong for $5,000, was worth $636,000 by the time it came up for auction in November 2005.
Last May, it was flipped for $6.9 million.
A handful of other star painters have commanded auction prices in the millions of dollars. Their staggering success has attracted a host of artists feeding a voracious network of galleries that has sprung up here.
"A lot of gold diggers appeared," complains Sheng Qi, a London-trained artist who has seen the price of his paintings rise steadily in recent years. "Anyone could be an artist."
The boom also attracted speculative dealers and collectors, drawn to a market that was expanding even faster than the speed of China's headlong economic growth. "Paintings became just like any other commodity," says Mr. Qi.
"A lot of strange birds came out of the woods," says Mr. Zhao wryly, referring to the speculators who drove the market for Chinese art. "Now they have heard the guns."
"You could see that this would explode one day," says Mr. Sans. "Some prices were beyond craziness. These people were making money on the backs of artists, selling paintings in six months. That's not collecting; it's just making money.
"These people will disappear now, and I am very happy about it," Sans adds.
Also likely to disappear as dealers and collectors become more discriminating, predicts Qi, are lesser talents. "The crisis is a good thing," he argues. "There won't be a lot of people painting a lot of trash, and the market will be cleaner.
"People who love art will continue to do so, and those who were only pretending don't need to pretend any more," he says.
In the meantime, though, the slump is hitting even respected artists.
Zeng Fanzhi, one of whose older paintings was bought for $9.7 million at auction a year ago, sold only a third of the paintings on display at the opening night of his first one-man show in New York last week.
Last year, says Fabien Fryns, owner of the F2 gallery here and a friend of Mr. Zeng, "The show would have sold out even before the opening" and "prices would have been 20 percent higher."
The fact that he did sell nine paintings, at prices ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, however, "shows that quality at the right price still sells," Mr. Fryns argues. "The buyers were really serious collectors," he adds. "Last year, maybe 50 percent of the works would have been sold to speculators."
Some mid-level artists, though, are finding life harder. "I know people who haven't sold a picture for six months," Qi says. And while none of the major Beijing galleries have closed, many smaller ones in the once-vibrant "798" art district have either shut their doors or turned themselves into coffee shops or fashion stores.
Auctioneers also are being cautious. At an early spring sale last week, one of China's largest houses, the Poly International Auction Co., "included more low-price items than last year, to attract more buyers," spokeswoman Liu Jing told the state-run Xinhua news agency.
"We also increased the number of items without a starting price," she said. "It's like a sale."
That policy appeared designed to hold the market up in the wake of a disappointing auction season last autumn, when Poly brought in only $59 million, compared with $152 million in the spring season, mostly from Chinese buyers.
That drop suggests that the local market is still weak. But Sans says he believes "there is a huge chance the local market will develop in the next few years."
Fryns, the F2 owner, also predicts that "a much stronger Chinese market will emerge" and says he is "pretty confident" that new Chinese collectors will buy from domestic artists as well as from established Western names.
In the long run, says Zhao, the cooling market means that "people will take more time to take a serious look at art" in China. "If you are serious about art, the crisis is good," he believes. "But it's not very good for speculators."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
As Chinese art market crashes, many artists applaud
Chinese contemporary painters hope the collapse will shake out speculators, leaving true collectors.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the April 6, 2009 edition
Beijing
One of the best ways to make a quick buck over the past few years has been to buy contemporary Chinese paintings. The fastest-growing sector of a feverish international art market saw prices leap by multiples of ten or more.
No longer. The global recession is deflating sales. Today, "the bubble is really bursting," says Beijing painter Zhao Gang, as prices tumble by nearly one-third and record-setting Chinese artists watch their works go unsold at auction.
But few people in the art world here are lamenting the end of an overheated era. "Chinese artists were seen as ATMs," says Jerome Sans, director of the nonprofit Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. "Maybe now they'll stop creating for the market and create for the mind."
Maybe too, he suggests, as the internationally fueled boom runs out of steam, local artists will turn their attention to local buyers, who are just beginning to build a collectors' market.
Prices for Chinese contemporary art have skyrocketed over the past five years. In 2004, only one of the top 10 best-selling living artists was Chinese, according to the artprice.com website, But by 2007 five of them came from China.
Among them was Yue Minjun, whose paintings of broadly grinning men in a variety of settings have been imitated widely here. "Gweong Gweong," a painting he made in 1993 and sold a year later to a dealer in Hong Kong for $5,000, was worth $636,000 by the time it came up for auction in November 2005.
Last May, it was flipped for $6.9 million.
A handful of other star painters have commanded auction prices in the millions of dollars. Their staggering success has attracted a host of artists feeding a voracious network of galleries that has sprung up here.
"A lot of gold diggers appeared," complains Sheng Qi, a London-trained artist who has seen the price of his paintings rise steadily in recent years. "Anyone could be an artist."
The boom also attracted speculative dealers and collectors, drawn to a market that was expanding even faster than the speed of China's headlong economic growth. "Paintings became just like any other commodity," says Mr. Qi.
"A lot of strange birds came out of the woods," says Mr. Zhao wryly, referring to the speculators who drove the market for Chinese art. "Now they have heard the guns."
"You could see that this would explode one day," says Mr. Sans. "Some prices were beyond craziness. These people were making money on the backs of artists, selling paintings in six months. That's not collecting; it's just making money.
"These people will disappear now, and I am very happy about it," Sans adds.
Also likely to disappear as dealers and collectors become more discriminating, predicts Qi, are lesser talents. "The crisis is a good thing," he argues. "There won't be a lot of people painting a lot of trash, and the market will be cleaner.
"People who love art will continue to do so, and those who were only pretending don't need to pretend any more," he says.
In the meantime, though, the slump is hitting even respected artists.
Zeng Fanzhi, one of whose older paintings was bought for $9.7 million at auction a year ago, sold only a third of the paintings on display at the opening night of his first one-man show in New York last week.
Last year, says Fabien Fryns, owner of the F2 gallery here and a friend of Mr. Zeng, "The show would have sold out even before the opening" and "prices would have been 20 percent higher."
The fact that he did sell nine paintings, at prices ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, however, "shows that quality at the right price still sells," Mr. Fryns argues. "The buyers were really serious collectors," he adds. "Last year, maybe 50 percent of the works would have been sold to speculators."
Some mid-level artists, though, are finding life harder. "I know people who haven't sold a picture for six months," Qi says. And while none of the major Beijing galleries have closed, many smaller ones in the once-vibrant "798" art district have either shut their doors or turned themselves into coffee shops or fashion stores.
Auctioneers also are being cautious. At an early spring sale last week, one of China's largest houses, the Poly International Auction Co., "included more low-price items than last year, to attract more buyers," spokeswoman Liu Jing told the state-run Xinhua news agency.
"We also increased the number of items without a starting price," she said. "It's like a sale."
That policy appeared designed to hold the market up in the wake of a disappointing auction season last autumn, when Poly brought in only $59 million, compared with $152 million in the spring season, mostly from Chinese buyers.
That drop suggests that the local market is still weak. But Sans says he believes "there is a huge chance the local market will develop in the next few years."
Fryns, the F2 owner, also predicts that "a much stronger Chinese market will emerge" and says he is "pretty confident" that new Chinese collectors will buy from domestic artists as well as from established Western names.
In the long run, says Zhao, the cooling market means that "people will take more time to take a serious look at art" in China. "If you are serious about art, the crisis is good," he believes. "But it's not very good for speculators."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
China's Hip-Hop Grannies shake up tradition
Adrienne Mong / NBC News
A poster advertising a performance by the Hip-Hop Grannies.
MSNBC
China's Hip-Hop Grannies shake up tradition
Posted: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 5:43 AM
Filed Under: Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
At least twice a week, Wu Ying goes to a local gym in western Beijing to work out. She joins a group of girlfriends and the occasional guy, and for a couple of hours they train with a dance instructor in a glass-walled room surrounded by treadmills and step machines.
The whole scene – some 20-odd people working up a sweat to the insistent beat of hip-hop, under dim fluorescent lights – would be unremarkable if not for the fact that Wu is 70 years old.
Wu, aka China’s pre-eminent Hip-Hop Granny, is a nimble Beijing native with an expressive face and elastic body. She has been performing hip-hop routines since 2003 when she saw the first National Hip-Hop Dancing Competition on Chinese television.
"The competitors were all young people, wearing headscarves, headdresses, hats, and various clothes," recounted Wu, a retired accountant who was 66 at the time. "I thought that was very fresh."
Inspired by "the look they had in their eyes, the way they moved their fingers, heads and bodies," Wu thought hip-hop dancing would be perfect for herself and China’s aged and infirm.
"The elderly don’t like to move too much," she added. (She’s right. Even though legions of elderly Chinese can be seen exercising in city parks across the country at dawn and dusk, they tend to favor slower-tempo activities like Tai Chi or ballroom dances such as waltzing.)
Wu set out to learn hip-hop dancing at a local gym and to study whatever she could about the activity. She also began looking to put together a five-member troupe to promote hip-hop dancing by touring the country and by performing on Chinese TV.
‘Hip-hop is merely for young people’
But not many other Chinese pensioners thought the same as Wu, who scoured Beijing high and low, targeting parks, community centres, and schools for continuing education.
"[People] said, ‘Hip-hop? What is hip-hop? Is that a sport for you? Hip-hop is merely for young people. How old are you? You are 66 and you want to dance hip-hop? Don't be ridiculous!’" laughed Wu as she described people’s initial reaction to her idea. Even her own daughter was embarrassed by the thought of a hip-hop mom and scoffed at the notion, provoking a rift between them that lasted days.
Eventually, Wu found four other women willing to try out, and they formed a team in February 2004. Six months and many rehearsals later, the Hip-Hop Granny Dance Team made its debut at the Beijing qualifier for the National Hip-Hop Dancing Competition.
The Grannies – whose average age was 60 at the time – faced off people several decades younger. "They were professionals," Wu said. "We seniors didn’t know much so we were very nervous." But their daily rehearsal routines paid off; the women walked off with third prize.
They haven’t looked back since, garnering further prizes and accolades every year. Moreover, Wu’s 48-year-old daughter, Guo Zhe, now appreciates her mother’s dancing and even occasionally joins in.
The Hip-Hop Grannies have also drawn many more members. Over the years, they’ve attracted at least 1,000 different women.
Among them is a 74-year-old who just began learning – she’s the oldest member.
And there is the odd man who tries it out. But in the same period, the group has only attracted five men.
Wu shrugged when asked why so few men participate. "They don’t like to move so much at that age?" she speculated.
Dancing for mental health
The physical health payoff from dancing hip-hop might appear obvious, but some of the members raved about the mental benefits.
Liu Jian Zhu, a 59-year-old former pharmacist with the Chinese air force, said dancing hip-hop has been "a breakthrough" for her.
"Since I was in the military, my life had been required to be serious and intense," Liu explained. "It has really changed my life and personality."
Wen Di, 55, used to work as a railroad construction technician, but after retiring just last year she wanted to find something to fill what she called the emptiness in her life.
"I saw Wu's dancing on TV and thought that it was very inspiring," she said, eagerly demonstrating some impressive hip-hop moves for us.
A rejuvenating presence
It might be a bad pun, but Wu – who works out for two and a half hours twice a week (more when it’s competition season) – is a rejuvenating presence.
Although she comes from a generation that lived through some of modern China’s most tumultuous decades, including the stifling Cultural Revolution era (when western cultural thought and influences were banned), her optimism is refreshing.
"We represent a new image, a new fashion for Chinese grandmothers," said Wu. "We develop with time and connect with the world. We don’t just learn our own Chinese culture. We learn cultures from other countries to enrich ourselves and our lives to lead a more colorful and high-quality life."
Wu said she plans to dance for as long as she physically can, adding that, "I think that dancing hip-hop has made me younger, happier, [and] improved my memory."
Perhaps the only drawback is that with the stress of competition her shoulder-length hair has finally succumbed to age. "It turned grey when we began entering competitions," she said, rolling her eyes in mock frustration. "I only just started coloring it in the past couple of years!"
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Pole Dancing: From the Erotic Domain, an Aerobic Trend in China
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times - Students taking a lesson at Lolan Pole Dancing School in Beijing. The school has five studios and plans to open six more this year. From the NYT
July 25, 2008
From the Erotic Domain, an Aerobic Trend in China
By JIMMY WANG
BEIJING — Clad in knee-high leather boots, spandex shorts and a sports bra, Xiao Yan struck a pose two feet off the ground, her head glistening with sweat and her arms straining as she suspended herself from a vertical pole.
“Keeping your grip is the hardest part,” she said. “It’s really easy to slide downward.”
Ms. Xiao, 26, who works as a supermarket manager, is one of a growing number of women experimenting with China’s newest, and most controversial, fitness activity: pole dancing.
“I used to take a normal aerobics class, but it was boring and monotonous,” Ms. Xiao said. “So I tried out pole dancing. It’s a really social activity. I’ve met a lot of girls here who I’m now close friends with. And I like that it makes me feel sexy.”
A nightclub activity mostly considered the domain of strippers in the United States, pole dancing — but with clothes kept on — is nudging its way into the mainstream Chinese exercise market, with increasing numbers of gyms and dance schools offering classes.
The woman who claims to have brought pole dancing to China, Luo Lan, 39, is from Yichun, a small town in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. Her parents teach physics at the university level.
“I’m not good at science like my parents. I’m the black sheep of my family, in that sense,” she said.
Ms. Luo said she struggled in 20 different occupations — secretary, saleswoman, restaurateur and translator among them — before deciding to take a break. She traveled to Paris in 2006 for vacation. It was there that she first saw pole dancing.
“I wandered into a pub, and there was a woman dancing on the stage,” she said. “I thought it was beautiful.”
Ms. Luo, who quickly discovered that pole dancing for fitness was popular in America, realized that if she could take away the shadier aspects of the erotic dance and repackage it into an activity more acceptable to mainstream Chinese women, she might create a Chinese fitness revolution. Here was an exercise that would allow women to stay fit and express their sexuality with an unprecedented degree of openness and freedom.
But she remained keenly aware of the challenges in a society where traditional values dictate that women be loyal, faithful and modestly dressed.
Upon her return to Beijing, Ms. Luo invested a little under $3,000 of her savings to start the Lolan Pole Dancing School. She placed advertisements in a lifestyle newspaper and called friends to get the word out.
Slowly, young women trickled in to take a look.
“People here have never seen a pole dance, and for that reason they don’t associate it with stripping or women of ill repute,” Ms. Luo said. “I knew if I could give people a positive first impression of this as a clean, fun, social activity, people wouldn’t just accept it, they’d embrace it.”
Before long, Ms. Luo was contacted by several magazines. In March 2008, Hunan Television, a nationally broadcast network, invited her and a group of her students to perform on a talk show.
“Most of the people in the audience had no idea what this was,” said Hu Jing, 24, an instructor at the Lolan School. “They just thought it was fun and clapped afterward.”
Since the broadcast, pole dancing for fitness has spread through China. The school now has five studios with plans to open six more this year. A rival pole dancing school, Hua Ling, opened half a year after the Lolan School.
Pole dancing’s move onto the fitness scene, however, has been a rocky one. Many Chinese, who disapprove of its sexual movements, consider it unruly and licentious.
“Five years ago, this wouldn’t have been permitted,” said Zhang Jian, 30, a manager in an interior design firm. “I think this is just a fad, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for women.”
Ms. Luo said she had received prank calls and plenty of criticism. “I’ve been contacted by many people who don’t like what we’re doing,” she said.
But those who embrace pole dancing for fitness are a snapshot of urban youths whose values are changing from those of their parents.
Although China has no state religion, study of Confucianism and Taoism, two conflicting philosophies that underlie much of modern Chinese thought, is mandatory in China’s education system. While Confucianism emphasizes achievement and propriety, Taoism stresses the unseen strengths in being humble and, in some cases, being perceived as average.
Although Jiang Li, 23, a pole dancing student, studied both philosophies in school, she said she could subscribe to neither.
“A lot of people expect Chinese women to be subdued and faithful, that we should marry and take care of kids at an early age,” she said. “But I don’t think that way — I want to be independent. I’ve been studying traditional Chinese dance for many years, but this is totally different. I feel in control when I do this. If I learn this well, I feel I can be a superstar. I want to be a superstar.”
Lucy Liang contributed research.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Chinese Composer Tan Dun in the NYT
New York Times
May 4, 2008
Of Musical Import
By IAN BURUMA
In Stockholm last fall, walking past a McDonald’s, Tan Dun turned to me and said: “Some 20 years ago, I was still planting rice in China. And now I’m conducting orchestras in all the great concert houses of the world: La Scala, the Met, the Berlin Philharmonic. I still can’t believe it.”
A trim, close-cropped man who likes to dress fashionably in dark colors and black leather pants, Tan Dun is a kind of rock star of the modern music scene. He won an Oscar for the score of Ang Lee’s film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” His latest opera, “The First Emperor,” starring Plácido Domingo, had its premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006 and will be revived there this week, with a few changes, mostly to the libretto. Hopping around the world, from Shanghai to Stockholm, from Tokyo to New York, he conducts and introduces his own music to a global audience of rapturous fans.
Tan is based in New York City, but I managed to catch him in Stockholm (between gigs in Shanghai and Rome), where he was attending part of a weeklong Tan Dun festival. We first met in a hotel coffee lounge. It was self-service. He chose to have tea: “Tea is from the inside,” he said. “Coffee is from the outside.” Tan tends to talk like that, less like a composer than like a mystic. “One plus one makes one” is another one of his sayings, meaning — I think — that his music is not so much a fusion of East and West as an individual expression emerging from the mixture of different traditions. Speaking of his birthplace, he once said, again rather typically: “Hunan is the home of philosophy, of yin and yang, of shamanistic culture. It has good feng shui.”
The wise man is also an astute entrepreneur, however. Walking from the hotel to the Konserthus, where the Nobel Prizes are handed out, he was talking in Chinese on his cellphone. After he was done, he turned to me in a state of great excitement. “Just imagine,” he said, eyes shining with pleasure. “We’ve got permission to perform ‘The First Emperor’ on the Great Wall of China for the Beijing Olympics. We’ll have a worldwide audience of billions!” Since then, there have been some doubts raised about this project. In fact, the Chinese government may not let it happen after all, but the very idea of it shows the scale of Tan’s artistic ambition.
It has indeed been a remarkable journey from rural Hunan to the audience of billions. Tan was born in 1957. Although his earliest memories, as he relates them in public, are full of Taoists, shamans and village sorcerers, his parents were professionals in Changsha, the provincial capital. His mother was a medical doctor, and his father worked at a food research institute. But he was partly raised by his grandmother, a vegetable farmer, who told him ghost stories, which he adored. Since traditional music of any kind, folk or opera, was banned during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and lasted more or less until 1976, Tan’s main introduction to music consisted of a few permitted revolutionary works.
Like all children of “intellectuals” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was forced to work in the countryside as part of the nationwide “re-education” campaign. “Imagine,” he said, “you were told to report to an office and made to swear to leave your family, to feed pigs, to plant rice, for your entire life. I cried. How could I do this for my entire life? In fact, the required length of time depended on the purity of your thoughts.” Tan was relatively lucky. Mao died two years after he was sent to a collective farm, and the Cultural Revolution came to an end.
“Everyone experienced bitterness,” he recalls now, “but I had fun. The farmers, who were experts in ghost operas, couldn’t let anyone hear their songs. But I found a way around this by setting Maoist texts to their folk melodies. Everybody understood the ruse, and they loved it. Since then I became an avant-gardist, not from New York, but from that village in Hunan.”
He explained the nature of ghost operas, whose form he has loosely adopted in some of his own works. “The traditional ghost opera,” he said, “has three acts: you welcome the ghost, you entertain the ghost, then leave with the ghost.” In Buddhist terms, it is about “the last life, our present life and the next life.” Religion in rural China, where Tan grew up, is an eclectic mix of Taoism, Buddhism and folk beliefs, mostly to do with nature worship, mediated by people in touch with the spiritual world. That is what he means by shamans.
While composing folk songs, Tan became the village musician, playing on anything he could find: a fiddle, a wok to use as a drum, even agricultural tools. His gift for improvisation, for making music out of anything at hand, is still evident in much of his work. Bowls of water, sheets of rice paper, rocks, stones, anything, can be used to express Tan’s musical imagination. Writing about “Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra,” commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote that “Tan’s contribution is to make everything about the concert experience, even holding a program on your lap, part of the heightened sensations.”
After Mao’s death in 1976, a freakish accident changed Tan’s life. A touring Beijing Opera troupe was in a shipwreck, and several members drowned. Tan was sent back to Changsha by the Communist Party to join the opera company as a violinist. Since the traditional operas had been banned for 10 years, their revival was hugely popular. Then, a revelation: Tan heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the radio. Western classical music had also been banned during the Cultural Revolution. It was a spur for him to apply for a place at the just-reopened Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. The competition was fierce, thousands of applicants, a handful of places. He was accepted. But the professors, who had themselves spent years feeding pigs in remote villages as part of their political “re-education,” were still stuck in old Soviet models of revolutionary music education.
Then, a second revelation: the British composer Alexander Goehr, married to an Israeli professor of Chinese literature, visited China in the early 1980s and gave a lecture about Schoenberg and Debussy. Goehr, whose father, Walter, a famous conductor, was a pupil of Schoenberg’s, is a highly respected composer in the Schoenbergian tradition. The hall was packed with at least a thousand students. One of them was Tan. “People were so hungry,” he recalls. “Professor Goehr completely reopened the door for us. It was like hearing the stories of 1001 Nights. We were so fascinated. It was so new to us. Because our beloved professor influenced me so much, I spent years trying to catch up with Schoenberg’s atonal music. But it’s too easy to lose yourself in a system like that, and I caught cultural jet lag. I remember Professor Goehr telling us to avoid ethnic content, to be neutral and independent. But right after he left, I tried to use Beijing opera and folk music. If you want to be a Chinese avant-garde artist, the safest way is to stick to your grandmother’s tone. The most dangerous way is to follow Western music from the Romantics to 12-tone. This period is poison. I could only use the techniques as a recipe for my fusion cooking.”
I called Alexander Goehr at his home in Cambridge, England, where he was a professor of music for many years. Goehr remembers the lecture vividly, but not Tan, who was just one face in a thousand. “Actually,” he said, “what I warned them against was to do a Chinese version of Western music. Unfortunately my warning had little effect. They have become Western composers with a few temple bells.”
I repeated something Tan said about the need for modern Chinese artists to retain a certain innocence. Tan told me how he had tried to avoid being too sophisticated. “If you are too sophisticated,” he said, “you lose courage.” Theory, he maintained, “makes for more boundaries. Competing with the Europeans, by being more sophisticated, is to resist yourself. One plus one makes one. Yin and yang, inside and outside, honesty and pretension. I have practiced this philosophy for the last 20 years.”
Goehr sighed over the phone and said: “Yes, that is what I had hoped as well, that they would keep a freshness, find something different out of their own experience, like Janacek or Mussorgsky. But that hope was a little innocent, too. In fact, because of their success in every other field, the Chinese are now in the same state as people who are not Chinese. They know what the trends are. They are technically excellent, but the overall popularism, which is commercial in origin, will lead to kitsch.”
Tan’s claim, of course, is that his music does emerge from his experience, from the ghost stories, Buddhist prayers and village shamans of his youth. One of his most striking pieces, a multimedia event for cello, video and orchestra, called “The Map,” was actually performed in Xiangxi, a village in rural western Hunan, where Tan once met a shaman, known as “the stone man,” who could talk to the winds and the clouds. Out of this encounter, he says, came the music, written for Yo-Yo Ma in 1999. The more-or-less Western sound of the cello is mixed with Chinese folk singing and the sounds of rushing water and clashing stones.
I asked Tan how it was received by the local people. “The farmers were more open than the civilized bourgeoisie,” he replied. “They touched the cello, because it was shiny and beautiful and they were worried that it was too cold. They talked to the instrument as if it were alive, in the spirit of the ghost operas.”
It is indeed a haunting piece of music, and the drama of the lone cellist, talking, as it were, to the folk singers on a video screen, is powerful. Even the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen seems to have been affected by the atmosphere of Tan’s dream of old Hunan. He is quoted as follows in the liner notes of the DVD: “My old French cello follows ‘The Map’ to Xiangxi. It has received great karma from the water there, and has made true connections with the roots of the people there.”
In fact, Tan found acclaim for Chinese-flavored pieces long before that. In 1979, he wrote a symphony based on a fourth-century Chinese lament. In 1983, he won his first big award, the Weber Prize, with a string quartet. His visit to Dresden to collect it was his first step into the Western world. Two years later, inspired by his grandmother’s death, he wrote an orchestral work, called “On Taoism.” These early pieces were, in his phrase, part of his “class struggle” against the atonal system. “I used folk resources to compete with the 12-tone system, as a challenge to Goehr and Schoenberg.” In 1989, he wrote “Nine Songs,” a musical version of classical Chinese poems, using ceramic instruments, another innovation based on tradition, and Chinese gongs.
Alexander Goehr was alluding to a musical trend among modern Chinese composers. What makes Tan interesting, however, is not just the music itself but his theatrical flair. As well as a composer and conductor, he is a man of the theater with an extraordinary talent for dramatic effects. Dance, Beijing opera, video art all have their places in his work. He is praised for his theatrical imagination as much as for his music. As the French critic Gérard Corneloup wrote in “Forum Opéra”: “Superb lighting, magnificent costumes, sumptuous voices and well-developed characters all participate in the sublime presentation of ethereal music that colors both words and phrases. Tan Dun is, indeed, Puccini miraculously reborn into the 21st century.”
Corneloup was referring specifically to an opera in three acts, titled “Tea: A Mirror of Soul.” It was first performed in Tokyo in 2002. I heard it in Stockholm. A few hours before the performance began, Tan explained his music to a roomful of Swedish music lovers. He was dressed in a modish black, semi-Chinese outfit and talked engagingly in English about his experience as a farmer in Hunan: “I can remember the young women, planting tea, getting covered in green from handling the leaves, their hands, their arms, their legs. I had an almost erotic fantasy of the soul going green too.”
Tea has a certain pedigree in expressions of Asian culture in the West. The most famous modern example is “The Book of Tea,” written by Kakuzo Okakura in English in 1906. This work was meant to show the essence of what Okakura, who lived and worked mostly in Boston, regarded as the essence of the Asian spirit. Far less well known is his opera, “The White Fox,” based on a Japanese legend and dedicated to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famous Boston patroness of the arts. In a way, Tan follows in Okakura’s footsteps. His art is an attempt to achieve something very few Asian artists have succeeded in doing: to forge something new, and at the same time traditional, by reworking Asian forms in Western idioms.
Tan’s opera “Tea” features a Japanese monk from Kyoto, who is actually a prince and becomes involved in a love triangle at the imperial Chinese court. The ancient “Book of Tea,” by Lu Yu, plays an important role in his rivalry with a Chinese prince. There is talk of Zen Buddhism, of water, fire and wind, of the “ways of tea.” The libretto, written by Tan and Xu Ying, resident playwright for the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, abounds in phrases like: “though bowl is empty, scent glows;/though shadow is gone, dream grows. . . .” Three female Japanese percussionists produced eerie and extraordinary sounds from rustling rice paper and bowls filled with water. The audience, judging from the applause, loved every minute of it.
There is no question that Tan uses Chinese culture in his music. The question is which Chinese culture. It may not be a culture that most contemporary Chinese people would recognize. Like the fortune cookie, much of it feels as if it were invented in America. This is not necessarily a bad thing. James Joyce recreated his Ireland living in Trieste, Paris and other places abroad. Distance can sharpen the imagination. I decided to ask Tan about this after his return to New York, to attend a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of “The Gate,” his multicultural opera featuring three theatrical heroines who died for love: Shakespeare’s Juliet; Koharu, heroine in the Japanese puppet play “Double Suicide”; and Yu Ji, from “Farewell My Concubine,” a Beijing opera about a woman who commits suicide for her lord.
We spoke in his office in Chelsea. He served me a cup of superb green tea from Zhejiang province. “When I came to New York in 1986,” he said, “to study composition at Columbia University, I lived downtown. At first I didn’t know how to bridge the musical distance between uptown and downtown. At Columbia, you immediately got into the atonal system. But downtown is so diverse: jazz, rock, the Blue Note, the Village Gate, the La MaMa theater. So I got jet-lagged. But I found a way to fix the distance. At night, downtown, I would meet with Meredith Monk, John Cage and Philip Glass. My jet lag between uptown and downtown reminded me where I was from. I looked back to the Eastern music I played before moving to Beijing. It all came back to me through my fascination with experimental music in downtown New York. Greenwich Village taught me about Chineseness from a world point of view.”
I asked him what role John Cage played in his development. I had read somewhere that Tan felt an instinctive cultural affinity with Cage’s experiments with music made with water, paper and kitchenware. He said: “Before John Cage, I didn’t pay attention to Lao-tzu” — the Taoist sage — “or the I Ching. But every time I spoke to Cage, it was as if I were talking to Lao-tzu, not an American, not John. We had dialogues about music in a very philosophical way — everything is an unanswered question.”
Tan would not be the first Asian artist to have reimported, as it were, Asian traditions from Western sources. Many Japanese rediscovered Zen in the 1960s by reading the American beat poets. But Chineseness from a world point of view is precisely what many Chinese in China didn’t like about “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” However slickly made and beautiful to look at, this kung-fu movie, with Tan’s score and Yo-Yo Ma’s sinuous cello, smacked to them of a fantasy tailored to Western taste. It could also be read the way I read it, as a nostalgic dream of overseas Chinese about a China that never was. But in fact Tan deals less in nostalgia than in juxtaposition, throwing elements from different cultures together.
Tan likes to say that he is like Marco Polo in the West. Or as he put it in an interview: “I’m a Marco Polo going backward from East to West.” What is perhaps his most famous opera is actually titled “Marco Polo” and features, apart from the Venetian explorer himself, Dante, Shakespeare and Mahler. The libretto is in English and Chinese, with smatterings of Italian and German. And the music ranges from Beijing opera to bits of Mahler. Completed in 1996, this work earned Tan the Grawemeyer Award for composition. Since its debut in Munich the same year, the opera has been performed all over the world.
Tan told me that when he writes his music, he has no specific audience in mind. But there is no question that the exoticism of his work is perfect for a globalized market hungry for new and unusual flavors. Tan expressed this perfectly in an interview with Hong Kong radio: “It’s not just listening to music. Also, the way we’re eating dinner, no more just French, Italian; we eat Mexican, Cantonese, Russian, Indonesian, Japanese. . . . ” In Stockholm, he told me how globalization offers new opportunities to artists, like himself, “not to standardize, or neutralize, but by giving people a chance to be seen.”
The danger of Tan’s huge commercial success is that it leads to a decorative, rather superficial kind of Chineseness. It is hard not to cringe a little when hearing such fortune cookie lyrics (in “Tea”) as: “In tea mind —/ woman makes life art,/man makes art life.” I asked Tan about the commercial constraints on his work, and he gave a very candid answer: “It is inescapable. You can’t avoid being commercialized. I don’t want to be, but I cannot resist it. I’m pushed that way. If my name is not a brand of Chinese culture in the avant-garde, Peter Gelb is not going to be behind me at the Metropolitan Opera.”
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, is known for his keenness to make opera more popular and has worked to open up a rather hidebound institution to a wider audience through television and video screenings and by bringing in famous filmmakers to direct operas or commissioning hot composers. He met Tan Dun while serving as president of the worldwide classical-music division of Sony. I sat with Gelb in his small, rather airless office deep in the bowels of the opera house. We spoke with half an eye on a television screen, showing the dress rehearsal of Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” with 227 extras, 118 chorus members, 41 dancers, four chickens, one horse and one goat.
“Look,” he said, when I asked him about the risks of what Alexander Goehr calls popularism, “most successful composers craved popular success. It’s only in recent decades that popular success was thought to be unseemly. But this is changing with composers like John Adams and Tan Dun. Tan is theatrically savvy, an entrepreneur in his instincts. He thinks visually. In his best pieces he has found an interesting balance between accessibility and originality.”
Gelb’s concern, as a manager who wants to “encourage popular success without compromising high artistic ideals,” is to make sure that Tan “continues to pursue that direction and not to become too derivative.” He paused. I asked: Derivative of whom? “Of himself.”
Tan’s most ambitious opera to date, “The First Emperor,” was not actually commissioned by Gelb, but he was manager of the Met by the time it was performed and has worked hard for a successful revival this month. Like all Tan’s operas, it is visually spectacular, with a Beijing opera singer, a phalanx of imperial soldiers, Chinese drums, an aluminum staircase with stones suspended from ropes representing the Great Wall of China and Plácido Domingo as the warlord who unified China in the third century B.C. The producer of this spectacle was Zhang Yimou, the director of such classic films as “Raise the Red Lantern” (1992) and “To Live” (1994). The music, borrowing a little from Puccini here, a little from Bernstein there, mixed with Chinese operatic effects, gongs and various improvised instruments using water, paper and stones, is the usual eclectic multicultural mix that Tan specializes in. The libretto, written with the novelist Ha Jin, is heavy with references to yin and yang. While the opera was still in production, Tan told The New York Times that “opera will no longer be a Western form, as it is no longer an Italian form. In the shamanistic sense, there is no East or West; all is human. Plácido and Zhang Yimou are also shamans.”
Not all the critics were impressed. Anthony Tommasini wrote in The Times: “His music does sing. And sing. And sing. On and on. . . . Mr. Tan’s goal in this work, it would seem, was to create a ritualistic and hypnotic lyricism. But ‘The First Emperor’ gives soaring melody a bad name.” Peter Davis wrote in New York magazine that “the lyrical set pieces in ‘The First Emperor’ are couched in a sickly sweet Americana idiom that sounds rather like watered-down Copland or Bernstein with a dash of Hollywood banality. Parts of Act Two, in fact, become so operetta-ish that I half-fancied Domingo might break into a song from Lehar’s ‘Land of Smiles.’ ”
Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, might seem a strange choice for a tragic hero in a spectacular opera. He ordered the building of the Great Wall, killed his critics, was the first recorded book burner in history and set the tone for the most brutal Chinese rulers to come (including Mao Zedong, who much admired him). In fact, however, although he was depicted through the centuries in China as a monster, he became a symbol of patriotic pride after the Communist revolution. Tan’s opera is decidedly ambiguous on this front, reflecting in a way the ambivalence that many Chinese feel about Chairman Mao. On the one hand, the opera is about the conflict between the ruler and the court composer, Gao Jianli (sung by Paul Groves). The emperor wants to be glorified; the composer wants to express himself. But the opera is also punctuated by rousing choruses rejoicing in a unified China.
Ha Jin, who now lives in Massachusetts but experienced the horrors of Maoism first hand, as did Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun, was not initially enthusiastic about the project. He told me on the phone that he didn’t like the idea of Qin Shi Huangdi, whom, like most Chinese, he saw as a symbol of harsh oppression. But his wife is a fan of Domingo’s. And Tan “persuaded me by saying it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Asian-Americans. And I thought it might be O.K. — not to celebrate the First Emperor but to highlight the conflict between the individual and the state.” So he accepted. Tan would send him texts in Chinese and Ha Jin would send back the revisions in English. But it didn’t quite turn out the way Jin hoped. He explained: “Zhang Yimou said there were two themes: conflict and patriotism. In his movie, ‘Hero,’ ” — also about the First Emperor, for which Tan wrote the score — “they highlighted one theme, patriotism. That’s the problem. I just wrote one line about China being united. Domingo sang it many times, ‘China! China! China!’ like a glorious moment, a celebration. But what can you do? I was just a worker.”
I asked Tan in Stockholm why he took on commissions that would obviously require a show of Chinese patriotism. Putting on “The First Emperor” for the Beijing Olympics would certainly have to be a patriotic gesture. He also wrote “Symphony 1997,” featuring Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist, for the official celebration of the handing over of Hong Kong. Peter Gelb claims responsibility for bringing the two stars together. Ma, he told me, “was interested, because he wanted to create music with ancient bells.” The first time I asked Tan about his relationship with the Chinese government, he gave the examples of Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the Soviet Union. He said: “A major commission from China is still focused on patriotic things. Like Shostakovich, sometimes we have no choice. But you can still express yourself. By doing ‘Symphony 1997,’ I could study bronze bells and introduce Yo-Yo Ma, as well as Western concepts, to China. There’s a way to educate the Communists without using their methods.” On the same occasion, Tan claimed that “The First Emperor” “reflects my own life, and that of Shostakovich.”
I found the comparison with Shostakovich odd, and told him so. After all, Tan was not confined to China but free to go and work anywhere he liked. Unlike Shostakovich, who had to contend with Joseph Stalin, Tan was not forced to do anything. We let the matter rest. Later, I asked him the same question at his office in New York. This time he gave a very different answer. “To me,” he said, with an impish smile, “it is the way for shamans to behave. I want to be playful, like a child, teasing the world, teasing the whole system. That is Taoism. It is not about political or cultural messages. It is a performance. Performance art.”
I suspect that this time he was telling the truth. Finding his stride, he continued: “I have no ego. The ego is to illustrate philosophical strangeness, to be a musical Taoist.” While I was mulling this over, he shifted in his chair and said: “And you know what? This strangeness helps my business. I have always worked with the best orchestras in the world. And never once did one of them fail to ask me back.” I can quite believe it. Whatever it is that is behind Tan’s extraordinary success, it surely isn’t innocence — or a lack of sophistication.
May 4, 2008
Of Musical Import
By IAN BURUMA
In Stockholm last fall, walking past a McDonald’s, Tan Dun turned to me and said: “Some 20 years ago, I was still planting rice in China. And now I’m conducting orchestras in all the great concert houses of the world: La Scala, the Met, the Berlin Philharmonic. I still can’t believe it.”
A trim, close-cropped man who likes to dress fashionably in dark colors and black leather pants, Tan Dun is a kind of rock star of the modern music scene. He won an Oscar for the score of Ang Lee’s film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” His latest opera, “The First Emperor,” starring Plácido Domingo, had its premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006 and will be revived there this week, with a few changes, mostly to the libretto. Hopping around the world, from Shanghai to Stockholm, from Tokyo to New York, he conducts and introduces his own music to a global audience of rapturous fans.
Tan is based in New York City, but I managed to catch him in Stockholm (between gigs in Shanghai and Rome), where he was attending part of a weeklong Tan Dun festival. We first met in a hotel coffee lounge. It was self-service. He chose to have tea: “Tea is from the inside,” he said. “Coffee is from the outside.” Tan tends to talk like that, less like a composer than like a mystic. “One plus one makes one” is another one of his sayings, meaning — I think — that his music is not so much a fusion of East and West as an individual expression emerging from the mixture of different traditions. Speaking of his birthplace, he once said, again rather typically: “Hunan is the home of philosophy, of yin and yang, of shamanistic culture. It has good feng shui.”
The wise man is also an astute entrepreneur, however. Walking from the hotel to the Konserthus, where the Nobel Prizes are handed out, he was talking in Chinese on his cellphone. After he was done, he turned to me in a state of great excitement. “Just imagine,” he said, eyes shining with pleasure. “We’ve got permission to perform ‘The First Emperor’ on the Great Wall of China for the Beijing Olympics. We’ll have a worldwide audience of billions!” Since then, there have been some doubts raised about this project. In fact, the Chinese government may not let it happen after all, but the very idea of it shows the scale of Tan’s artistic ambition.
It has indeed been a remarkable journey from rural Hunan to the audience of billions. Tan was born in 1957. Although his earliest memories, as he relates them in public, are full of Taoists, shamans and village sorcerers, his parents were professionals in Changsha, the provincial capital. His mother was a medical doctor, and his father worked at a food research institute. But he was partly raised by his grandmother, a vegetable farmer, who told him ghost stories, which he adored. Since traditional music of any kind, folk or opera, was banned during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and lasted more or less until 1976, Tan’s main introduction to music consisted of a few permitted revolutionary works.
Like all children of “intellectuals” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was forced to work in the countryside as part of the nationwide “re-education” campaign. “Imagine,” he said, “you were told to report to an office and made to swear to leave your family, to feed pigs, to plant rice, for your entire life. I cried. How could I do this for my entire life? In fact, the required length of time depended on the purity of your thoughts.” Tan was relatively lucky. Mao died two years after he was sent to a collective farm, and the Cultural Revolution came to an end.
“Everyone experienced bitterness,” he recalls now, “but I had fun. The farmers, who were experts in ghost operas, couldn’t let anyone hear their songs. But I found a way around this by setting Maoist texts to their folk melodies. Everybody understood the ruse, and they loved it. Since then I became an avant-gardist, not from New York, but from that village in Hunan.”
He explained the nature of ghost operas, whose form he has loosely adopted in some of his own works. “The traditional ghost opera,” he said, “has three acts: you welcome the ghost, you entertain the ghost, then leave with the ghost.” In Buddhist terms, it is about “the last life, our present life and the next life.” Religion in rural China, where Tan grew up, is an eclectic mix of Taoism, Buddhism and folk beliefs, mostly to do with nature worship, mediated by people in touch with the spiritual world. That is what he means by shamans.
While composing folk songs, Tan became the village musician, playing on anything he could find: a fiddle, a wok to use as a drum, even agricultural tools. His gift for improvisation, for making music out of anything at hand, is still evident in much of his work. Bowls of water, sheets of rice paper, rocks, stones, anything, can be used to express Tan’s musical imagination. Writing about “Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra,” commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote that “Tan’s contribution is to make everything about the concert experience, even holding a program on your lap, part of the heightened sensations.”
After Mao’s death in 1976, a freakish accident changed Tan’s life. A touring Beijing Opera troupe was in a shipwreck, and several members drowned. Tan was sent back to Changsha by the Communist Party to join the opera company as a violinist. Since the traditional operas had been banned for 10 years, their revival was hugely popular. Then, a revelation: Tan heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the radio. Western classical music had also been banned during the Cultural Revolution. It was a spur for him to apply for a place at the just-reopened Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. The competition was fierce, thousands of applicants, a handful of places. He was accepted. But the professors, who had themselves spent years feeding pigs in remote villages as part of their political “re-education,” were still stuck in old Soviet models of revolutionary music education.
Then, a second revelation: the British composer Alexander Goehr, married to an Israeli professor of Chinese literature, visited China in the early 1980s and gave a lecture about Schoenberg and Debussy. Goehr, whose father, Walter, a famous conductor, was a pupil of Schoenberg’s, is a highly respected composer in the Schoenbergian tradition. The hall was packed with at least a thousand students. One of them was Tan. “People were so hungry,” he recalls. “Professor Goehr completely reopened the door for us. It was like hearing the stories of 1001 Nights. We were so fascinated. It was so new to us. Because our beloved professor influenced me so much, I spent years trying to catch up with Schoenberg’s atonal music. But it’s too easy to lose yourself in a system like that, and I caught cultural jet lag. I remember Professor Goehr telling us to avoid ethnic content, to be neutral and independent. But right after he left, I tried to use Beijing opera and folk music. If you want to be a Chinese avant-garde artist, the safest way is to stick to your grandmother’s tone. The most dangerous way is to follow Western music from the Romantics to 12-tone. This period is poison. I could only use the techniques as a recipe for my fusion cooking.”
I called Alexander Goehr at his home in Cambridge, England, where he was a professor of music for many years. Goehr remembers the lecture vividly, but not Tan, who was just one face in a thousand. “Actually,” he said, “what I warned them against was to do a Chinese version of Western music. Unfortunately my warning had little effect. They have become Western composers with a few temple bells.”
I repeated something Tan said about the need for modern Chinese artists to retain a certain innocence. Tan told me how he had tried to avoid being too sophisticated. “If you are too sophisticated,” he said, “you lose courage.” Theory, he maintained, “makes for more boundaries. Competing with the Europeans, by being more sophisticated, is to resist yourself. One plus one makes one. Yin and yang, inside and outside, honesty and pretension. I have practiced this philosophy for the last 20 years.”
Goehr sighed over the phone and said: “Yes, that is what I had hoped as well, that they would keep a freshness, find something different out of their own experience, like Janacek or Mussorgsky. But that hope was a little innocent, too. In fact, because of their success in every other field, the Chinese are now in the same state as people who are not Chinese. They know what the trends are. They are technically excellent, but the overall popularism, which is commercial in origin, will lead to kitsch.”
Tan’s claim, of course, is that his music does emerge from his experience, from the ghost stories, Buddhist prayers and village shamans of his youth. One of his most striking pieces, a multimedia event for cello, video and orchestra, called “The Map,” was actually performed in Xiangxi, a village in rural western Hunan, where Tan once met a shaman, known as “the stone man,” who could talk to the winds and the clouds. Out of this encounter, he says, came the music, written for Yo-Yo Ma in 1999. The more-or-less Western sound of the cello is mixed with Chinese folk singing and the sounds of rushing water and clashing stones.
I asked Tan how it was received by the local people. “The farmers were more open than the civilized bourgeoisie,” he replied. “They touched the cello, because it was shiny and beautiful and they were worried that it was too cold. They talked to the instrument as if it were alive, in the spirit of the ghost operas.”
It is indeed a haunting piece of music, and the drama of the lone cellist, talking, as it were, to the folk singers on a video screen, is powerful. Even the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen seems to have been affected by the atmosphere of Tan’s dream of old Hunan. He is quoted as follows in the liner notes of the DVD: “My old French cello follows ‘The Map’ to Xiangxi. It has received great karma from the water there, and has made true connections with the roots of the people there.”
In fact, Tan found acclaim for Chinese-flavored pieces long before that. In 1979, he wrote a symphony based on a fourth-century Chinese lament. In 1983, he won his first big award, the Weber Prize, with a string quartet. His visit to Dresden to collect it was his first step into the Western world. Two years later, inspired by his grandmother’s death, he wrote an orchestral work, called “On Taoism.” These early pieces were, in his phrase, part of his “class struggle” against the atonal system. “I used folk resources to compete with the 12-tone system, as a challenge to Goehr and Schoenberg.” In 1989, he wrote “Nine Songs,” a musical version of classical Chinese poems, using ceramic instruments, another innovation based on tradition, and Chinese gongs.
Alexander Goehr was alluding to a musical trend among modern Chinese composers. What makes Tan interesting, however, is not just the music itself but his theatrical flair. As well as a composer and conductor, he is a man of the theater with an extraordinary talent for dramatic effects. Dance, Beijing opera, video art all have their places in his work. He is praised for his theatrical imagination as much as for his music. As the French critic Gérard Corneloup wrote in “Forum Opéra”: “Superb lighting, magnificent costumes, sumptuous voices and well-developed characters all participate in the sublime presentation of ethereal music that colors both words and phrases. Tan Dun is, indeed, Puccini miraculously reborn into the 21st century.”
Corneloup was referring specifically to an opera in three acts, titled “Tea: A Mirror of Soul.” It was first performed in Tokyo in 2002. I heard it in Stockholm. A few hours before the performance began, Tan explained his music to a roomful of Swedish music lovers. He was dressed in a modish black, semi-Chinese outfit and talked engagingly in English about his experience as a farmer in Hunan: “I can remember the young women, planting tea, getting covered in green from handling the leaves, their hands, their arms, their legs. I had an almost erotic fantasy of the soul going green too.”
Tea has a certain pedigree in expressions of Asian culture in the West. The most famous modern example is “The Book of Tea,” written by Kakuzo Okakura in English in 1906. This work was meant to show the essence of what Okakura, who lived and worked mostly in Boston, regarded as the essence of the Asian spirit. Far less well known is his opera, “The White Fox,” based on a Japanese legend and dedicated to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famous Boston patroness of the arts. In a way, Tan follows in Okakura’s footsteps. His art is an attempt to achieve something very few Asian artists have succeeded in doing: to forge something new, and at the same time traditional, by reworking Asian forms in Western idioms.
Tan’s opera “Tea” features a Japanese monk from Kyoto, who is actually a prince and becomes involved in a love triangle at the imperial Chinese court. The ancient “Book of Tea,” by Lu Yu, plays an important role in his rivalry with a Chinese prince. There is talk of Zen Buddhism, of water, fire and wind, of the “ways of tea.” The libretto, written by Tan and Xu Ying, resident playwright for the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, abounds in phrases like: “though bowl is empty, scent glows;/though shadow is gone, dream grows. . . .” Three female Japanese percussionists produced eerie and extraordinary sounds from rustling rice paper and bowls filled with water. The audience, judging from the applause, loved every minute of it.
There is no question that Tan uses Chinese culture in his music. The question is which Chinese culture. It may not be a culture that most contemporary Chinese people would recognize. Like the fortune cookie, much of it feels as if it were invented in America. This is not necessarily a bad thing. James Joyce recreated his Ireland living in Trieste, Paris and other places abroad. Distance can sharpen the imagination. I decided to ask Tan about this after his return to New York, to attend a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of “The Gate,” his multicultural opera featuring three theatrical heroines who died for love: Shakespeare’s Juliet; Koharu, heroine in the Japanese puppet play “Double Suicide”; and Yu Ji, from “Farewell My Concubine,” a Beijing opera about a woman who commits suicide for her lord.
We spoke in his office in Chelsea. He served me a cup of superb green tea from Zhejiang province. “When I came to New York in 1986,” he said, “to study composition at Columbia University, I lived downtown. At first I didn’t know how to bridge the musical distance between uptown and downtown. At Columbia, you immediately got into the atonal system. But downtown is so diverse: jazz, rock, the Blue Note, the Village Gate, the La MaMa theater. So I got jet-lagged. But I found a way to fix the distance. At night, downtown, I would meet with Meredith Monk, John Cage and Philip Glass. My jet lag between uptown and downtown reminded me where I was from. I looked back to the Eastern music I played before moving to Beijing. It all came back to me through my fascination with experimental music in downtown New York. Greenwich Village taught me about Chineseness from a world point of view.”
I asked him what role John Cage played in his development. I had read somewhere that Tan felt an instinctive cultural affinity with Cage’s experiments with music made with water, paper and kitchenware. He said: “Before John Cage, I didn’t pay attention to Lao-tzu” — the Taoist sage — “or the I Ching. But every time I spoke to Cage, it was as if I were talking to Lao-tzu, not an American, not John. We had dialogues about music in a very philosophical way — everything is an unanswered question.”
Tan would not be the first Asian artist to have reimported, as it were, Asian traditions from Western sources. Many Japanese rediscovered Zen in the 1960s by reading the American beat poets. But Chineseness from a world point of view is precisely what many Chinese in China didn’t like about “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” However slickly made and beautiful to look at, this kung-fu movie, with Tan’s score and Yo-Yo Ma’s sinuous cello, smacked to them of a fantasy tailored to Western taste. It could also be read the way I read it, as a nostalgic dream of overseas Chinese about a China that never was. But in fact Tan deals less in nostalgia than in juxtaposition, throwing elements from different cultures together.
Tan likes to say that he is like Marco Polo in the West. Or as he put it in an interview: “I’m a Marco Polo going backward from East to West.” What is perhaps his most famous opera is actually titled “Marco Polo” and features, apart from the Venetian explorer himself, Dante, Shakespeare and Mahler. The libretto is in English and Chinese, with smatterings of Italian and German. And the music ranges from Beijing opera to bits of Mahler. Completed in 1996, this work earned Tan the Grawemeyer Award for composition. Since its debut in Munich the same year, the opera has been performed all over the world.
Tan told me that when he writes his music, he has no specific audience in mind. But there is no question that the exoticism of his work is perfect for a globalized market hungry for new and unusual flavors. Tan expressed this perfectly in an interview with Hong Kong radio: “It’s not just listening to music. Also, the way we’re eating dinner, no more just French, Italian; we eat Mexican, Cantonese, Russian, Indonesian, Japanese. . . . ” In Stockholm, he told me how globalization offers new opportunities to artists, like himself, “not to standardize, or neutralize, but by giving people a chance to be seen.”
The danger of Tan’s huge commercial success is that it leads to a decorative, rather superficial kind of Chineseness. It is hard not to cringe a little when hearing such fortune cookie lyrics (in “Tea”) as: “In tea mind —/ woman makes life art,/man makes art life.” I asked Tan about the commercial constraints on his work, and he gave a very candid answer: “It is inescapable. You can’t avoid being commercialized. I don’t want to be, but I cannot resist it. I’m pushed that way. If my name is not a brand of Chinese culture in the avant-garde, Peter Gelb is not going to be behind me at the Metropolitan Opera.”
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, is known for his keenness to make opera more popular and has worked to open up a rather hidebound institution to a wider audience through television and video screenings and by bringing in famous filmmakers to direct operas or commissioning hot composers. He met Tan Dun while serving as president of the worldwide classical-music division of Sony. I sat with Gelb in his small, rather airless office deep in the bowels of the opera house. We spoke with half an eye on a television screen, showing the dress rehearsal of Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” with 227 extras, 118 chorus members, 41 dancers, four chickens, one horse and one goat.
“Look,” he said, when I asked him about the risks of what Alexander Goehr calls popularism, “most successful composers craved popular success. It’s only in recent decades that popular success was thought to be unseemly. But this is changing with composers like John Adams and Tan Dun. Tan is theatrically savvy, an entrepreneur in his instincts. He thinks visually. In his best pieces he has found an interesting balance between accessibility and originality.”
Gelb’s concern, as a manager who wants to “encourage popular success without compromising high artistic ideals,” is to make sure that Tan “continues to pursue that direction and not to become too derivative.” He paused. I asked: Derivative of whom? “Of himself.”
Tan’s most ambitious opera to date, “The First Emperor,” was not actually commissioned by Gelb, but he was manager of the Met by the time it was performed and has worked hard for a successful revival this month. Like all Tan’s operas, it is visually spectacular, with a Beijing opera singer, a phalanx of imperial soldiers, Chinese drums, an aluminum staircase with stones suspended from ropes representing the Great Wall of China and Plácido Domingo as the warlord who unified China in the third century B.C. The producer of this spectacle was Zhang Yimou, the director of such classic films as “Raise the Red Lantern” (1992) and “To Live” (1994). The music, borrowing a little from Puccini here, a little from Bernstein there, mixed with Chinese operatic effects, gongs and various improvised instruments using water, paper and stones, is the usual eclectic multicultural mix that Tan specializes in. The libretto, written with the novelist Ha Jin, is heavy with references to yin and yang. While the opera was still in production, Tan told The New York Times that “opera will no longer be a Western form, as it is no longer an Italian form. In the shamanistic sense, there is no East or West; all is human. Plácido and Zhang Yimou are also shamans.”
Not all the critics were impressed. Anthony Tommasini wrote in The Times: “His music does sing. And sing. And sing. On and on. . . . Mr. Tan’s goal in this work, it would seem, was to create a ritualistic and hypnotic lyricism. But ‘The First Emperor’ gives soaring melody a bad name.” Peter Davis wrote in New York magazine that “the lyrical set pieces in ‘The First Emperor’ are couched in a sickly sweet Americana idiom that sounds rather like watered-down Copland or Bernstein with a dash of Hollywood banality. Parts of Act Two, in fact, become so operetta-ish that I half-fancied Domingo might break into a song from Lehar’s ‘Land of Smiles.’ ”
Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, might seem a strange choice for a tragic hero in a spectacular opera. He ordered the building of the Great Wall, killed his critics, was the first recorded book burner in history and set the tone for the most brutal Chinese rulers to come (including Mao Zedong, who much admired him). In fact, however, although he was depicted through the centuries in China as a monster, he became a symbol of patriotic pride after the Communist revolution. Tan’s opera is decidedly ambiguous on this front, reflecting in a way the ambivalence that many Chinese feel about Chairman Mao. On the one hand, the opera is about the conflict between the ruler and the court composer, Gao Jianli (sung by Paul Groves). The emperor wants to be glorified; the composer wants to express himself. But the opera is also punctuated by rousing choruses rejoicing in a unified China.
Ha Jin, who now lives in Massachusetts but experienced the horrors of Maoism first hand, as did Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun, was not initially enthusiastic about the project. He told me on the phone that he didn’t like the idea of Qin Shi Huangdi, whom, like most Chinese, he saw as a symbol of harsh oppression. But his wife is a fan of Domingo’s. And Tan “persuaded me by saying it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Asian-Americans. And I thought it might be O.K. — not to celebrate the First Emperor but to highlight the conflict between the individual and the state.” So he accepted. Tan would send him texts in Chinese and Ha Jin would send back the revisions in English. But it didn’t quite turn out the way Jin hoped. He explained: “Zhang Yimou said there were two themes: conflict and patriotism. In his movie, ‘Hero,’ ” — also about the First Emperor, for which Tan wrote the score — “they highlighted one theme, patriotism. That’s the problem. I just wrote one line about China being united. Domingo sang it many times, ‘China! China! China!’ like a glorious moment, a celebration. But what can you do? I was just a worker.”
I asked Tan in Stockholm why he took on commissions that would obviously require a show of Chinese patriotism. Putting on “The First Emperor” for the Beijing Olympics would certainly have to be a patriotic gesture. He also wrote “Symphony 1997,” featuring Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist, for the official celebration of the handing over of Hong Kong. Peter Gelb claims responsibility for bringing the two stars together. Ma, he told me, “was interested, because he wanted to create music with ancient bells.” The first time I asked Tan about his relationship with the Chinese government, he gave the examples of Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the Soviet Union. He said: “A major commission from China is still focused on patriotic things. Like Shostakovich, sometimes we have no choice. But you can still express yourself. By doing ‘Symphony 1997,’ I could study bronze bells and introduce Yo-Yo Ma, as well as Western concepts, to China. There’s a way to educate the Communists without using their methods.” On the same occasion, Tan claimed that “The First Emperor” “reflects my own life, and that of Shostakovich.”
I found the comparison with Shostakovich odd, and told him so. After all, Tan was not confined to China but free to go and work anywhere he liked. Unlike Shostakovich, who had to contend with Joseph Stalin, Tan was not forced to do anything. We let the matter rest. Later, I asked him the same question at his office in New York. This time he gave a very different answer. “To me,” he said, with an impish smile, “it is the way for shamans to behave. I want to be playful, like a child, teasing the world, teasing the whole system. That is Taoism. It is not about political or cultural messages. It is a performance. Performance art.”
I suspect that this time he was telling the truth. Finding his stride, he continued: “I have no ego. The ego is to illustrate philosophical strangeness, to be a musical Taoist.” While I was mulling this over, he shifted in his chair and said: “And you know what? This strangeness helps my business. I have always worked with the best orchestras in the world. And never once did one of them fail to ask me back.” I can quite believe it. Whatever it is that is behind Tan’s extraordinary success, it surely isn’t innocence — or a lack of sophistication.
Friday, April 25, 2008
China: Amy Tan Reveals Stories of Dong Folk Songs
NPR All Things Considered
All Things Considered, April 25, 2008 - In the Southwest China village of Dimen, song takes the place of the written word. People in Dimen learn to read and write in the official national language — Mandarin Chinese — but they speak in their own tongue: the language of the Dong people.
Their voices imitate cicadas in the fields above the village. Dimen is isolated, but like most places in modern China, it's learning the greater world is not so far away. With the recently released collection, Dong Folk Songs: People and Nature in Harmony, people everywhere can now hear this unique song style.
American author Amy Tan has been a repeated visitor to Dimen. She wrote about her experience in National Geographic Magazine — the May 2008 issue is devoted solely to the country of China.
Before All Things Considered staff members left for Chengdu for a China series, Tan sat down with Robert Siegel to recall the first time she set foot in Dimen.
"Entering into the village I had little girls singing those songs — those dong songs, the welcoming songs — one at each elbow," Tan says. "However, the singing isn't just to welcome tourists, it's how the culture communicates with each other."
While these "gate-barring songs" are reserved mainly for tourists and official guests, the Dong song-style is a form of communication every child learns from the age of 5. "And they sing on key, on rhythm, perfectly a capella, in tune with one another," Tan says.
Young children not only sing to greet but also talk about community and the changing of seasons. The song "Spring Is Here, Swallows Fly" talks about the shortness of childhood, using birds as a metaphor:
After winter we get spring / Swallows fly amidst green leaves / Cicadas sing on top of berry trees / High and low sounds fill the mountains / Cicadas' songs are so beautiful, let's stop and listen / You can hear the mountains and forests resounding / Even the birds would stop and listen / There is music, there is love / All four seasons are filled with happiness / We are happy in our hearts
Across the Dong culture, most of the songs celebrate the natural world.
"Many of the songs are about nature, listening to nature," Tan says. "There's a lot about being out in the field working and realizing that even though your life is very hard and you're working constantly and it never stops, no matter what the season or the weather, there is this beauty."
But Dimen's rich oral history is at risk. Only one woman can sing the hours-long story that recounts the entire story of the Dimen people and the younger generation doesn't seem interested in learning it.
"There was a couple, two couples, on a bridge — Lover's Lane — smooching," Tan says. "And I asked them what they like to sing. 'Karaoke.' I asked them about their other songs. Yes, they do sing the Cicada songs, they love those songs. How about the song about the history of their village? 'That song is boring.' 'Would you ever learn it?' 'No, I don't think so.'
"So it was a very sad feeling, as I listened to this woman sing this song over dinner, that she would probably be the last person to know this song."
All Things Considered, April 25, 2008 - In the Southwest China village of Dimen, song takes the place of the written word. People in Dimen learn to read and write in the official national language — Mandarin Chinese — but they speak in their own tongue: the language of the Dong people.
Their voices imitate cicadas in the fields above the village. Dimen is isolated, but like most places in modern China, it's learning the greater world is not so far away. With the recently released collection, Dong Folk Songs: People and Nature in Harmony, people everywhere can now hear this unique song style.
American author Amy Tan has been a repeated visitor to Dimen. She wrote about her experience in National Geographic Magazine — the May 2008 issue is devoted solely to the country of China.
Before All Things Considered staff members left for Chengdu for a China series, Tan sat down with Robert Siegel to recall the first time she set foot in Dimen.
"Entering into the village I had little girls singing those songs — those dong songs, the welcoming songs — one at each elbow," Tan says. "However, the singing isn't just to welcome tourists, it's how the culture communicates with each other."
While these "gate-barring songs" are reserved mainly for tourists and official guests, the Dong song-style is a form of communication every child learns from the age of 5. "And they sing on key, on rhythm, perfectly a capella, in tune with one another," Tan says.
Young children not only sing to greet but also talk about community and the changing of seasons. The song "Spring Is Here, Swallows Fly" talks about the shortness of childhood, using birds as a metaphor:
After winter we get spring / Swallows fly amidst green leaves / Cicadas sing on top of berry trees / High and low sounds fill the mountains / Cicadas' songs are so beautiful, let's stop and listen / You can hear the mountains and forests resounding / Even the birds would stop and listen / There is music, there is love / All four seasons are filled with happiness / We are happy in our hearts
Across the Dong culture, most of the songs celebrate the natural world.
"Many of the songs are about nature, listening to nature," Tan says. "There's a lot about being out in the field working and realizing that even though your life is very hard and you're working constantly and it never stops, no matter what the season or the weather, there is this beauty."
But Dimen's rich oral history is at risk. Only one woman can sing the hours-long story that recounts the entire story of the Dimen people and the younger generation doesn't seem interested in learning it.
"There was a couple, two couples, on a bridge — Lover's Lane — smooching," Tan says. "And I asked them what they like to sing. 'Karaoke.' I asked them about their other songs. Yes, they do sing the Cicada songs, they love those songs. How about the song about the history of their village? 'That song is boring.' 'Would you ever learn it?' 'No, I don't think so.'
"So it was a very sad feeling, as I listened to this woman sing this song over dinner, that she would probably be the last person to know this song."
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sa Dingding, Breakthrough Chinese Artist
World Music Central
Sa Dingding, The Breakthrough Chinese Artist, Wins Major BBC World Music Award and is Nominated for Audience Award
04/15/2008 06:34AM
Contributed by: WMC_News_Dept.
AwardsLondon, UK - Singer/songwriter Sa Dingding is helping to keep the spotlight on her native China in this Olympic year by winning the prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Asia Pacific. This award helps establish Sa Dingding as the new face - and voice - of China around the world.
Sa Dingding is also due to appear at the Award Winners’ Concert on 30th July at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms and is confirmed artist for the WOMAD festival.
The prestigious BBC World Music award is based on the album Alive which was released globally last year through Universal Music, and which drew worldwide critical acclaim.
Sa Dingding has created a powerful and sophisticated sound by fusing the music of Chinese folk traditions and minority religions - including Tibetan Buddhism - with Western dance music and electronica. This is overlaid with her strong, haunting voice to create a uniquely appealing sound.
Sa Dingding is already well known in China, having won the title ‘Best Dance Music Singer’ there after the release of her first album in 1998. With growing international recognition, her recent trip to the UK generated significant interest from a diverse range of media, including Newsnight and the Independent.
Sa Dingding’s fascination with the music of music from the South Asian region stems from her own background; she is half Mongolian. She plays traditional Chinese string, wind and percussion instruments, and writes in several languages including Sanskrit and one she created herself from the emotions evoked by music.
More information about the Alive album and Sa Dingding is available at www.sadingding.co.uk.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Chinese Underground Avant-Garde Music
New York Times
October 27, 2007
Growing Underground Is Making Noise in China
By BEN SISARIO
BEIJING — Down a short alley in the sprawling, tourist-mobbed 798 art district here — a complex of 1950s-era military factories converted into galleries and studios — is a tiny shop that serves as one of the centers of China’s small but thriving experimental music scene.
The store, Sugar Jar, is barely big enough to accommodate a half-dozen customers, and one wall displays all the essentials of the genre, from discs of abstract electronica and brutal noise-rock to anthologies with bold titles like “China: The Sonic Avant-Garde.” Playing samples from his stock, the proprietor, a lanky, soft-spoken man named Lao Yang, noted proudly that his store is one of the only spots in all of Beijing to buy much of this music.
Like Sugar Jar, avant-garde music occupies a minuscule niche in Chinese society, overshadowed by the larger and vastly more lucrative world of contemporary visual art. Only a few dozen musicians around the country make up this circle, but their work has begun to attract international attention, and over the last several years a steady stream of Western musicians, including Brian Eno and the New York guitarist Elliott Sharp, have visited and given their blessing.
“The feeling of the scene in Beijing is exciting and reminds me of New York in 1979,” said Mr. Sharp, who last performed here in April. “There’s a tangible sense of discovery and transgression.”
Though China may be in the beginnings of a new love affair with consumerism, rigid cultural controls are still in place, and discovery and transgression are values not widely held by the Communist government. Following President Hu Jintao’s call for moral purity in society, broadcasters have come under increasing pressure lately to keep potentially subversive material — which means anything but sugary, shallow pop — off the airwaves. At the end of the Communist Party Congress in October, the official Chinese Music Association denounced the “vulgar” pop music reaching the nation’s youth through the Internet.
Growing out of rock and electronic music, and operating outside the state-supported classical sphere, the experimental scene in China has existed for barely a decade. Its hub is Beijing, with the electronic performers Wang Fan, Sulumi, Yan Jun and FM3; Sun Wei, who creates sound collages under the name 718; and Dou Wei, one of China’s biggest rock stars, whose solo career includes numerous spacey, dreamlike albums that incorporate traditional instrumentation.
Shanghai has one of the most extreme noise groups, Torturing Nurse, which sometimes performs with a female member in a nurse’s uniform. Huanqing, from Sichuan Province, makes field recordings from the hinterlands of China and manipulates them with electronics.
Though Western styles have influenced them, the Chinese musicians have for the most part developed in isolation, and their work is flush with the excitement of creating a new kind of music with no previous national model.
“Chinese people don’t know the best music system,” said Mr. Yan, who is also an influential critic. “There are no rules. No teacher. I can use this, I can use that — that’s all interesting. In the West everything was created already. But here we don’t know that.”
In Beijing the subculture that surrounds this music is so small that most of the major participants often turn up at a weekly concert and gathering at 2Kolegas, a bar inside a drive-in movie complex on the east side of town. One recent night Mr. Yan led an audience-participation performance that involved strips of plastic sound triggers laid on the floor, to be danced on, stepped on or smacked.
It could have been a musical game of the kind that flourished in downtown New York lofts in the 1970s, except for the overhead ambient music with Chinese instrumentation that played through a sound system. Among those in the crowd were the members of FM3, who frequently employ Chinese sound elements, as well as Wu Na, who plays the zitherlike guqin.
Despite the new openness of Chinese society and its arts, the stultifying influence of the state is still felt in mass entertainment like the candied pop that fills the airwaves, and even in the often dull music coming out of the universities.
Kenneth Fields, a professor of electronic music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, complained of a lack of creativity and free thought among students at his and other universities. The most exciting new music in China, he said, comes from the underground.
“Media is very centrally controlled at the top; at the bottom it seems to be a mirror of anarchy,” Professor Fields said. “There’s no innovation at the top, but on the bottom there’s a lot of informal freedoms.”
The experimental and underground rock musicians represent the most creative contingent of Chinese music, and the scene has had its first bona fide international hit: FM3’s Buddha Machine, a device slightly bigger than an iPod that plays nine electronic drones, has sold nearly 50,000 units around the world and already spawned remix albums.
Christiaan Virant, an American-born musician who is half of FM3, arrived at 2Kolegas in a spiffy black suit with a while silk scarf and a white Panama hat. (The other half is a Chinese man, Zhang Jian.) His new prosperity, he said, is “all 100 percent thanks to the Buddha Machine.”
But this music has received scant attention at home, from the marketplace or, for good or ill, from the government. The Buddha Machine is not widely available in China, because the low price demanded by the domestic market would make the cost of distributing it prohibitive, Mr. Virant said. (It is, of course, for sale at Sugar Jar.)
Like most pockets of avant-garde music, the Chinese musicians have no real commercial prospects. And while relatively few links exist to contemporary visual arts, that world and its moneyed clientele provide essential ancillary income.
Artists who might have minimal record sales — meaning hundreds of copies, or even fewer — can make money doing sound installations at galleries and, increasingly, through commissions from real estate developers looking to add a cool factor to their buildings by using sound art commissioned from underground musicians.
“There are huge amounts of rich people in China who lavish huge amounts of money on weird stuff,” Mr. Virant said.
The attention did not seem so lavish one recent afternoon at Sugar Jar. Over a few hours several curious gallerygoers wandered into the shop and looked around at the CDs for sale, though none bought anything. Mr. Lao said he operates the store without a proper retail license — that, he said, would necessitate stocking music for mainstream tastes, an intolerable concession — and until recently slept in the back.
He said he had no illusions that the music he sells will be accepted by a mass audience. He added that what he hopes for most is support from the government in the form of public festivals and other profile-raising events.
“Even though this music can’t be accepted by most of the people,” he said, “this is the real music of China.”
October 27, 2007
Growing Underground Is Making Noise in China
By BEN SISARIO
BEIJING — Down a short alley in the sprawling, tourist-mobbed 798 art district here — a complex of 1950s-era military factories converted into galleries and studios — is a tiny shop that serves as one of the centers of China’s small but thriving experimental music scene.
The store, Sugar Jar, is barely big enough to accommodate a half-dozen customers, and one wall displays all the essentials of the genre, from discs of abstract electronica and brutal noise-rock to anthologies with bold titles like “China: The Sonic Avant-Garde.” Playing samples from his stock, the proprietor, a lanky, soft-spoken man named Lao Yang, noted proudly that his store is one of the only spots in all of Beijing to buy much of this music.
Like Sugar Jar, avant-garde music occupies a minuscule niche in Chinese society, overshadowed by the larger and vastly more lucrative world of contemporary visual art. Only a few dozen musicians around the country make up this circle, but their work has begun to attract international attention, and over the last several years a steady stream of Western musicians, including Brian Eno and the New York guitarist Elliott Sharp, have visited and given their blessing.
“The feeling of the scene in Beijing is exciting and reminds me of New York in 1979,” said Mr. Sharp, who last performed here in April. “There’s a tangible sense of discovery and transgression.”
Though China may be in the beginnings of a new love affair with consumerism, rigid cultural controls are still in place, and discovery and transgression are values not widely held by the Communist government. Following President Hu Jintao’s call for moral purity in society, broadcasters have come under increasing pressure lately to keep potentially subversive material — which means anything but sugary, shallow pop — off the airwaves. At the end of the Communist Party Congress in October, the official Chinese Music Association denounced the “vulgar” pop music reaching the nation’s youth through the Internet.
Growing out of rock and electronic music, and operating outside the state-supported classical sphere, the experimental scene in China has existed for barely a decade. Its hub is Beijing, with the electronic performers Wang Fan, Sulumi, Yan Jun and FM3; Sun Wei, who creates sound collages under the name 718; and Dou Wei, one of China’s biggest rock stars, whose solo career includes numerous spacey, dreamlike albums that incorporate traditional instrumentation.
Shanghai has one of the most extreme noise groups, Torturing Nurse, which sometimes performs with a female member in a nurse’s uniform. Huanqing, from Sichuan Province, makes field recordings from the hinterlands of China and manipulates them with electronics.
Though Western styles have influenced them, the Chinese musicians have for the most part developed in isolation, and their work is flush with the excitement of creating a new kind of music with no previous national model.
“Chinese people don’t know the best music system,” said Mr. Yan, who is also an influential critic. “There are no rules. No teacher. I can use this, I can use that — that’s all interesting. In the West everything was created already. But here we don’t know that.”
In Beijing the subculture that surrounds this music is so small that most of the major participants often turn up at a weekly concert and gathering at 2Kolegas, a bar inside a drive-in movie complex on the east side of town. One recent night Mr. Yan led an audience-participation performance that involved strips of plastic sound triggers laid on the floor, to be danced on, stepped on or smacked.
It could have been a musical game of the kind that flourished in downtown New York lofts in the 1970s, except for the overhead ambient music with Chinese instrumentation that played through a sound system. Among those in the crowd were the members of FM3, who frequently employ Chinese sound elements, as well as Wu Na, who plays the zitherlike guqin.
Despite the new openness of Chinese society and its arts, the stultifying influence of the state is still felt in mass entertainment like the candied pop that fills the airwaves, and even in the often dull music coming out of the universities.
Kenneth Fields, a professor of electronic music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, complained of a lack of creativity and free thought among students at his and other universities. The most exciting new music in China, he said, comes from the underground.
“Media is very centrally controlled at the top; at the bottom it seems to be a mirror of anarchy,” Professor Fields said. “There’s no innovation at the top, but on the bottom there’s a lot of informal freedoms.”
The experimental and underground rock musicians represent the most creative contingent of Chinese music, and the scene has had its first bona fide international hit: FM3’s Buddha Machine, a device slightly bigger than an iPod that plays nine electronic drones, has sold nearly 50,000 units around the world and already spawned remix albums.
Christiaan Virant, an American-born musician who is half of FM3, arrived at 2Kolegas in a spiffy black suit with a while silk scarf and a white Panama hat. (The other half is a Chinese man, Zhang Jian.) His new prosperity, he said, is “all 100 percent thanks to the Buddha Machine.”
But this music has received scant attention at home, from the marketplace or, for good or ill, from the government. The Buddha Machine is not widely available in China, because the low price demanded by the domestic market would make the cost of distributing it prohibitive, Mr. Virant said. (It is, of course, for sale at Sugar Jar.)
Like most pockets of avant-garde music, the Chinese musicians have no real commercial prospects. And while relatively few links exist to contemporary visual arts, that world and its moneyed clientele provide essential ancillary income.
Artists who might have minimal record sales — meaning hundreds of copies, or even fewer — can make money doing sound installations at galleries and, increasingly, through commissions from real estate developers looking to add a cool factor to their buildings by using sound art commissioned from underground musicians.
“There are huge amounts of rich people in China who lavish huge amounts of money on weird stuff,” Mr. Virant said.
The attention did not seem so lavish one recent afternoon at Sugar Jar. Over a few hours several curious gallerygoers wandered into the shop and looked around at the CDs for sale, though none bought anything. Mr. Lao said he operates the store without a proper retail license — that, he said, would necessitate stocking music for mainstream tastes, an intolerable concession — and until recently slept in the back.
He said he had no illusions that the music he sells will be accepted by a mass audience. He added that what he hopes for most is support from the government in the form of public festivals and other profile-raising events.
“Even though this music can’t be accepted by most of the people,” he said, “this is the real music of China.”
Thursday, August 23, 2007
China's Latest Export: Anti-Establishment Music
Morning Edition, August 17, 2007 · China, the world's top exporter of laptop computers, T-shirts and toys is now trying to export indie rock. The country's largest independent record label has just released its first album in the United States, by a band called Rebuilding the Rights of Statues.
The band toured the United States before the album's release, performing at the South by Southwest musical festival in Austin, Texas, and several shows in New York.
The art of making anti-establishment music in a non-democratic state can come in the translation. The three members of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS for short, compose in English.
The band is required to translate all of its lyrics into Chinese and submit them to the government for approval.
Meng Jin Hui is a manager at Modern Sky, China's largest independent record label.
"Maybe sometimes when we translate, it might be wrong," he says.
For example, the band translated the title of its song "Hang the Police" as "the police are laughing."
Often they'll translate literally. As is the case with any language, the literal translations sometimes don't make sense. And that can work to the band's advantage.
Still, lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong insists he's not intimidated by the government censors.
"It's like a game of cat and mouse to see who can win," he says.
Hua says that dealing with the government forces his band to be subtler in its lyrics.
"It's just different from the West, where people are very direct with what they say," he says. "They just say what they want. But in China how we say things is not very direct. I think this adds depth to what we're doing, and it's fun."
Hua's pragmatic view is typical of many rock musicians in China who grew up in the '80s and '90s during the country's rapid economic boom.
Shen Li Hui founded the Modern Sky label 10 years ago when his own band wanted to record an album.
"Actually the Chinese government is not really that bad," he says. "Within the last 10 years, it has changed quite a bit. Of course, the situation is still not ideal, but the government is more open and liberal than before."
China's first generation of rock bands emerged a few years before the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Those groups focused more on politics. Today's bands are more interested in art, Shen says.
But the art still needs some work, says Trey McArver. He traveled to China four years ago and discovered an indie rock scene in Wuhan, a grimy industrial city of more than 8 million people, where he now owns a club with a Chinese partner.
McArver says his first encounter with the music captured the excitement of shows in the United States.
"It was in this abandoned building on the fifth floor," he recalls. "It was dirty. And there were all these kids there with mohawks and tight, black jeans, and just something I had not seen in China at all."
Then, the music started.
"They couldn't even play their instruments," McArver says. "They would play for 30 seconds or a minute and they would have to stop and they would start over, or try to go to the next song."
Many bands, McArver says, are simply copying things they've heard from Western acts.
Re-TROS' musicians say they're influenced by groups like Interpol, Gang of Four and Joy Division.
McArver says that while Re-TROS' songs aren't completely original, the band still has something to say.
"It's a little bit more thoughtful and it's very sincere," he says. "They're not making music to be cool."
A steady performance schedule earns Re-TROS the equivalent of $300 dollars a month, barely enough for the three musicians to live on in Beijing. But right now, they say their main goal is to make music.
Re-TROS bass player Liu Min says that one benefit to releasing an album in the United States is to show Americans a side of China they might not have heard before.
"We don't expect it will be a big seller," she says. "But of course, we are excited to come to the U.S., the most developed rock 'n' roll market in the world. And if Americans hear us, they might see the progress that rock 'n' roll music in China has made."
The band toured the United States before the album's release, performing at the South by Southwest musical festival in Austin, Texas, and several shows in New York.
The art of making anti-establishment music in a non-democratic state can come in the translation. The three members of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS for short, compose in English.
The band is required to translate all of its lyrics into Chinese and submit them to the government for approval.
Meng Jin Hui is a manager at Modern Sky, China's largest independent record label.
"Maybe sometimes when we translate, it might be wrong," he says.
For example, the band translated the title of its song "Hang the Police" as "the police are laughing."
Often they'll translate literally. As is the case with any language, the literal translations sometimes don't make sense. And that can work to the band's advantage.
Still, lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong insists he's not intimidated by the government censors.
"It's like a game of cat and mouse to see who can win," he says.
Hua says that dealing with the government forces his band to be subtler in its lyrics.
"It's just different from the West, where people are very direct with what they say," he says. "They just say what they want. But in China how we say things is not very direct. I think this adds depth to what we're doing, and it's fun."
Hua's pragmatic view is typical of many rock musicians in China who grew up in the '80s and '90s during the country's rapid economic boom.
Shen Li Hui founded the Modern Sky label 10 years ago when his own band wanted to record an album.
"Actually the Chinese government is not really that bad," he says. "Within the last 10 years, it has changed quite a bit. Of course, the situation is still not ideal, but the government is more open and liberal than before."
China's first generation of rock bands emerged a few years before the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Those groups focused more on politics. Today's bands are more interested in art, Shen says.
But the art still needs some work, says Trey McArver. He traveled to China four years ago and discovered an indie rock scene in Wuhan, a grimy industrial city of more than 8 million people, where he now owns a club with a Chinese partner.
McArver says his first encounter with the music captured the excitement of shows in the United States.
"It was in this abandoned building on the fifth floor," he recalls. "It was dirty. And there were all these kids there with mohawks and tight, black jeans, and just something I had not seen in China at all."
Then, the music started.
"They couldn't even play their instruments," McArver says. "They would play for 30 seconds or a minute and they would have to stop and they would start over, or try to go to the next song."
Many bands, McArver says, are simply copying things they've heard from Western acts.
Re-TROS' musicians say they're influenced by groups like Interpol, Gang of Four and Joy Division.
McArver says that while Re-TROS' songs aren't completely original, the band still has something to say.
"It's a little bit more thoughtful and it's very sincere," he says. "They're not making music to be cool."
A steady performance schedule earns Re-TROS the equivalent of $300 dollars a month, barely enough for the three musicians to live on in Beijing. But right now, they say their main goal is to make music.
Re-TROS bass player Liu Min says that one benefit to releasing an album in the United States is to show Americans a side of China they might not have heard before.
"We don't expect it will be a big seller," she says. "But of course, we are excited to come to the U.S., the most developed rock 'n' roll market in the world. And if Americans hear us, they might see the progress that rock 'n' roll music in China has made."
Monday, August 13, 2007
Digital Music Project Races to Save Tibetan Folk Songs
Digital Music Project Races to Save Tibetan Folk Songs
Paul Mooney in Red Cliff Village, China
for National Geographic News
June 29, 2007
In the remote plateaus of Tibet, recording artists have been hard at work laying down tracks of love ballads, drinking tunes, and songs meant to soothe the savage beast.
That's because students at Qinghai Normal University are trying to save Tibetan folk music, which has been vanishing in the face of cultural conflict and globalization.
Led by anthropology professor Gerald Roche, the team is fighting fire with fire, using high-tech devices to capture tunes that are being lost due in part to encroaching modernization.
"The goal is to digitalize the songs we record and return them to our communities," said 20-year-old student Dawa Drolma. "We want to record as many songs as possible."
Dubbed the Tibetan Endangered Music Project (TEMP), the volunteer-run program aims to put all the digital songs they collect online, as a way of archiving the material for future generations.
So far the students have recorded more than 250 songs, including melodies for herding, harvesting, singing babies to sleep, and coaxing yaks into giving more milk.
"It is quite remarkable how much they have been able to accomplish from such a remote place, thanks to the Internet and digital recording technology," said Jonathan C. Kramer, a professor of music at North Carolina State University who has worked with the students.
"It is hard to imagine such a project even 20 years ago."
Fading Melodies
Tibetan music first went on the decline during the Cultural Revolution, a campaign between 1966 and 1976 during which the Chinese government sought to wipe out all "feudal" practices and "make art serve politics."
The biggest threat today, however, is modernization.
"After we got electricity ten years ago, people began buying tape recorders, radios, and TVs, and then they began losing interest in traditional things," Drolma said of her remote village in Gansu province.
Anne-Laure Cromphout, a doctoral student at the Free University of Brussels, is doing research at Qinghai on the relationship between traditional and modern Tibetan music.
She said another problem has been the influx of modern Chinese pop music.
"People hear this music all the time on the radio, on [video CDs], and cassette tapes," she said. "It comes in and basically takes over."
Mechanization has also had an impact, she added.
"Butter-churning songs are disappearing, because there are now electric machines to do this and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm."
In a barren mountain region west of the provincial capital of Xining, TEMP volunteer Drolma sits with two grandmothers in a farmhouse in Red Cliff Village who are repeating the words of an ancient folk song.
The women are bent close as if in prayer, each cupping her left hand over an ear so she can hear her own voice more clearly.
The women are learning an ancient song linked to the hair-changing ceremony, a rare rite that celebrates a girl becoming a woman.
No one knows how long this tradition has existed here, but they do know the songs are fading from memory.
Cairang Ji, 61, is the only person in the village who still knows how to sing the 30-minute song. She is trying to pass the words on to her two neighbors.
Kramer, of North Carolina State, said that the assimilation of native peoples around the world has stripped them of traditional languages, beliefs, customs, and forms of expression.
The result is a marked incidence of alienation, alcoholism, and suicide among younger members of these groups, Kramer said.
These people, "having lost their traditional identity, seem to have lost some of their capacity to function effectively as human beings," he said.
The raw material of the music archive, he said, could be used to train folk singers and teachers to continue traditions.
"Educational curricula can be developed to teach children the songs of their ancestors, and from these songs learn about the ways of life that were once practiced by their parents and grandparents."
Keeping Up the Tempo
But financial hurdles still need to be addressed to keep the project up and running.
"Cultural preservation is not very high on the list of funding priorities in an area where basic human needs still need so much improvement," TEMP leader Roche said.
The recording equipment being used now is secondhand, and during this year's sessions, 6 of the 17 students reported their machines breaking down.
Back in Red Cliff Village, one of the grandmothers, Pumao Ji, is persuaded to take the mike. The shy Tibetan farmer belts out songs with a surprisingly strong voice for 30 minutes.
After she finishes, she puts on the headphones and for the first time hears what her own voice sounds like on tape.
"I like it," she said, smiling. But "I'm not as good as when I was young."
Pumao Ji and Pumao, the other villager who has come to learn the hair-changing song, say they're determined that the music will survive them.
"We'll teach this to the younger generation," Pumao said. "If we don't, the songs will disappear, and I'll feel sad."
Paul Mooney in Red Cliff Village, China
for National Geographic News
June 29, 2007
In the remote plateaus of Tibet, recording artists have been hard at work laying down tracks of love ballads, drinking tunes, and songs meant to soothe the savage beast.
That's because students at Qinghai Normal University are trying to save Tibetan folk music, which has been vanishing in the face of cultural conflict and globalization.
Led by anthropology professor Gerald Roche, the team is fighting fire with fire, using high-tech devices to capture tunes that are being lost due in part to encroaching modernization.
"The goal is to digitalize the songs we record and return them to our communities," said 20-year-old student Dawa Drolma. "We want to record as many songs as possible."
Dubbed the Tibetan Endangered Music Project (TEMP), the volunteer-run program aims to put all the digital songs they collect online, as a way of archiving the material for future generations.
So far the students have recorded more than 250 songs, including melodies for herding, harvesting, singing babies to sleep, and coaxing yaks into giving more milk.
"It is quite remarkable how much they have been able to accomplish from such a remote place, thanks to the Internet and digital recording technology," said Jonathan C. Kramer, a professor of music at North Carolina State University who has worked with the students.
"It is hard to imagine such a project even 20 years ago."
Fading Melodies
Tibetan music first went on the decline during the Cultural Revolution, a campaign between 1966 and 1976 during which the Chinese government sought to wipe out all "feudal" practices and "make art serve politics."
The biggest threat today, however, is modernization.
"After we got electricity ten years ago, people began buying tape recorders, radios, and TVs, and then they began losing interest in traditional things," Drolma said of her remote village in Gansu province.
Anne-Laure Cromphout, a doctoral student at the Free University of Brussels, is doing research at Qinghai on the relationship between traditional and modern Tibetan music.
She said another problem has been the influx of modern Chinese pop music.
"People hear this music all the time on the radio, on [video CDs], and cassette tapes," she said. "It comes in and basically takes over."
Mechanization has also had an impact, she added.
"Butter-churning songs are disappearing, because there are now electric machines to do this and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm."
In a barren mountain region west of the provincial capital of Xining, TEMP volunteer Drolma sits with two grandmothers in a farmhouse in Red Cliff Village who are repeating the words of an ancient folk song.
The women are bent close as if in prayer, each cupping her left hand over an ear so she can hear her own voice more clearly.
The women are learning an ancient song linked to the hair-changing ceremony, a rare rite that celebrates a girl becoming a woman.
No one knows how long this tradition has existed here, but they do know the songs are fading from memory.
Cairang Ji, 61, is the only person in the village who still knows how to sing the 30-minute song. She is trying to pass the words on to her two neighbors.
Kramer, of North Carolina State, said that the assimilation of native peoples around the world has stripped them of traditional languages, beliefs, customs, and forms of expression.
The result is a marked incidence of alienation, alcoholism, and suicide among younger members of these groups, Kramer said.
These people, "having lost their traditional identity, seem to have lost some of their capacity to function effectively as human beings," he said.
The raw material of the music archive, he said, could be used to train folk singers and teachers to continue traditions.
"Educational curricula can be developed to teach children the songs of their ancestors, and from these songs learn about the ways of life that were once practiced by their parents and grandparents."
Keeping Up the Tempo
But financial hurdles still need to be addressed to keep the project up and running.
"Cultural preservation is not very high on the list of funding priorities in an area where basic human needs still need so much improvement," TEMP leader Roche said.
The recording equipment being used now is secondhand, and during this year's sessions, 6 of the 17 students reported their machines breaking down.
Back in Red Cliff Village, one of the grandmothers, Pumao Ji, is persuaded to take the mike. The shy Tibetan farmer belts out songs with a surprisingly strong voice for 30 minutes.
After she finishes, she puts on the headphones and for the first time hears what her own voice sounds like on tape.
"I like it," she said, smiling. But "I'm not as good as when I was young."
Pumao Ji and Pumao, the other villager who has come to learn the hair-changing song, say they're determined that the music will survive them.
"We'll teach this to the younger generation," Pumao said. "If we don't, the songs will disappear, and I'll feel sad."
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Pilgrim With an Oboe, Citizen of the World
NYT
April 8, 2007
Pilgrim With an Oboe, Citizen of the World
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
DRESSED in black, his oval face adorned with sideburns and an upturned lock of hair, the slender oboist looked like a New Wave Tintin as he took his seat on stage for an orchestra rehearsal.
He turned and chatted with the bassoonist behind him, waved shyly to a violinist across the stage and exchanged words with the neighboring principal flutist, who threw his head back in laughter.
The man in black, Liang Wang, all of 26, was only a few months into his first season as principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic. It is an enormous job: giver of the tuning pitch A, de facto leader of the woodwinds, a major solo voice. Around him were some of the toughest, most expert orchestra players in the world, several of whom had joined the orchestra long before Mr. Wang was born.
By all accounts the players — most important, the woodwind section — have embraced him. For his part Mr. Wang said in an interview, he feels at home.
“People are just so supportive of me, and allow me to express myself as an artist,” said Mr. Wang, who conveys a mix of self-assurance, unfeigned humility and amazement at where he has arrived. “They really welcome people who are trying to make something musical.”
Although he does not want to sound cocky, Mr. Wang said, he has an inner security about his abilities. “If you don’t have the goods,” he added, “people aren’t going to put up with you.”
It is an extraordinary place to be for a young man who just a little more than a decade ago was playing his oboe in a practice room in Beijing. But Mr. Wang’s hiring was also a clarion example of the strides musicians from China have made in the realm of Western classical music. They have become a powerful presence as soloists, orchestra members and conservatory students.
Immigrants — Russians, Japanese and Koreans — have long filled out orchestral string sections and excelled as pianists. But Chinese musicians have to a large extent broken out of those areas, lending their talents to woodwinds, brass and percussion instruments as well, despite the generally lower quality of teaching of those instruments in China.
Two of the finest students now in the Juilliard School’s precollege division, teachers there say, are a Chinese clarinetist and a Chinese marimba player.
Mr. Wang’s rise has been meteoric.
Orchestra auditions are grueling competitions to win coveted lifetime jobs. Hundreds of musicians often vie for a position. Winning a first chair in a major orchestra is like winning tenure at an Ivy League university.
Mr. Wang’s touch on the audition circuit was golden from the start, so successful that he won jobs faster than he could take them, although it is also true that he came up at a time when an unusually large number of top jobs were open.
He was appointed principal oboist at the Richmond Symphony in Virginia in 2003 but never showed up, having won an audition for the principal position at the San Francisco Ballet. Then came an appointment to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra as associate principal oboist. He lasted two weeks before grabbing the principal job at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
While there he was a finalist at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He won an audition for the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago, a summer job, which was rendered moot by an appointment at the Santa Fe Opera.
“There’s an incredible combination of talent and personality,” said Paavo Jarvi, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony. “Liang is a good example of what’s right with musical education here at the highest level.” The veterans of the Cincinnati woodwind section, some old enough to be Mr. Wang’s grandparents, immediately accepted him as a colleague, Mr. Jarvi said.
After a season in Cincinnati, Mr. Wang won the equivalent of full professorships at Harvard and Yale, simultaneously. He received offers as principal oboist from both the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.
He used the Met offer to negotiate a better package from the Philharmonic, where he could play for a favorite conductor, the music director Lorin Maazel. The job would also be less grueling than the Met’s and more high-profile, offering a heavy weekly dose of oboe solos.
“I enjoy being put on the spot,” Mr. Wang said. “I like the pressure.”
He took some ribbing from his new colleagues for his flighty job history. “I became the ‘two-weeks guy,’ ” he said.
Despite his extraordinary ability and success, Mr. Wang, like many Asian-born musicians, has had to confront preconceptions about his ability to connect with Western classical music. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Richard Woodhams of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a German conductor said he would be happy to show Mr. Wang how to play Brahms, since it was not in his culture, he recounted.
“You don’t have to be German to play Brahms,” Mr. Wang said. “I was very hurt. People think that way? It never occurred to me.”
Mr. Woodhams counseled him to work extra hard because some critics would blame stylistic failings on his nationality, Mr. Wang said. “I had to go the extra mile,” he added. “It may seem like I won a lot of auditions. But I worked harder.”
Sometimes, Mr. Wang said, he gets naïve questions like, “Did you listen to classical music when you were growing up?”
“There are things called CD players,” he said with some sarcasm. He pointed out that he probably grew up listening to far more classical music than most American youngsters. “The thing I don’t understand is why it should make a difference,” he said. “I am a Chinese guy when I look in the mirror, but I’m a world citizen of music.”
At the Philharmonic players in the woodwind section praise Mr. Wang as having a tone easy to blend with, rock-solid intonation and great sensitivity and musicality.
“He’s a very mature player, beyond his years,” said Judith LeClair, the principal bassoonist. “He’s a wonderful colleague. It’s just all music. He’s just very humble and wants to do his job.” Mr. Wang said he feels that acceptance when he senses the other members of the wind section following his lead when he makes subtle changes of character or color.
Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said he was frustrated that Mr. Wang did not take the job there after an extensive search but did not begrudge him the choice. Mr. Wang impressed him, he said, during a tryout concert performance that included Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto. The oboe part is notoriously extensive and difficult.
“It was remarkable how quickly he grasped it,” Mr. Thomas said. “It became real music very, very quickly.”
Mr. Wang auditioned for the New York Philharmonic in May 2005, having practiced for a month in his closet, where the dead acoustic laid bare the tiniest flaws. (“Trust me,” he said, “it doesn’t sound good at all.”) He played for two trial periods, including a concert with no rehearsals. Mr. Maazel wanted to see if he could handle the pressure, it seemed to Mr. Wang. “I like excitement like that,” he said.
For the Met audition, he learned 34 excerpts from 18 operas, then listened through the operas to understand the contexts of the excerpts.
He was offered the Philharmonic job last June and now occupies the Alice Tully Chair as principal oboist. “The hard work paid off,” he said.
MR. WANG is from Tsingtao, which is in the province of Shandong, the home of Lao-tzu and Confucius. As a former German and Japanese colony, Tsingtao is the cradle of many fine Chinese musicians. His mother was a singer but could not pursue a career because of the Cultural Revolution; his father was a government official overseeing business interests. His family is well off now, but Mr. Wang said he grew up middle class, living in a one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on the living-room couch for seven years.
He was introduced to the oboe at 7 by his uncle, an oboist with the Tsingtao orchestra and now a woodwind instrument dealer in Beijing. “I heard him play ‘Swan Lake,’ the oboe solo,” Mr. Wang said. “I fell in love with the sound of the oboe.” He was drawn, he added, by the instrument’s personal, vocal timbre. He began studying with his uncle.
At 13 he won a rare oboe scholarship at the Central Conservatory in Beijing and left home for good, moving there to share a dormitory room with six other young musicians. He also shared practice room No. 256 with Lang Lang, now a superstar pianist.
Two years later Mr. Wang was visiting an exhibit put on by Lorée, the French oboe maker. A man there heard him play and invited him to his hotel — the Olympic, Mr. Wang still remembers — for an audition. “He said, ‘Do you want to come to the United States?’ ” Mr. Wang recounted. “For a Chinese kid this is impossible. It was too good to be true.”
The man turned out to be a Taiwanese Lorée dealer with ties to the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, a high school program. Within months Mr. Wang was there. “It was a Cinderella story, really,” he said.
By 2003 he had graduated from Curtis in Philadelphia, where he said he attended every Philadelphia Orchestra program for four years. Mr. Woodhams was a major influence. “He taught us how to be musicians rather than audition takers,” Mr. Wang said.
After three years of constant moving Mr. Wang now lives in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue and 63rd Street, where, like most other oboists, he spends endless hours painstakingly carving reeds from cane. He has bonded with other young members of the Philharmonic, including the Spanish Pascual Martinez Forteza, the second-clarinetist since 2001, and the German Markus Rhoten, the principal timpanist, who also joined the orchestra this season.
Mr. Wang has a proud streak. While at Curtis, he applied for an audition to the Los Angeles Philharmonic but was turned down because he was too inexperienced. He pressed, was given permission and won through to the finals but did not get the job — again, he was told, because he was not ready.
When the orchestra reconsidered and asked him back for a tryout last year, he declined. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said he could not recall the matter. “Auditioning for an orchestra and hiring is not an exact science,” he said. “It really is as much about the kind of fit.”
In February, Mr. Salonen appeared as guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic in a program that included Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin,” which has a prominent and difficult oboe part.
Mr. Wang said he felt awkward greeting Mr. Salonen but felt a measure of satisfaction as well. And as the audience applauded after the performance, Mr. Salonen gave him a solo bow.
Thomas Stacy, the veteran English horn player, also noticed. He sent Mr. Wang a bottle of sparkling wine afterward and a note praising the “myriad colorings and spontaneous subtlety” of his performance, closing with, “Damn, what a talent!”
April 8, 2007
Pilgrim With an Oboe, Citizen of the World
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
DRESSED in black, his oval face adorned with sideburns and an upturned lock of hair, the slender oboist looked like a New Wave Tintin as he took his seat on stage for an orchestra rehearsal.
He turned and chatted with the bassoonist behind him, waved shyly to a violinist across the stage and exchanged words with the neighboring principal flutist, who threw his head back in laughter.
The man in black, Liang Wang, all of 26, was only a few months into his first season as principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic. It is an enormous job: giver of the tuning pitch A, de facto leader of the woodwinds, a major solo voice. Around him were some of the toughest, most expert orchestra players in the world, several of whom had joined the orchestra long before Mr. Wang was born.
By all accounts the players — most important, the woodwind section — have embraced him. For his part Mr. Wang said in an interview, he feels at home.
“People are just so supportive of me, and allow me to express myself as an artist,” said Mr. Wang, who conveys a mix of self-assurance, unfeigned humility and amazement at where he has arrived. “They really welcome people who are trying to make something musical.”
Although he does not want to sound cocky, Mr. Wang said, he has an inner security about his abilities. “If you don’t have the goods,” he added, “people aren’t going to put up with you.”
It is an extraordinary place to be for a young man who just a little more than a decade ago was playing his oboe in a practice room in Beijing. But Mr. Wang’s hiring was also a clarion example of the strides musicians from China have made in the realm of Western classical music. They have become a powerful presence as soloists, orchestra members and conservatory students.
Immigrants — Russians, Japanese and Koreans — have long filled out orchestral string sections and excelled as pianists. But Chinese musicians have to a large extent broken out of those areas, lending their talents to woodwinds, brass and percussion instruments as well, despite the generally lower quality of teaching of those instruments in China.
Two of the finest students now in the Juilliard School’s precollege division, teachers there say, are a Chinese clarinetist and a Chinese marimba player.
Mr. Wang’s rise has been meteoric.
Orchestra auditions are grueling competitions to win coveted lifetime jobs. Hundreds of musicians often vie for a position. Winning a first chair in a major orchestra is like winning tenure at an Ivy League university.
Mr. Wang’s touch on the audition circuit was golden from the start, so successful that he won jobs faster than he could take them, although it is also true that he came up at a time when an unusually large number of top jobs were open.
He was appointed principal oboist at the Richmond Symphony in Virginia in 2003 but never showed up, having won an audition for the principal position at the San Francisco Ballet. Then came an appointment to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra as associate principal oboist. He lasted two weeks before grabbing the principal job at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
While there he was a finalist at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He won an audition for the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago, a summer job, which was rendered moot by an appointment at the Santa Fe Opera.
“There’s an incredible combination of talent and personality,” said Paavo Jarvi, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony. “Liang is a good example of what’s right with musical education here at the highest level.” The veterans of the Cincinnati woodwind section, some old enough to be Mr. Wang’s grandparents, immediately accepted him as a colleague, Mr. Jarvi said.
After a season in Cincinnati, Mr. Wang won the equivalent of full professorships at Harvard and Yale, simultaneously. He received offers as principal oboist from both the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.
He used the Met offer to negotiate a better package from the Philharmonic, where he could play for a favorite conductor, the music director Lorin Maazel. The job would also be less grueling than the Met’s and more high-profile, offering a heavy weekly dose of oboe solos.
“I enjoy being put on the spot,” Mr. Wang said. “I like the pressure.”
He took some ribbing from his new colleagues for his flighty job history. “I became the ‘two-weeks guy,’ ” he said.
Despite his extraordinary ability and success, Mr. Wang, like many Asian-born musicians, has had to confront preconceptions about his ability to connect with Western classical music. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Richard Woodhams of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a German conductor said he would be happy to show Mr. Wang how to play Brahms, since it was not in his culture, he recounted.
“You don’t have to be German to play Brahms,” Mr. Wang said. “I was very hurt. People think that way? It never occurred to me.”
Mr. Woodhams counseled him to work extra hard because some critics would blame stylistic failings on his nationality, Mr. Wang said. “I had to go the extra mile,” he added. “It may seem like I won a lot of auditions. But I worked harder.”
Sometimes, Mr. Wang said, he gets naïve questions like, “Did you listen to classical music when you were growing up?”
“There are things called CD players,” he said with some sarcasm. He pointed out that he probably grew up listening to far more classical music than most American youngsters. “The thing I don’t understand is why it should make a difference,” he said. “I am a Chinese guy when I look in the mirror, but I’m a world citizen of music.”
At the Philharmonic players in the woodwind section praise Mr. Wang as having a tone easy to blend with, rock-solid intonation and great sensitivity and musicality.
“He’s a very mature player, beyond his years,” said Judith LeClair, the principal bassoonist. “He’s a wonderful colleague. It’s just all music. He’s just very humble and wants to do his job.” Mr. Wang said he feels that acceptance when he senses the other members of the wind section following his lead when he makes subtle changes of character or color.
Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said he was frustrated that Mr. Wang did not take the job there after an extensive search but did not begrudge him the choice. Mr. Wang impressed him, he said, during a tryout concert performance that included Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto. The oboe part is notoriously extensive and difficult.
“It was remarkable how quickly he grasped it,” Mr. Thomas said. “It became real music very, very quickly.”
Mr. Wang auditioned for the New York Philharmonic in May 2005, having practiced for a month in his closet, where the dead acoustic laid bare the tiniest flaws. (“Trust me,” he said, “it doesn’t sound good at all.”) He played for two trial periods, including a concert with no rehearsals. Mr. Maazel wanted to see if he could handle the pressure, it seemed to Mr. Wang. “I like excitement like that,” he said.
For the Met audition, he learned 34 excerpts from 18 operas, then listened through the operas to understand the contexts of the excerpts.
He was offered the Philharmonic job last June and now occupies the Alice Tully Chair as principal oboist. “The hard work paid off,” he said.
MR. WANG is from Tsingtao, which is in the province of Shandong, the home of Lao-tzu and Confucius. As a former German and Japanese colony, Tsingtao is the cradle of many fine Chinese musicians. His mother was a singer but could not pursue a career because of the Cultural Revolution; his father was a government official overseeing business interests. His family is well off now, but Mr. Wang said he grew up middle class, living in a one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on the living-room couch for seven years.
He was introduced to the oboe at 7 by his uncle, an oboist with the Tsingtao orchestra and now a woodwind instrument dealer in Beijing. “I heard him play ‘Swan Lake,’ the oboe solo,” Mr. Wang said. “I fell in love with the sound of the oboe.” He was drawn, he added, by the instrument’s personal, vocal timbre. He began studying with his uncle.
At 13 he won a rare oboe scholarship at the Central Conservatory in Beijing and left home for good, moving there to share a dormitory room with six other young musicians. He also shared practice room No. 256 with Lang Lang, now a superstar pianist.
Two years later Mr. Wang was visiting an exhibit put on by Lorée, the French oboe maker. A man there heard him play and invited him to his hotel — the Olympic, Mr. Wang still remembers — for an audition. “He said, ‘Do you want to come to the United States?’ ” Mr. Wang recounted. “For a Chinese kid this is impossible. It was too good to be true.”
The man turned out to be a Taiwanese Lorée dealer with ties to the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, a high school program. Within months Mr. Wang was there. “It was a Cinderella story, really,” he said.
By 2003 he had graduated from Curtis in Philadelphia, where he said he attended every Philadelphia Orchestra program for four years. Mr. Woodhams was a major influence. “He taught us how to be musicians rather than audition takers,” Mr. Wang said.
After three years of constant moving Mr. Wang now lives in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue and 63rd Street, where, like most other oboists, he spends endless hours painstakingly carving reeds from cane. He has bonded with other young members of the Philharmonic, including the Spanish Pascual Martinez Forteza, the second-clarinetist since 2001, and the German Markus Rhoten, the principal timpanist, who also joined the orchestra this season.
Mr. Wang has a proud streak. While at Curtis, he applied for an audition to the Los Angeles Philharmonic but was turned down because he was too inexperienced. He pressed, was given permission and won through to the finals but did not get the job — again, he was told, because he was not ready.
When the orchestra reconsidered and asked him back for a tryout last year, he declined. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said he could not recall the matter. “Auditioning for an orchestra and hiring is not an exact science,” he said. “It really is as much about the kind of fit.”
In February, Mr. Salonen appeared as guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic in a program that included Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin,” which has a prominent and difficult oboe part.
Mr. Wang said he felt awkward greeting Mr. Salonen but felt a measure of satisfaction as well. And as the audience applauded after the performance, Mr. Salonen gave him a solo bow.
Thomas Stacy, the veteran English horn player, also noticed. He sent Mr. Wang a bottle of sparkling wine afterward and a note praising the “myriad colorings and spontaneous subtlety” of his performance, closing with, “Damn, what a talent!”
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