Former North Korean Propaganda Artist Turns to Pop Art

CNN

After escape from North Korea, artist turns from propaganda to pop art
By Paul Ferguson, CNN
updated 12:26 AM EDT, Sun March 25, 2012

Atlanta (CNN) -- Song Byeok had every reason to be pleased with his success. A gift for drawing led to a prestigious career as a propaganda artist and full membership in North Korea's communist party.

Then the food shortages started.

Like tens of thousands of other North Koreans in the mid-1990s, Song made forays across the Tumen River to find food in China. Despite witnessing a better material life across the border, he says, he never doubted that North Korea was culturally superior. He never considered leaving his homeland for anything more than food.

"I was a believer. I saw North Koreans as pure," Song said. "And we needed the Great Leader to protect us from outsiders."

Today, Song paints in Seoul, South Korea, his art haunted by his former whole-hearted belief in the North Korean regime. Song's paintings chronicle a personal, often agonizing journey from child-like allegiance to the country's founder and "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung, and his son, "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, to Song's life today as a contemporary artist.

In his former life, he would paint boyish-looking soldiers with heroic features across an entire side of a factory to inspire workers with the same patriotism he believed in.

His current paintings explore themes of freedom while skewering his former devotion to North Korea's leaders. He paints children in military uniforms, their heads bowed and eyes closed. His trademark work shows Kim Jong Il's face atop Marilyn Monroe's famous film pose on a sidewalk grate, holding down her skirt as it billows around her hips.

The painting created a stir in South Korea, where American Greg Pence saw it and raised funds on Kickstarter to exhibit Song's work this winter in Washington and Atlanta.

Song is passionate and sometimes brooding when discussing North Korea but gracious and open about his deeply personal passage from propaganda artist to painter who anguishes over oppression in North Korea.

Song's journey to disbelief began the moment he watched, helpless, as his father was caught in a current during a river crossing to China and drowned. Song was halfway across when his father was swept away; he swam back but was unable to rescue him. Despondent, Song searched for his father's body along the riverbank but was captured by North Korean border guards.

Despite his rank as a party member, getting caught meant questioning and torture by North Korean guards to confirm that he was not working for the South Koreans or the foreign missionaries based in China who proselytize among defectors.

"There were no exceptions," he said. "All who are caught are investigated."

In North Korea, a brutal choice

The torment of not recovering his father's remains was much greater than the broken teeth and beatings, Song said. The beatings were so harsh, he said, he was close to death, and he believes that he was released so he would not die in custody.

More than bones, the guards' treatment broke Song's belief in the regime. He describes the moment he left jail as if a veil had been lifted: He saw the world with a new clarity. As he hobbled through the streets, wondering how he'd get home, he decided he wanted a different life. He decided to defect.

In a country of 25 million, only about 20,000 have defected and settled in South Korea, according to the South Korean government. There are no precise figures for how many defectors live in hiding in China; estimates from governments, researchers and non-governmental organizations vary from 25,000 to more than 400,000.

"When people are picked up in China and repatriated, they face prosecution back in North Korea if they are believed to have met with South Koreans or missionaries," said Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist at the Peterson Institute.

China labels North Korean escapees "economic migrants" and forcibly returns them despite accounts of torture and execution. So those hoping to defect must make their way across China to a third country.

Of those North Koreans interviewed in China, only about one in 10 say they left because of a longing for freedom, according to W. Courtland Robinson, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the issue for more than a decade.

The vast majority who leave give the same explanation Song did for his pre-defector forays into China during the famine: the search for work or food.

"The (North Korean) system is so integral to who you are," Robinson said. "People generally don't say 'I am frustrated, and I want out.' "

Song's paintings explore that theme: a devotion to serving North Korea's leaders so strong that citizens view it as part of their identity.

"Flower Children" shows a gaggle of smiling, uniformed schoolgirls waving and holding North Korea's standard reading primers, "The Story of Kim Jong Il's Childhood" and "History of Kim Il Sung."

The girls exude childish charm, but some faces show a weariness that only comes with age, and their eyes are all closed. Their shoes have holes.

"They believe they are happy," Song said. "They believe they are so much better off than the rest of the world because of their two leaders, who are like two suns."

Read the full story and view images HERE.

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.

NYT: Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows

NYT
March 25, 2010
Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

YANGON, Myanmar — The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.

“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.

Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.

Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.

Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here.

U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional “spirit dances” with something resembling techno music, said he believed that the government tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control. “You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release,” he said.

“We live in fear,” he said. “We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy.”

The success of artists like Mr. Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar’s often monochromatic image as a place of zero freedoms. This country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place — human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.

But even if the generals willed it, people here say, the government would probably not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society here is too unruly, disorganized and corrupt; people are too creative, the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.

The police are famously brutal, but they, too, suffer from tropical torpor: a common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.

Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country’s largest cities.

The government has nurtured the creation of a soccer league after years without any organized matches. Soccer games are famously raucous, with fans spewing invective toward the opposing side, ignoring government exhortations to be “polite.”

The number of FM radio stations in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has gone from just one a few years ago to a handful that play both Burmese and Western-style music. Last year, a private company started up the country’s first television channel dedicated to music videos.

“The government is trying to distract people from politics,” said a Western-educated Burmese businessman who declined to be identified because he thought it might jeopardize his business. “There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.”

The contrast between the military government’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and the surprisingly uninhibited entertainment scene can be jarring.

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Read the full story (with photos and video) HERE.

Hmong Hip-hop Heritage

A New York Times video on Tou Saiko Lee, a rapper from Minnesota, and how he keeps his Hmong heritage alive through a mix of hip-hop and ancient traditions.

Ilyas Malayev, 72, Uzbek Musician and Poet, Dies

New York Times
May 7, 2008
Ilyas Malayev, 72, Uzbek Musician and Poet, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ilyas Malayev, a musician and poet renowned in Uzbekistan and transplanted to Queens, where he was a legend among fellow Bukharan Jews, died on Friday in Flushing. He was 72 and lived in Forest Hills.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Lana Levitin, his manager.

Before emigrating from his native land in Central Asia, Mr. Malayev won fame and official plaudits in the former Soviet Union for his interpretation of the shash maqam, a body of folk melodies and songs that originated as the court music of feudal Bukhara. He also performed his own songs, and wrote lyric poetry in several languages, which he published in the United States under the titles “Milk and Sugar” and “Devon.” Still, he struggled to build a new creative life after immigrating to America in 1992.

“He’s one of maybe half a dozen people in the world who has such a deep knowledge of the shash maqam,” said Walter Z. Feldman, an expert on Ottoman Turkish music, told a reporter for The New York Times in 1997. “What Malayev knows almost nobody knows.”

Mr. Malayev was born in Mary and grew up in Kattakurgan, a small town near Bukhara, where he learned to play the tar and the tambur, string instruments similar to the lute, as well as the violin. He also applied himself to the shash maqam, studying with local teachers and listening to recordings made in the time of the last emir of Bukhara.

In 1951 he moved to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where he performed in various state-supported ensembles. He appeared with the Uzbek Song and Dance Ensemble from 1952 to 1960, the Ensemble of Singers and Dancers of the Peoples of the World from 1953 to 1956, and the Folk and Variety Orchestras of Uzbekistan Radio from 1956 to 1962. From 1962 to 1992 he performed with the Symphonic Variety Orchestra of Uzbekistan Radio.

Mr. Malayev achieved great popularity as a variety performer and wedding entertainer, combining comedy routines, poetry recitations, excerpts from the shash maqam and his own songs. His performances in stadiums drew tens of thousands of Uzbeks, and his appeal reached beyond his native republic.

“No occasion would be complete without Malayev,” he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1997. “When Brezhnev came to visit, my wife and I always sang.”

Despite his reputation, Mr. Malayev was unable to publish his poetry in the Soviet Union. He attributed this to anti-Semitism. He belonged to a small Jewish minority in a predominantly Muslim (although officially atheist) society. Traditionally, Jews performed as musicians at the court of the Bukharan emirs.

After emigrating, Mr. Malayev found his way to Queens, where an enclave of Bukharan Jews was developing in Rego Park and Forest Hills. He became a central figure in the area’s cultural life, organizing local musicians and singers into an ensemble, Maqam, for which he was an instrumentalist and music director. As the Ilyas Malayev Ensemble, the group released a compact disc on the Shanachie label in 1997 called “At the Bazaar of Love.” After Mr. Malayev’s death, the group was renamed the Ilyas Malayev Ensemble Maqam.

Besides his wife, Muhabbat Shamayeva, a vocalist with the ensemble, Mr. Malayev is survived by two sons, Radj, of Forest Hills, and Gera, of Leonia, N.J.; three daughters, Nargis and Viola, both of Forest Hills, and Bella, of Tel Aviv; 15 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

“While other Central Asian émigré musicians plugged in and sang pop songs in the hope of appealing to a younger crowd, Malayev never abandoned his belief in the power of traditional music and poetry to stir the spirit,” said Theodore Levin, whose book “The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)” includes an affectionate portrait of Mr. Malayev. “A listener didn’t need to understand Uzbek or Tajik to feel the power of his songs and poetry.”

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."

Translated Abstract of Study on Tuvan Music

From Tuva-Online
read the original here.

Fundamental Research on Musical Culture of Tuva in the Twentieth Century Ready for Publishing
Dina Oyun
May 2, 2007
Translated by Sean Quirk and Theodore Levin

Famous Tuvan music researcher Valentina Suzukei has finished her multifacetous study of Tuvan music culture in the XXth century. The scientist takes a closer look at the Tuvan musical phenomenon, analyses it in the context of the nomadic world perception, gives a full account of the ritual and labour musical practices, songs, instrumental music, Tuvan traditional instruments, makes a survey of both positive and negative consequences of the attempts to 'adapt' Tuvan music to European standards.

Here are abstracts of the above-mentioned work: Tuva is one of the most striking and original cultural centers of the Altai-Sayan region, remarkable for its diversity of musical forms and genres, and for the melodic richness and distinct national color and timbre of its traditional sound production. Tuva’s rich legacy of instrumental music merits special attention. Beginning in ancient times, the musical culture of the Tuvans has evolved exclusively in the context of a nomadic way of life characterized by specific cultural and economic conditions. The musical tradition of the Tuvans maintained an organic continuity and did not undergo any radical change until the second decade of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century was the first in the entire centuries-long history of the Tuvans to bring about a revolutionary transformation of musical life. This transformation occurred both as a result of the change from a nomadic way of life to a sedentary one, and as a result of the introduction of new musical forms and ideas. This social transformation had both positive and, to a greater degree, negative results. One of the main reasons for the unpremeditated destruction of tradition, which seriously degraded the foundations of Tuvan culture, was an a priori judgment that it was “primitive.” As a consequence, the condescending treatment of the culture as “undeveloped” or, more precisely, “backward” – stuck in a mere primordial state of existence, facilitated the idea that it was necessary to provide aid for its “rehabilitation.” Thus emerged the idea of “professionalizing” folk music, which became widespread from the first days of the foundation of Soviet power in Tuva.

It is imperative to highlight the consequences of misdirected efforts to professionalize traditional music. One consequence was that folk musicians began to evaluate their own music-making through the unfamiliar standards of academic music, and finding themselves wanting, developed a low self-image. The result of this experience was a mutation not only of instruments but of all the aesthetic-normative bases of the traditional sound system upon which the ethnic “sound ideal” had been oriented. Paradoxically, all of these transformations still have a place in the established educational system of culture and arts at all levels: in music schools, colleges, and conservatories, in institutes and in academies of culture. And this is one of the principal problems in modern systems (ethnic, ethno-artistic) of professional music education for the bearers of traditional culture, which today requires a fundamental review.

In the present day, against the backdrop of the events of the 1990s, which brought a major reconstruction of socio-economic and cultural systems in the post-Soviet republics, there is an urgent need for a re-examination of the gains and losses that have occurred in the ethnic cultures of the national republics of the former USSR.

In the post-Perestroika era a process has begun in the various ethnic republics of the former USSR to return to their own historical roots. These processes have not passed over Tuva. The professionalization of Tuvan music in essence was and is an attempt at adaptation, or more precisely, an attempt at remaking traditional music within the parameters of European classical music theory. The process of professionalizing Tuvan music brought with it an attempt to translate musical instruments and instrumental music from the drone-overtone system of tuning to the tempered tuning system. However, Tuvan music first debuted on the world stage in its pure, non-professionalized form in records produced by the Moscow Sound Recording Factory in 1934 at the request of the government of the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR). Since that time, Tuvan music has commanded massive interest as an extraordinary example of creative human fantasy in the realm of sound. Tuva’s particular achievement in the sphere of musical culture, or more broadly, sound culture, is considered a unique contribution to the evolution of human culture.

The nomads’ experience of acoustical immersion in the sounds of their natural environment and the subsequent transformation of this experience into an artistic and creative consciousness gives rise to a unique effect: a considerably broader conception of music and musicality than that imparted by classical European theoretical musical knowledge.

Chapter I: The Musical Culture of Tuva at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditional musical culture of the Tuvans as a specific form that reflected life, domestic work, material and spiritual culture, history and worldview was an original aesthetic phenomenon that presented a complex sound-world corresponding to an ethnic sound-ideal. This traditional musical culture, or what one could call the process of understanding the world in sound, embodied people’s conception of the characteristics of sound, various ways of making it, and the organization and effect of this or that kind of sound on the surrounding world and on individuals.

The Traditional Tuvan Conception of Sound

Understanding the specifics of Tuvan music carries a necessary condition: an ability to comprehend the world, and especially the nature of Tuva, with the eyes and ears of a nomad – an essential skill for perceiving the atmosphere of Tuva, its “aroma,” colors, sounds, and subtle nuances, sometimes barely perceptible in the ephemeral sound world of nature. It should be noted that what the author of this work is calling for is in fact quite far outside the classical research methods of theoretical musicology. Indeed, the concepts and physical variables that are principally developed and manipulated in Tuvan music lend themselves poorly to the conventional approaches of European music theory and musicology.

European music theory arose from a Christian worldview opposed to the traditions of the East. This worldview places man against nature, where man and nature are two opposite forces, contradictory and hostile to one another. “The Christians despised the earth: what is a creature compared to the creator? What are sun, moon, and earth compared to the spirit of man? Earthly life loses purpose for he who believes in God, who believes in eternal heavenly life,” wrote L. Feierbach in The Essence of Christendom. “Christianity separated man from all association with nature and through that fell into extremism, finding even in the remote comparison of man with animal an insult to human dignity.”[i]

The formation of the Tuvans’ traditional complex of sound perception was influenced in the pre-Revolutionary period by early forms of pre-shamanic beliefs (totemism, fetishism, animism), shamanism, and somewhat later syncretized with the genetically related philosophical-religious worldview of Buddhism. It must be emphasized that “the propagation of Lamaism in Tuva was characterized by its interweaving with local shamanic cults.”[ii]

Shamanic mythology is based on the cosmogonic conception of the universe (macrocosmos) as a three-tiered area with upper, middle, and lower worlds. Each world, accordingly, is populated with a pantheon of deities, spirit-lords, and a pandemonium of evil spirits and supernatural forces. The shamanists’ mythological complex of cosmogonic perceptions reflects the nomadic sense of sacred space and nourishes the feeling of an indissoluble connection with nature. This idea of the indivisibility of man and nature developed in the ancient past and exists among other peoples of Central Asia.

The traditional shamanistic conception of microcosmos and macrocosmos is tightly interwoven with a belief in supernatural forces inhabiting the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds, and presents the main basis for determining a person’s place in objective reality. The awareness of an indissoluble connection with the natural world is a core value of shamanic cults, which sacralized the guiding mechanism of people’s daily lives. This mechanism was also founded in animistic conceptions connected with the deification of nature, and veneration of the living world and the terrible strength of nature.

Under these conditions, it becomes clear why images of nature occupy a central place in the artistic creations of the Tuvans. Singing a materially perceptible picture of the natural environment is not ideal contemplation, as Europeans have often perceived it, but a social manifestation of shamanic ideology rooted in an animistic perception of deified nature.

The Tuvans’ auditory and visual perception of the environment has left a significant imprint on their sound cognition. In instrumental music, it is exactly the three-dimensionality, multiplicity, and spatiality of the flow of sound that imparts such a subtle timbral color to the expressive language of Tuvan folk music, thus allowing reality to be perceived keenly and artistically. Thus a holographic rather than photographic image is created of the native environment that simultaneously incorporates concepts from the realm of spiritual culture as well as metaphysical and social ideas. Thus the traditional music of the Tuvans is influenced by domestic-economic and philosophical-psychological factors, by the forces of nature and climate, philosophy and psychology, economics and social life.

Laic and Ceremonial Folklore

The Tuvans’ auditory perception of their environment has been reflected in their musical culture and significantly influenced the originality of their creative expression in the sound arts. The nomads’ perception of environmental sounds and noises allows them to interpret every reproducible sound, not always by means of a precise pitch, but through timbre.

A good musical ear – a fundamental characteristic of a good musician as well as a good listener – also implies the skill to reproduce or perceive sounds rich in timbre, which impart a special color and meaning to the performance of music. The timbral characteristics of sound are usually correctly and unambiguously deciphered by members of a traditional culture, and in many cases, timbre also serves as an organizing principle for musical form and genre. Nevertheless, many musical instruments of the Tuvans were cast aside as “primitive and dated trappings of the past” for the reason that it was impossible to play classical European music on them, as a consequence retarding the development of national professional art in the period of the foundation of Socialism. Aside from this, ruthless ideological struggle took place under the banner of uprooting the remnants and vestiges of feudalism. This banner was convenient, for what was not understood was briskly swept aside under the pretext of having primitive attributes of the past. National instruments were suppressed on the grounds that they represented counter-revolutionary intentions. Other instruments were reconstructed, modernized, or “improved” with the aim of facilitating the performance of harmonically-organized music.

Viewed through the prism of traditional domestic activity, the nuances and subtleties of Tuvan “sound culture” become clear. The seasonal herding cycle of the nomads, the daily pasturing of cattle, and the self-appointed mission of protecting the grasslands and allowing them to grow anew make for constant communication between man and animal. From their observations of the natural world, Tuvans have assembled a very precise and original sound calendar that plays an important role in the lives of nomads. While the lunar calendar marks the passing of standardized time -- hours, days, years, and so on -- the sound calendar is precisely calibrated to local climatic conditions and helps to maintain herders’ close connection to the natural world. This sound calendar divides the year into four quarters, each connected to a different pasturage, and provides aural cues that inform nomads when it is time to move their herds from one pasturage to the next. All genres of ceremonial folklore are organized according to the sound calendar and linked to a specific pasturage and its corresponding camp.

Vocal Music

Tuvans’ love of music, and especially of song has been repeatedly noted by pre-Revolutionary authors. “The Tuvan satisfies his need for music everywhere he has the opportunity: he sings on the road, in leisure and at work,” wrote the Russian merchant N.F. Vesyelkov at the end of the nineteenth century. “Of all the Turkic tribes, the Soyot [Tuvans] are the most tuneful. In my observation, the Soyot are ninety-five percent singers,” noted A.V. Anokhin, a well-known collector of musical folklore of the Turkic-speaking peoples of Western Siberia. Popular vocal genres include kozhamyktar (quatrains), kyska yrlar (short songs), and uzun yrlar (long songs).

Musical Instruments and Instrumental Music

The traditional musical culture of Tuva is distinguished by its variety of musical instruments, and by the important role of musical instruments in spiritual, expressive, and material culture. Traditional folk terminology includes a systematic array of terms for evaluating musical instruments, instrumental performance, and instrumental music. Both musical instruments and instrumental music express a distinctive sound-ideal that is reflected in the sound-producing potentialities of instruments and in the specific manner of their realization.

The Tuvan instrumentarium includes a large number of musical instruments that are performed in different genres of folklore. There are instruments to accompany lyric songs and heroic epics, instruments that reproduce hunting calls and signals for calling domesticated animals, and instruments in shamanist and Buddhist ceremonial practices.

Instruments Used in Work

In Tuvan “intonational culture” (the musical-semantic domain based on Asaf’ev’s theory of “intonatsia”) instruments played outdoors systematically represent the natural sound world in the sphere of social and psychology activity.[iii] In the majority of cases these instruments can be made quickly, and be made to produce sound through simple physical procedures. The materials used to construct the instrument are also simple: the stalks of farinaceous plants (wild oats, barley, feather-grass), stems of buckwheat or umbellate (angelica, wild parsnip) plants, pieces or branches of trees, bark, leaves, etc. In many cases, making such instruments takes no more than one or two minutes.

Many of these instruments can be made only at a certain time of year. Instruments made from vegetable matter are particularly dependent on the season, for example, the terezin-ediski or kinds of murgu, which are made generally in the fall inasmuch as the stems that are the source material reach the necessary firmness simultaneously with the ripening of cereal grains. Another instrument, a variant of the shoor, made from willow bark, is made only in early spring at the time when the sap begins to run (chuluk uezi), and the bark is easy to remove whole.

One of the distinctive peculiarities of these instruments is their impermanence, right down to single-use, as for example, with instruments made from leaves. In the majority of cases, the materials from which they are made are very fragile, and over time, with the drying of stalks and stems, their sound qualities worsen or are completely lost.

Ceremonial Instruments

Beginning in the eighteenth century, Buddhism gained significance in Tuva as the official religion. Nevertheless, shamanism retained a strong influence. A particular feature of Tuvan Buddhism was its interweaving with the local shamanic cults, and syncretism with shamanic beliefs and practices. The parallel existence of Buddhism and shamanism is reflected in many ceremonies and religious holidays, often conducted with the joint participation of lamas and shamans.

Shamanic instruments

Buddhist musical instruments

Musical Instruments

The Tuvan instrumentarium includes a large number of musical instruments that exist in stable forms and are used primarily in artistic, as opposed to ritual or applied technological, forms of music. Such instruments are used to accompany lyric songs and heroic epics, as well as to perform a highly developed instrumental repertoire that is a testament to the richness of the instrumentarium, and to its important role in the historical development of national culture and music.

The majority of Tuvan instruments are stringed instruments, i.e., chadagan, igil, byzaanchy, doshpuluur, and chanzy. but aerophones and idiophones are also prominent in this group of developed instruments existing in stable forms. For example, shoor (end-blown flute) limbi (side-blown flute), demir-xomus (metal jew’s harp) and kuluzun xomus (bamboo jew’s harp) belong to this group (the metal jew’s harp was also formerly used in the ritual practice of shamans). These instruments are considered by the Tuvans as natively Tuva, despite the etymology of their names, their construction, and the non-native materials from which some are made (e.g., byzaanchy, chanzy, limbi). These factors suggest that such musical instruments were brought to Tuva long ago, and are evidence of the Tuvans’ historical and ethnocultural connections to other peoples in Inner Asia. Over time, changing political, social, and economic conditions among the Tuvans also changed the role of musical instruments, and not all of their older social, aesthetic, and religious functions were maintained.

Instrumental Music without Instruments

An interesting aspect of Tuvan music is the imitation of musical instruments. The shoor, demir-xomus, and limbi all offer examples of such imitation.

Instrumental Music

Traditional musical instruments and instrumental music comprise a major component of Tuvan musical culture that fully displays the creative use of sound. The principal feature that distinguishes Tuvan instrumental music is that it is rooted in a drone-overtone system of sound production. That is, overtones (harmonics) are sequenced to form melodies set against a fundamental drone pitch. Drone-overtone music represents a unique sound system with its own specific rules that has to date not been thoroughly studied by musicology.

In drone-overtone sound art, the fundamental semantic meaning is carried not by the pitch organization of the sound material, or even by the rhythm, but by timbre. As the fundamental parameter of Tuvan musical aesthetics, timbre represents one of the most striking qualities of instrumental music. It is indeed the prominent role of timbre in Tuvan music that accounts for the large number of instruments on which pitch is not fixed, either in space or in time. These conditions influence morphological features of instruments such as non-standardization of size and the absence of frets on stringed instruments. Moreover, bowed instruments do not have a fingerboard on the neck inasmuch as only harmonics are played on them.

The ergonomic, morphological, and acoustic characteristics of instruments that reflect the drone-overtone system are all oriented toward representing the Tuvan sound world. A significant difference in the size of different instruments of the same type does not cause any inconvenience for a folk performer, nor does it affect the structure of the sound. The size of traditional musical instruments is mainly a function of the size of its performer, who, in the majority of cases, has made the instrument himself.

The role of timbre and texture in musical style are clearly demonstrated not only in instrumental music, but in the art of “playing” the throat: xöömei. As a sound structure, xöömei is represents a purely drone-overtone approach to sound production. Outside of this structure, xöömei simply does not exist. It is precisely in xöömei that the specific features of the Tuvan sound-ideal are brilliantly presented in their most refined form -- a complex sound world reflected in the aesthetics of instrumental music.

Xöömei can be called “singing” only because the fundamental tone is emitted from the vocal cords as a result of applying pressure in a particular way. In its sound structure, and in the logical development of its musical substance, xöömei is much more similar to instrumental music. This similarity is confirmed by the shared use of the drone-overtone system.

A.V. Anokhin was the first to understand that xöömei represented a musical phenomenon that required a hitherto unknown music theory to make sense of it: “the throat-singing of the Tuvans stands outside all established theories (my emphasis-V.S.), and perhaps constitutes a unique phenomenon in the arena of vocal art.”[iv]

Khöömei

As a specific genre of folk music in the general system of Tuvan cultural values, xöömei is an autonomous and highly specific phenomenon. While xöömei is produced by the human vocal apparatus, its sound has nothing in common with what is typically considered to be “singing.” In our time, it is still not completely understood how a single performer can produce two sounds simultaneously – a drone and an overtone melody. Still not understood in the secret art of throat-singing is the location of the second sound source. No one doubts that the drone originates in the region of the performer’s vocal cords. But where and how the whistle-like melodic overtone sounds are produced, and how their pitch changes are regulated – these questions remain to be answered.

Borbangnadyr

Sygyt

Ezengileer

Kargyraa

The art of xöömei has been passed down to the contemporary generation as an empirical system of cognizing sound space developed by their ancient ancestors. The structure, closure, and logical completeness of the system is what has allowed it to be preserved and transmitted from one generation to the next through the centuries. The real functioning of this sound system appears in practice in the sound structure of Tuvan xöömei and instrumental music.

Part II: The Musical Culture of Tuva in the Soviet Period (1921-1991)

The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 also drew the Tuvans into the orbit of the worldwide revolutionary movement, and served as a historical boundary beyond which cardinal changes were introduced into the centuries-long nomadic way of life.

Tuvan Musical Culture in the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR), 1921-1944

Inasmuch as the founding idea of the Great October Revolution was above all the irreconcilable class struggle of the subjugated workers with their exploiters, Tuva’s pre-Revolutionary culture was also interpreted from the perspective of this struggle. For that very reason, from the entire rich musical legacy of the people, the songs that best served the “call to arms” were those that sounded themes of protest against the feudal yoke – songs about hard labor, and laments about the callousness and cruelty of the noyons, or feudal lords, who oppressed the poor arat. Great importance was attached to song texts, since only in these songs could one find concord with revolutionary ideas.

In particular it was the song genres kyska yr (short song) and kozhamyk (quatrain) that best expressed the relationship of the people to the events taking place around them. All other genres of Tuvan traditional music culture were too specific and foreign-sounding to be deployed in the service of revolutionary ideas. For that reason, it was easier to dismiss them as “primitive” or as religious vestiges of the past.

The Beginning of Professionalization

Along with the large-scale sedentarization of nomads and deep rupture of the nomadic way of life, professional musical life began to take shape in the republic beginning in the 1940s. Educating Tuvans in reading musical notation and other aspects of the European system of music education was considered as a necessary step in the evolution of Tuvan culture.

When people spoke about the professionalization of Tuvan music, in fact what they meant was academicization, i.e., the total substitution of one sound system for another. But in the 1940s, no one suspected or could admit the idea that Tuvan music had its own sound system with its own theoretical basis.

Amateur Arts Activities in the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR)

The majority of musical genres that had not been professionalized in the first years of Socialism were actively included in the concert programs of amateur arts groups that were organized throughout Tuva. Naturally, these genres were also “reformed” in accordance with Revolutionary principles. It was during this period that Tuvan musical culture underwent a major loss in the area of traditional instrumental music. Reconstructed and modernized, Tuvan musical instruments were retooled to the specifications of European instruments, in the process losing their traditional, purely instrumental repertoire and gradually becoming merely accompanying instruments for vocal performance. In the following years, instruments were used only for playing song melodies.

During this period, academic music specialists assimilated traditional Tuvan music, in particular, songs, at the same time that they familiarized themselves with a range of foreign musics.

The Musical Culture of Tuva in the Soviet Period (1944-1991)

The unification and merger of Tuvan culture with the “great” Soviet Socialist culture at last took place. This event had been intensively prepared by the cultural politics of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the TNR during the previous 10-13 years of its existence as the world’s second (after the USSR) socialist government. From the moment that the TNR joined the USSR, an analogous model of culture was formed in which music was divided into “professional” and “amateur.” And thus Soviet Tuva also had a “professional” and “amateur” musical culture that didn’t allow for any other form of musical activity. The only kinds of performance that Tuva was missing to fill out its Soviet-style musical life were opera and ballet.

Professional Music in Soviet Tuva

By the beginning of the 1980s, the work of establishing a professional school of composition in Tuva had been essentially completed. This was largely made possible by the creation of the Union of Composers of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1978.

Survey of Basic Genres of Composed Works

Song genres

Symphonic works

Cantata-Oratorio genres

Chamber music works

Genres particular to composers in Tuva

Amateur musical arts in Soviet Tuva

A wide network of amateur choirs and orchestras was established within the republic-wide system of culture “clubs.” These ensembles and orchestras included both Tuvan and Russian folk instruments that were played together in one and the same group.

The System of Music Education in the Republic

The uniform system of standardized state music education created in the Soviet era corresponded to the ideological directives of that time. The totalitarian regime’s bent for unifying culture throughout the territory of the super-state found a basis in theories of cultural development. New forms of culture, created in great haste, were called upon to serve as a visible embodiment of results hitherto unseen in the history of humanity, for example, the leap of many “backward” Eastern peoples from feudalism to socialism without the intermediary stage of capitalism.

The oral system that had been used to train carriers of traditional culture was ignored, and the Soviet system of European notation-based music education was instituted in its place in training folk musicians in state institutes of culture and art.

Part III: The Musical Culture of Tuva at the End of the Twentieth Century (1991-2000)

After the break-up of the USSR in 1991, Tuva, as one of the fully entitled subjects of the Russian Federation, became known as the Republic of Tyva, with all of the attributes of state power: a president elected by the populace, parliament, constitution, and so on.

The Situation in the Performance of European Art Forms

In the last decade of the twentieth century, myriad problems arose in the sphere of “professional” music (as it has become acceptable to call this sphere of musical art). Insufficient resources were allocated to training performers of ballet, opera, and orchestral music, thus retarding their growth—insufficiencies that go back to the Soviet era, when an institutional base for classical European music had not been fully developed. Neither ballet nor opera had their own organizational structures, nor for that matter, did almost all other forms of European performing arts. Qualified ballet dancers and symphony orchestra players are insufficiently represented in the Republic of Tyva, and there is not a single opera singer.

The Situation with Folk (Amateur) Arts

Following the weakening and disappearance of communist ideology in the life of the Russian public, a spiritual vacuum was created that needed to be filled. After the break-up of the USSR, there arose a sense of freedom that brought about the realization by different peoples of a desire to find and return to their own roots. Culture and religion began to play an important role in this, since they offered the possibility of finding a new purpose in life, as well as serving as a basis of morals and interpersonal relations.

Possible Directions for the Development of Culture in Tuva

Local level

Regional level

Russian and international level

Part 4: Theoretical Problems of Tuvan Musicology

The socialist cultural politics that reigned at the beginning of the twentieth century did not allow for the idea that a “backward” culture like that of Tuva could have its own theory, and led to the loss of a valuable layer of traditional culture, namely, its instrumental music. Aside from that, beginning in the first years of Soviet power, attempts to modernize traditional musical instruments amounted to making bad copies of European instruments. This was from the start an unpromising and unproductive practice that distorted not only the foundation of traditional culture but also undermined the authority of European music itself.

A theoretical summary of the way Tuvans conceive musical sounds as the smallest structural elements of a musical language point to the necessity of studying the characteristics of natural sounds that inform the development of instrumental music. The specifics of the ethnic sound-ideal as a complex sound world reflected in the aesthetics of instrumental music is examined in the first chapter.

The Nature of Sound and its Connection with Instruments

The following instruments are particularly interesting in the scheme of drone-overtone organization: igil, demir-xomus, and xöömei.

Features of drone-overtone music-making on the igil

Features of drone-overtone music-making on the demir-xomus

Features of drone-overtone music-making in throat-singing

Basic principles of performance in drone-overtone music-making

Theoretical and Practical Problems of Tuvan Musical Culture

The prominence of the drone-overtone texture in Tuvan instrumental music leads to a host of theoretical problems. One of these involves theoretical generalization about the internal organization of a distinctive musical system that exists in the aural tradition of a people and in the expressive language of its national music. The actual performance practice of traditional instruments shows that the instrumental music of the Tuvans functions on the basis of the natural scale.

Moreover, Tuvans repeatedly use the effect of a reinforced natural scale (on account of the imposition of micro-irregularities, or nonlinear oscillations). With such a reinforced dispersion of the fundamental tone due to the (extroverted) centrifugal dynamic of the emitted sound, the overtone is not separated from the fundamental, as occurs in European music in the use of flageolet (when the fundamental pitch is not heard). In the drone-overtone system, the extraction of the melodic overtone occurs only against the background of a drone pitch. If you remove the drone, all overtones will disappear, including the melodic ones. Introverted (centripetal) and extroverted dynamic characteristics of a basic sound unit in music have not hitherto been discussed in world music practice either by musicians or musicologists, and is being introduced for the first time in this work. The difference between the two systems is intuitively sensed by musicians, whose understanding of sound production corresponds to the method of sound production on the instruments they play. And here there has been – and continues to be – a lack of understanding particularly about the modernization of traditional instruments.

Oral tradition, without resorting to developed theoretical concepts, fixed its achievements in the system of the phonic complex of musical instruments and in the specifics of traditional performance styles. The more theoretically developed European classical tradition trained and trains musicologists who, in their analytical assessments, never examine the fundamental sound unit as such. All theoretical conclusions were based on – and continue to be based on – the conception of intervals between non-overtone sounds corresponding to the European sound-ideal.

From the History of the Tuvan Sound System

One of the natural, yet most complex questions concerns the origins of the specific musical structure at the root of Tuvan instrumental music. Nomadic culture did not leave written sources. Nonetheless, on the basis of many indirect sources, it is possible to speculate about the epoch in which the musical system of the nomads was formed.

The Turks – the descendents of ancient nomadic cultures of Central Asia – are one of the greatest consolidated ethnoses, today populating a significant part of Eurasia, from northeast Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea, and the world of Turkic musical culture – rich and diverse – has long served as an object of attention for scholars.

As far as instruments, instrumental music, and xöömei are concerned, Tuva itself represents a completely original epicenter of drone-overtone music, clearly distinguished from Central Asian types of sound culture.

The musical culture of modern Turkic-speaking peoples has been presented in all its richness and variety of sound material. Nevertheless, in the ancient, archaic layers of these cultures, many elements of an enduring unity unique to these cultures continue to be kept. Such a long-standing endurance, which has not been subject to destruction over the march of centuries, allows us to propose that in the period of their historical commonality, i.e., in the period of the nomadic empire of the ancient Turks (6th-8th century), a particular type of musical civilization was founded, formed on the basis of a conscious and active ideology. A somewhat more manifest support of this idea lies in the fact that “many themes, styles, heroic epics (accompanied by music), and various musical-poetic genres prove to be all-Turkic and can be traced back to the earlier and later nomads of Eurasia.”[v] Moreover, that period in all likelihood can be connected to the formation among the Turks of a special manner of absorbing a sound-space “with a love for thick, nasal timbres rich with overtones… and an abundance of drone forms.”[vi]

In very ancient musical genres such as throat-singing, epic tale-singing, performance on the khomus-kubyz-gopuz, kuraye-shoor-sybyzgy, igil-ikili-kylkoboz, etc., a single principle was used to produce specific sounds that carried in them features common to the Central Asian Turks. Musicology and music theory have yet to fully understand this sound system, in part, perhaps, because the ancient Turks did not leave written evidence about it. Nonetheless, the sound material itself – the music of Turkic peoples – can serve as an empirical “sound” document, preserving through successive centuries one important source about the ethnogenesis of these peoples. Moreover, in the absence of extensive theoretical generalizations, oral tradition has the ability not only to transmit but to reproduce the principles through which a sound-space is assimilated, and to preserve and demonstrate the principles of sound organization inside the system itself.

Conclusion

Until the 1920s, Tuvan traditional music preserved the specific character of nomadic culture. The twentieth century has gone down in history as a time of worldwide revolutionary correctives. The Tuvan people, inspired by the idea of a Socialist society, enthusiastically embraced the idea of building a new culture, firmly discarding everything that was branded as “primitive vestiges of feudalism.”

Beginning with the period of the Tuvan People’s Republic, in connection with changes in social conditions, traditional musical culture also began to change. Beginning in the 1930s, state cultural politics focused on the cultural backwardness of non-Slavic ethnic groups throughout the Soviet Union. In Tuva, the destructive influence of state cultural policies on traditional music centered on the Europeanization of musical instruments and musical repertories as part of the attempt to integrate Tuva into a unified cultural front with a Socialist orientation. Music in Tuva changed accordingly: there was a sharp decrease in work-related and ritual folklore, as well as in traditional instrumental music. By contrast, new genres of composed music appeared, including arrangements of folk music.

The last decade of the twentieth century, marked by the break-up of the USSR, weakened the ideological pressure that drove class-based cultural politics and affected science and scholarship. The indisputable value of traditional music was recognized, as were the specifics of its conceptual basis and aesthetics, knowledge of which is essential to approach traditional music as an object of research. The extraordinary phenomenon of Tuvan musical culture consists of the fact that, notwithstanding the relatively small number of carriers of traditional culture, and notwithstanding the ubiquity of Eurocentrism that came with the building of Socialism, and even notwithstanding the massive “attack” of mass culture and its novel means of audio and video recording, Tuvan music has begun to have its own significant effect on the world music community. This specific experience in the sphere of musical (or more broadly, sound) culture should be valued as the Tuvans’ unique contribution to the development of world culture.
Translated by Sean Quirk and Theodore Levin

[i] L. Feuerbach, “The Essence of Christendom.” In Selection of Philosophical Works. Vol. 2., Moscow, 1955, p. 183.

[ii] History of Tuva, vol. 1. Moscow, 1964, p. 214.

[iii] Yu. I. Sheikin, V.M. Tsekhanskii, V.V. Mazepus, Intonatsionnaia kul’tura etnosa (opyt sistemnogo rassmotreniia). Musical Cultures of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East, 1986, p. 235.

[iv] A.V. Anokhin, manuscript, Archive of the Tuvan Institute for Humanities Research, no. 864, p. 19.

[v] Karakulov, B.O. “Perspectives on the development of musical Turkology in Kazakhstan.

[vi] Mukhambetova, A. “The Musical Space of Turkic Music.” Paper presented at First International Symposium, “Music of the Turkic Peoples,” Almaty, 1994, p. 131.

Valentina Suzukei is contactable by e-mail: vsuzukei@mail.ru

21st century Kabuki

Tradition With A Wry Twist
18th in a Line of Kabuki Masters, Kanzaburo Tries Out a Few Firsts

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 26, 2007; C01

NEW YORK-- He is comfortable in chalk-white pancake makeup and lavish silk kimonos. He has mastered specialized styles of Japanese dance. He is an expressive actor, his red-lipped face going cross-eyed and his gestures freezing at moments of high drama.

And taking the stage at the Lincoln Center to play a shyster lecher of a monk, Nakamura Kanzaburo, 18th in a line of Kabuki masters, stands as the very symbol of Kabuki theater's 400 years of tradition.

Then he opens those lips.

"He's a metrosexual!" he says suddenly in an aside onstage.

"He only has a limited high school education," he says of a play's character.

"Who writes this crap?" he asks in his minimal English.

Kanzaburo, it seems, has gone 21st century on Kabuki.

"We want to create new ways of Kabuki," he says in Japanese through a translator while sitting in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, his soft-featured and smooth-shaven countenance well suited for his art's facial demands. Then, he adds, eyebrows raised: "But it has to be successful."

In 2000, he created his company, Heisei Nakamura-za -- which is scheduled to perform two pieces today at the Warner Theatre -- to try to recapture the feel of the earliest years of Kabuki. Back in Edo-period Japan, beginning about 1603, the art form was new and raw and raucous -- and so weird that its very name meant "tilted."

Kanzaburo and his director, Kushida Kazuyoshi, infuse the classics with contemporary details to re-create that edginess of centuries ago. By doing so, they hope to appeal to the generation of Japan's vid-kids reared on Hollywood films and anime.

The tradition of Kabuki is innovation, Kanzaburo likes to say. But the other tradition of that early, populist Kabuki is scorn from upper-caste tastemakers. Kanzaburo, 52, has faced such criticism.

Still, he continues to perform at Kabuki-za, the venerated Tokyo theater that shows unadulterated productions of the classics. And he teaches his two sons with the same orthodoxy that his father taught him.

The Kanzaburo dynasty dates to the 18th century, when three major theaters dominated Edo (now Tokyo), including the original Nakamura-za, run by the first Nakamura Kanzaburo.

Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII made his stage debut at age 4, after learning from his father, who was just beginning to export Kabuki after the neglect and isolation of World War II. Nakamura Kanzaburo XVII first performed in the United States in 1960, when Japanese-American relations were frayed. "Love, love, love," legend says Greta Garbo telegraphed after the performance.

Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII began training each of his sons, Kantaro, 25, and Shichinosuke, 24, in music and dance when they were 2, and they made theatrical debuts at 5 and 4, respectively.

Throughout their childhoods, they were cajoled with sweets and disciplined to perform. Dinner conversation at home has always revolved around recent Kabuki performances.

"In my father's mind, that's all there is -- it's all about theater," says Kantaro outside his Lincoln Center dressing room. "He's crazy! Totally crazy."

"In addition to being my children's father, I am also their master," says Kanzaburo, during a separate interview. "Even in the home, the language is very formal."

The work "Renjishi," which the company performed last week in New York, is a parable of a lion who throws his cub off a cliff and will rear him only if he can climb back up and prove he is strong enough to survive.

Kanzaburo used to perform it with his father, playing the cub to his father's lion. Now he performs with both his sons, playing the lion to their cubs.

"There's a part where we stomp our feet and there's a specific timing of when we stomp," he says. "I learned that from my father, but the timing was very specific to us. We would listen to each other. It goes beyond something you can actually teach. My sons would stomp at the same moment, do the stomp at the exact same time -- it's in their bodies, in their DNA.

"My father used to perform it and I would follow. I would be watching my father's back. Now that my father's gone, I have taken his role and my sons watch my back."

In "Hokaibo," a thrilling, raunchy comedy the company performed last week in New York, the core of Kabuki was apparent in all its melodrama, gore and profanity, along with extreme beauty, oddness and savage luxe.

Kanzaburo's humorous English-language additions fit right in a play in which a man waves a stick below his robes to indicate an erection, and in which a face is sliced off from its head to dangle midair, red and gory.

The play got an ovation, but there were critics in the house.

"It's a little too much," whispered an American usher, who said that she wrote her college thesis on Kabuki, and that Kanzaburo has departed too much from tradition.

Kanzaburo said conservatives in Japan initially ignored his new company. But then he garnered acclaim during his New York debut in 2004, in which the play called for him to be chased over miniature rooftops to end up in the arms of New York police.

"We got a rave review in the New York Times," he said. "That changed everything in Japan."

The latest production of Heisei Nakamura-za in Japan involved an electric guitar and female singers. Kanzaburo said even his wife -- who is the daughter, sister and mother of Kabuki actors -- had her qualms.

"My wife's family is very traditional -- whenever I do something new, she says, 'Is it a little too much?' Like electric guitar -- 'Is it too much?' Each time, we do a little more," he said.

The 900-seat theater, whose tickets cost roughly $125, sold out, said Toru Tanaka, Kanzaburo's manager. Gross ticket sales have been more than $1 million over the season's eight months, he says.

Original Kabuki stories were often dramatic versions of sensational events -- lovers' suicides, public vendettas, scandalous murders -- a kind of living newspaper performed by the river. "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," for instance, was based on the true story of a young couple who took their own lives in a nearby forest. A low-caste Romeo and Juliet, he was a clerk in a soy-sauce business, she was a prostitute.

Kanzaburo says he has considered adapting contemporary events into plays, but life these days has become too easy to make good Kabuki.

"You can fly [for] hours and get to New York," he says. "In the past, you would have to really journey, walk, ride, take a boat -- even getting together for a simple meeting was full of confusion and complexity.

"If they had had cellphones, Romeo and Juliet would not have had to die. He would have called her, and said: 'Don't take the medicine! I'm going to take a potion that'll make me only look dead!' "

But Kanzaburo's sons have visions of adapting tales from splatter movies and comic books.

"Night of the Living Dead," suggests a smiling Kantaro, who is also a popular television and film actor in Japan. "Zombie."

"I can make those kinds of films into Kabuki," Kantaro says. "I want to do it from midnight till the first train starts running in the early morning. I'd have blood spurt on the audience. I'd call it 'Midnight Kabuki.' "

"Comics," adds Shichinosuke -- who appeared in the film "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise -- suggesting absurd and gruesome manga stories about cannibals who gain special powers when they consume human flesh.

"Kabuki is already violent, very dark," Kantaro says. "There's no light in the Edo period, no electricity, night is very dark, there's only moonlight -- and on nights without moonlight, there's only stars and lots of spirits."

Will their father accept these ideas as legitimate Kabuki?

"I haven't talked to my father about it," he says, raising his index finger to his lips. "Shhh. It's a secret."

And so the sons take up the tradition and the change -- and the risk.

"I try to teach them exactly as I was taught," says Kanzaburo. "I don't like distorting. But it's like the telephone game -- the same things always have to come out differently."

Increasingly in the West, the Players Are From the East

NYT
April 4, 2007
Increasingly in the West, the Players Are From the East
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

With stunning swiftness China’s surging ranks of classical musicians have found a home in Western concert halls, conservatories and opera houses, jolting a musical tradition born in the courts and churches of Europe.

Large solo fees, plush orchestra jobs, an established audience and the presence of teachers steeped in the tradition have lured them to American and European cities. The phenomenon, which has been building for at least a decade, has gathered steam in the last few years, injecting new vitality into the American classical music scene after historic influxes of Italians, Germans and Russian Jews, and more recently Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans.

“I honestly think that in some real sense the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years,” said Robert Sirota, the president of the Manhattan School of Music. “They represent a vast new audience as well as a classical-music-performing population that is much larger than anything we’ve had so far. You’re looking at a time when, maybe 20 to 40 years from now, Shanghai and Beijing are really going to be considered centers of world art music.”

Cultural generalizations are always perilous. But many Western musicians and educators interviewed cited similar qualities in Chinese virtuosos: passion and refinement, expressiveness and brilliance. Chinese players seem less bound by the culture of conformity sometimes found in Asia, those Westerners said.

“Mainland China has a tremendous sense of going for it,” said Paavo Jarvi, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “There is something open. They are reaching out rather than holding back.” And they have arrived.

Consider that the hottest artist on the classical music planet may well be the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, 24, the darling of fans worldwide. The biggest event in the opera world last year was a Metropolitan Opera premiere by Tan Dun, “The First Emperor,” which the Met hopes to take on tour to China next year.

In 2005, at the most recent Van Cliburn piano competition, a deeply Texan tradition in Fort Worth, 8 of the 35 participants were Chinese, up from 3 in 2001 and 1 in 1991; one of the six finalists, Chu-Fang Huang, went on to win the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2005. Chinese violinists and pianists now regularly win prizes in the world’s other major competitions as well.

Along with Lang Lang and another highly praised Chinese pianist, Yundi Li, also 24, a new crop of stars in their teens or barely out of them are on the way up. They include Yuja Wang, 20, a pianist studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, already under major artists’ management, and Sa Chen, 17, another 2005 Cliburn finalist.

For several decades Japanese and Korean musicians have formed a major presence in the West. In particular they have long populated the string sections of professional orchestras. Chinese musicians have now joined them in force and are winning high-profile positions. Hae-Ye Ni, who was born in Shanghai in 1972, was appointed principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra last fall. The Chicago and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras have assistant concertmasters born in China.

And not only string players: Liang Wang, 26, was recently named principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious chairs in orchestral music.

Chinese talent has entered almost every area of the classical music world.

A diverse group of composers like Mr. Tan, Bright Sheng, Chen Yi and Zhou Long have opened up a new sound world of Chinese-inflected rhythms, melodies and harmonies for younger American and European composers. Chinese singers, whose culture has its own rich opera tradition, round out casts in major opera houses around the United States.

Chinese conductors have in the last five years made the leap to prominent podiums, shaping orchestras and opera companies in music’s most prominent role. Their arrival is felt especially in Europe, but the rising star Xian Zhang, 33, was recently named associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

It is in the elite Western conservatories that the presence of Chinese is perhaps most significant for the future. The talented Chinese have become a bonanza for music schools, where they are raising the technical bar and joining the already robust ranks of Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese.

The wellspring is China’s almost limitless pool of young musicians, a mounting number driven by increasing prosperity and nurtured by Chinese society’s desire to compete with the West.

Music schools are sending administrators on recruitment trips to China or holding auditions there. Online applications from China to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston have doubled in the last three years. The Eastman School of Music in Rochester sent its admissions director on a scouting mission in October, and the school has about 100 Chinese applicants for next year, twice what it had a decade ago.

“One goes where the talent is,” said Jamal Rossi, Eastman’s interim dean.

Ties between American and Chinese conservatories are growing. Teachers from the United States are increasingly traveling to China to give master classes and lessons. A youth symphony from the New England Conservatory plans to go in June; another, from the Juilliard School, hopes to go early next year.

But the West is where careers are made.

“America has everybody coming from the world,” said Lang Lang, who studied with Gary Graffman, the former president of the Curtis Institute. “You can find every style in New York. I wouldn’t have a career like this and artistic development like this if I stayed in China. China is great for fundamentals, for children. We are very disciplined. We have great traditions. But we don’t have this kind of tradition that we have in Juilliard and Curtis. Piano is not just talent. It’s also tradition.”

His success in the West has fueled his career in China. “In the last five years, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve basically become a household name.”

Whether a talent like Lang Lang or a humble back-bench string player, many Chinese musicians believe that absorbing Western classical music on its native soil is essential.

Lin Yaoji, a prominent violin teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, makes every effort to have his brightest students study abroad at the earliest opportunity, he said, and he has placed many at top schools in Germany and the United States. “It is not our own music, so we cannot make them feel it is their own,” he added. “For that they have to go abroad.”

So, at Curtis, 7 of the 20 piano students are China-born. Mr. Graffman, the former president, who still teaches there, said that four of his five current students are Chinese, including Yuja Wang, who performs with major orchestras around the world. Another, Hao Chen Zhang, 16, learned the 10 Rachmaninoff Op. 23 preludes over Christmas break.

“That’s no joke,” said Mr. Graffman, a member of the generation of piano virtuosos who came of age in the 1950s, like Eugene Istomin, Byron Janis and Leon Fleisher. “These kids learn, frankly, in one week what it took me and my colleagues three months.”

There is a dark side to the bonanza. Many Chinese musicians fall prey to excessive competitiveness and grow obsessed with outward displays of success, like winning prizes.

Yoheved Kaplinsky, the chairwoman of the Juilliard piano department, also worries that there may simply not be enough room for so many great young soloists on the concert scene. “There’s bound to be conflict,” she said. “There’s bound to be friction.” Defying stereotypes, the talent does not stop at the piano and violin. One of the brightest young lights in the demanding precollege division at Juilliard is a 16-year-old clarinetist from Guangzhou, Weixiong Wang, an 11th-grader at the Professional Children’s School in New York.

Weixiong picked up the clarinet at 10, studied at a local conservatory and, at a clarinet festival in Shanghai, met a Juilliard clarinet teacher, who invited him to study in New York, at 13. Like many young Chinese students, he came with his mother and lives with her in Queens, in a two-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst. His mother sketches portraits in a mall; his father died five years ago in a car accident.

Weixiong’s current teacher, Alan R. Kay, called him a “tremendous talent,” a natural performer and one of the five best students he has had in 20 years of teaching. “It’s rare to find somebody that hot at his age,” Mr. Kay said. “He’s clearly a great musician.”

Already Weixiong has won four local competitions, including a Juilliard concerto contest. “When I was 11, my dream was to come to America,” he said. “I’m going to do my best to practice really hard, so I can be a soloist.”

On a Saturday in February, Weixiong gave a short recital at Juilliard. Only about 15 people attended. Weixiong’s mother, who was helping a pregnant friend move out of her home, could not make it.

He took the stage in a dark suit and open-necked shirt, a tall young man with shaggy hair that fell into his eyes. He performed Debussy’s “Première Rhapsodie,” a cool work of soft, high, floating tones that requires extreme control. Weixiong played with maturity, releasing a full, ringing sound and moving in sympathy with the music.

In the next piece, a sonata by Joseph Horovitz, he added glissandos and jazzy inflections. “My challenge is to calm him down,” Mr. Kay said later. “He’s a big showoff. I’m trying to teach him some dignity.”

Outside the recital hall the Juilliard lobby was abuzz with parents and students lugging their instruments.

One mother, Czrina Suen, stopped to chat with members of the parents association. A former flight attendant, she had moved from Hong Kong with her daughter Poony Poon, 10, to give her the chance to study piano at Juilliard, where she has a scholarship.

“They are the best in the world,” Ms. Suen said. “In Hong Kong she can’t find a suitable teacher.” Poony, a tiny girl in a fluffy white coat, plopped into a chair.

Ms. Suen used to travel 90 minutes each way between Flushing, Queens, and Manhattan, taking her daughter to lessons at Juilliard and to class at the Calhoun School, an exhausting routine. Matters improved when she and her daughter moved to West 150th Street.

Ms. Suen said that her husband had taken on extra work to send money. “We cannot survive for a long time here,” she added. “We are looking for a sponsor.”

But the will to overcome such difficulties among many families of musical Chinese children points at what the future may hold for classical music.

As Lang Lang put it: “Two hundred years ago it was Europe. A hundred years ago it was America. Fifty years ago it was Japan. And now it’s China.”

Joseph Kahn contributed reporting from Beijing.

M&C Note: see original post for video clips

Classical Music Looks Toward China With Hope

NYT
April 3, 2007
Classical Music Looks Toward China With Hope
By JOSEPH KAHN and DANIEL J. WAKIN

BEIJING, April 1 — Yu Zhenyang, a self-assured 15-year-old violinist with a picture of Jascha Heifetz in his bedroom, glided through the Mendelssohn Concerto from memory. His teacher bounded across the room, flailing his arms, swooning to demonstrate pathos and urging Zhenyang to play with more passion.

“You are the lead,” said the teacher, Lin Yaoji. “Be bolder. Stretch the distance between the notes, and then close the distance. I don’t want symmetry. Surprise me.”

Zhenyang is one of the brightest young stars at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, which has in recent years become part of China’s huge export machine churning out musical virtuosos.

With the same energy, drive and sheer population weight that has made it an economic power, China has become a considerable force in Western classical music. Conservatories are bulging. Provincial cities demand orchestras and concert halls. Pianos and violins made in China fill shipping containers leaving its ports.

The Chinese enthusiasm suggests the potential for a growing market for recorded music and live performances just as an aging fan base and declining record sales worry many professionals in Europe and the United States. Sales for a top-selling classical recording in the West number merely in the thousands instead of the tens of thousands 25 years ago.

More profoundly, classical music executives say that the art form is being increasingly marginalized in a sea of popular culture and new media. Fewer young American listeners find their way to classical music, largely because of the lack of the music education that was widespread in public schools two generations ago. As a result many orchestras and opera houses struggle to fill halls.

China, with an estimated 30 million piano students and 10 million violin students, is on an opposite trajectory. Comprehensive tests to enter the top conservatories now attract nearly 200,000 students a year, compared with a few thousand annually in the 1980s, according to the Chinese Musicians Association.

The hardware side has also exploded. As of 2003, 87 factories made Western musical instruments. By last year the number had grown to 142, producing 370,000 pianos, one million violins and six million guitars. China dominates world production of all three.

The Communist Party, which three decades ago was trying to wipe out classical music, now deems it an essential component of the “advanced culture” it vows to create to make the country a true great power.

At the same time European classical music has a charge of pop-culture frisson in China. Young people flock to concerts, or at least those they can afford. A woman at a Beijing bookstore was seen carrying Mozart’s portrait in her wallet. Piano showrooms look like auto dealerships, with coddled youth staging impromptu recitals on Baldwins and Yamahas made in China, as anxious parents haggle over prices. Stars like Lang Lang, the piano virtuoso, make television commercials.

“Music is hot in China,” said Chen Hung-Kuan, the chairman of the piano department at the Shanghai Conservatory. “It may be fading in Western countries,” he added, but in China the talent is “unlimited.”

Harnessing that talent has not always been smooth. Parents view acceptance to an elite conservatory not only as a passage into the world of art but also as an escape from poverty. Teachers push their students to master technical showpieces by rote to impress judges at the standardized nationwide competitions that serve as entrance exams for top schools.

China at its best produces virtuosos who can compete worldwide. But it has yet to develop a deep, sustainable culture in Western music. It has no symphony orchestra that ranks with a major orchestra in the United States, most critics say. Fans here flock to hear greats from the West but often shun the high prices to hear local performers.

The government has a complex bordering on mania when it comes to building concert halls. Some are white elephants, constructed hastily with little attention to programming or economic viability.

But optimists hope that these are growing pains for an art form that only a few decades ago, during the Cultural Revolution, was suppressed. Today classical music arouses few of the political and nationalist sensitivities that have made it harder for other kinds of Western culture or media to take root in China.

“Music is the least national of the arts,” said Wu Zuqiang, a composer, a former director of the Central Conservatory and a government adviser on the arts. “It crosses cultures more easily than anything else.”

One of the clearest signs that classical music has official approval in China came from Li Lanqing, a retired member of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee and former minister of education. Mr. Li wrote a lengthy, loving tribute to 50 Western composers in which he argued that you cannot be a true intellectual if you don’t understand Western classical music.

In a surprisingly bold statement he said that Chinese composers should “borrow theory and technique from European classical music to reform Chinese music.”

What Mr. Li called for was the revival of a longstanding goal. European classical music has long if not deep roots in China and has been associated with modernity for centuries. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci brought a clavichord when he visited China in the late 16th century. An Italian missionary, Teodoricus Pedrini, arrived in Beijing in 1711 and wrote court music for Emperor Kangxi.

Western music flourished here in the early 20th century. It even enjoyed strong support by Communist leaders until the Cultural Revolution. When China’s “reform and opening” policy took hold in the late 1970s, Western music started making a significant comeback. Chinese musicians began flowing to the United States.

By the 1990s members of the Politburo boasted of their love for classical music. President Jiang Zemin said he consoled himself after the death of the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1997 by listening to Mozart’s Requiem.

But elite support may count for less than the upsurge in interest among Chinese nationwide, including millions of parents and youth far outside Beijing, Shanghai and the other modern cities.

That trend began, paradoxically, just as Mao Zedong was trying to wipe out remnants of Western bourgeois influence. Musical talent was one of the few things that could offer an escape from harsh labor in the countryside, where millions of urban youth were sent to commune with peasants.

“Every kid — you have 10 fingers, you were playing something at that time,” said Li-Kuo Chang, the Chinese-born assistant principal violist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “Whether you have talent or not, that was a way of saving you to be sent to the factory or farm.”

The Cultural Revolution gave rise to a hunger for music. When it ended, people were “so thirsty to suck everything in,” said Yu Long, one of China’s most energetic conductors and musical entrepreneurs.

Mr. Yu described his own initiation. One day in 1976 his grandfather approached him with a “mysterious smile” and played a tape of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. “I suddenly felt in another world,” Mr. Yu said. “I decided to go abroad and study. It opened a whole new world for me.”

More recently China’s family-planning policy, which limits most urban parents to a single child, prompted many to treat their offspring like prodigies.

Children are being pushed to study an instrument, both as a possible means of advancement in the country’s hypercompetitive school system and as a way of creating respectable, well-rounded adults. Increased prosperity means that more families can pay for lessons, which has turned private teaching into a lucrative profession.

“We have the chance to give the best to our kids,” Mr. Yu said. “Not like our parents.”

The story of Yu Zhenyang, the Mendelssohn-playing student, is not unusual. He started playing violin at 7 in a mandatory arts class in Jingzhou, in Hubei province. His teacher, a graduate of the Central Conservatory, recognized his talent and persuaded his parents to allow him to specialize in music. At 9 he won a national youth violin competition, and two years later he tested high enough to enter the middle school attached to the Central Conservatory.

His mother, Yu Ya, gave up her job and moved with him to Beijing. “Our feeling was that he was not only the pride of our family, but actually of the whole town,” said Ms. Yu, who accompanies Zhenyang to classes, rehearsals and performances, often with a video camera. The family, with little savings of its own, borrows from friends to pay the steep tuition and the rent for part of a small walk-up apartment near the school.

Zhenyang sleeps and practices in the only bedroom. “He has to have a room that’s big enough to practice, or it doesn’t sound right,” Ms. Yu said. She sleeps on a cot tucked along the wall of the hallway outside.

Zhenyang said his goal was to play so well that musical experts around the world would not be able to tell his nationality unless they looked at his face. “Much of what people talk about as being identifiable as the Chinese accent in music is really just not measuring up to the international standard,” he said. “It’s subtle, but you can hear the same flaws in the performances of people trained in China. That’s what I want to overcome.”

The insight hints at one of the obstacles Chinese musical experts feel that the country still faces. Classical music, Chinese critics say, is still treated too often like a technology that can be mastered with the right combination of capital, labor and quality control. But a combination of technique, culture and creativity are needed to create playing that sounds spontaneous, sensitive and rich in emotion — not wooden and shaped by a cookie cutter.

Yu Long, the conductor, said the major obstacle to spreading musical culture was not money but the state-run education system, which focuses on prizes and status among young musicians and teachers. Though awards are seen to bring credit to society, they do little to enhance people’s appetite for music. “It cannot be like a race,” Mr. Yu said. “It is about beauty and feeling.” And music must be seen as part of a larger culture, he added, as in the West. “Here people lock themselves up in a practice room and think they can make great music,” he said.”

There are other concerns. While government support for classical music is clearly strong, critics say China has misallocated hundreds of millions of dollars on elaborate concert halls. That money might have been better spent, they suggest, on music education and affordable performances.

The trend began in Shanghai in the 1990s, when city leaders decided they needed a great opera house to compete with other international cities. The city set aside a prime plot of land next to the new government headquarters. The striking French-designed glass-and-steel structure cost $160 million.

Critics say city officials have spent far less time and money on managing the house. Its administrators, under pressure to recoup the big investment, have set New York prices for many shows despite Shanghai’s much lower average standard of living. The city pressures state-owned companies to purchase seats to fill the house.

Communist Party leaders have dreamed of having an even grander performance center in Beijing since the 1950s. President Jiang revived the idea in the 1990s and selected the block just west of Tiananmen Square. The government chose another French architect, Paul Andreu.

The National Theater, as it is called, is already widely considered a white elephant, even before it has opened. The project is four years late and, by local media estimates, at least $100 million over its already enormous $400 million budget.

Communist Party leaders argued for years over who should run the National Theater. No agency wanted to take responsibility if it had to assume the cost of operating its four performance halls. Finally, late last year, the Beijing city government was named the operator. But no formal opening has been announced.

Beijing needs a space for music that is bigger and more sophisticated acoustically, but the government mishandled the project, said Wu Zuqiang, the government arts adviser, who consulted on the theater during its design phase in the 1990s.

Classical music in China faces other obstacles. The quality of instruments in conservatory orchestras, particularly woodwinds and brasses, is poor. Not enough time is given to chamber music, vital to building the skills of listening and playing together with sensitivity. Some wonder how much Western traditions can be assimilated.

“There’s no question the talent is there,” said Joseph W. Polisi, president of the Juilliard School. “The commitment to Western art music is definitely there. But is that talent prepared to absorb what we have here?”

Joseph Kahn reported from Beijing and Daniel J. Wakin from New York. Rujun Shen contributed reporting from Shanghai.

New Chinese Art, New Chinese Capitalism

Yue Minjun with some of his smiling figures in his Beijing studio. One of China’s new breed of financially successful artists, he lives in a large walled-off compound.


NYTimes
January 4, 2007
In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, Jan. 3 — After the peppered beef carpaccio and before the pan-fried sea bass there were raucous toasts and the clinking of wine glasses in the V.I.P. room of New Heights, a jazzy restaurant in this city’s most luxurious location, overlooking the Bund.

Wang Guangyi, one of China’s pioneering contemporary artists, was there. So were Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and 20 other well-known Chinese artists and their guests, many of whom had been flown in from Beijing to celebrate the opening of a solo exhibition of new works by Zeng Hao, another rising star in China’s bubbly art scene.

“We’ve had opening dinners before,” said the Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, sipping Chilean red wine, “but nothing quite like this until very recently.”

The dinner, held on a recent Saturday night in a restaurant located on the top floor of a historic building that also houses an Armani store and the Shanghai Gallery of Art, was symbolic of the soaring fortunes of Chinese contemporary art.

In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million worth of Asian contemporary art, most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. In 2004 the two houses combined sold $22 million in Asian contemporary art.

The climax came at a Beijing auction in November when a painting by Liu Xiaodong, 43, sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979, when loosened economic restrictions spurred a resurgence in contemporary art.

That price put Mr. Liu in the company of the few living artists, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, whose work has sold for $2 million or more at auction.

“This has come out of nowhere,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, global head of Asian arts at Sotheby’s, which, like Christie’s, has just started a division focusing on contemporary Chinese art.

With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese auction houses that once specialized in traditional ink paintings are now putting contemporary experimental artworks on the block.

Western galleries, especially in Europe, are rushing to sign up unknown painters; artists a year out of college are selling photographic works for as much as $10,000 each; well-known painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China.

“What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer specializing in Asian contemporary art who has galleries in London and New York. “New ground is being broken. There’s a revolution under way.”

But the auction frenzy has also sparked debate here about whether sales are artificially inflating prices and encouraging speculators, rather than real collectors, to enter the art market.

Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. “They are not educating the public or helping artists develop. Many of them know nothing about art.”

But the boom in Chinese contemporary art — reinforced by record sales in New York last year — has also brought greater recognition to a group of experimental artists who grew up during China’s brutal Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

After the 1989 government crackdown in Tiananmen Square, avant-garde art was often banned from being shown here because it was deemed hostile or anti-authoritarian. Through the 1990s many artists struggled to earn a living, considering themselves lucky to sell a painting for $500.

That has all changed. These days China’s leading avant-garde artists have morphed into multi-millionaires who show up at exhibitions wearing Gucci and Ferragamo.

Wang Guangyi, best-known for his Great Criticism series of Cultural Revolution-style paintings emblazoned with the names of popular Western brands, like Coke, Swatch and Gucci, drives a Jaguar and owns a 10,000-square-foot luxury villa on the outskirts of Beijing.

Yue Minjun, who makes legions of colorful smiling figures, has a walled-off suburban Beijing compound with an 8,000-square-foot home and studio. Fang Lijun, a “Cynical Realist” painter whose work captures artists’ post-Tiananmen disillusionment, owns six restaurants in Beijing and operates a small hotel in western Yunnan province.

If China’s art scene can be likened to a booming stock market, Zhang Xiaogang, 48, is its Google. More than any other Chinese artist Mr. Zhang, with his huge paintings depicting family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, has captured the imagination of international collectors. Prices for his work have skyrocketed at auction over the last two years.

When his work “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120” sold for $979,000 at Sotheby’s auction in March, many art insiders predicted the market had topped out and prices would plummet within months.

But in October, the British collector Charles Saatchi bought another of Mr. Zhang’s pieces at Christie’s in London for $1.5 million. Then in November at Christie’s Hong Kong auction, Mr. Zhang’s 1993 “Tiananmen Square” sold to a private collector for $2.3 million. According to Artnet.com, which tracks auction prices, 16 of Mr. Zhang’s works have sold for $500,000 or more during the past two years.

Are such prices justified? Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China and perhaps the largest collector of Chinese contemporary art with more than 1,500 pieces, calls the market frothy but not finished.

“I don’t see anything at the moment that will stop the rise in prices,” he said. “More and more people are flocking to the market.”

Mr. Goedhuis insists that this is the beginning of an even bigger boom in Chinese contemporary art.

“I don’t think there’s a bubble,” he said. “There’s a lot of speculation but no bubble. That’s the paradox. In China there are only a handful of buyers — 10, 20, 30 — out of a billion people. You only need another 10 to come in and that will jack up prices.”

He added: “Another astonishing fact is there is not a single museum in the West that has committed itself to buying Chinese art. It’s just starting to happen. Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, MoMA, they’re all looking.”

Representatives from those museums, as well as others, have made scouting missions to China. A growing number of international collectors are looking at Chinese art too.

“After the 2005 Sotheby’s show I just jumped in,” said Didier Hirsch, a French-born California business executive who has long collected American and European contemporary art. “People said the next big run-up in prices would be at Sotheby’s in March so I said, ‘Now or never.’ ” Mr. Hirsch purchased nearly his entire collection — about 40 works — by phone after doing research on the Internet. He said he went first for what he called the titans — the original group of post-’79 painters — including Wang Guangyi and Liu Xiaodong.

Some critics here say the focus on prices has led to a decline in creativity as artists knock off variations of their best-known work rather than exploring new territory. Some are even employing teams of workers in assembly-line fashion.

Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, has become a regular visitor to China, scouting young artists for the center and other places. On a recent trip “I went to visit the studio of a well-known Beijing painter,” Mr. Phillips said. “The artist wasn’t there, but I saw a group of canvases being painted by a team of young women who seemed to be just in from the countryside. I found it a little disconcerting.”

There are also complaints that some artists are ignoring international standards by selling works directly into the auction market, rather than selling first to collectors. And many experts here say that some gallery officials and artists are sending representatives to the auctions to bid on their own works to prop up prices, or “protect” the prices of some rising stars.

But Lorenz Helbling, director of the ShanghART Gallery here, said Chinese artists continue to produce an impressive array of works, and that talk about the market being overrun by commercialism is exaggerated.

“Things are much better than they were 10 years ago,” he said. “Back then many artists were commissioned to simply paint dozens of paintings for a gallery owner, who went out and sold those works. Now these artists are thinking more deeply about their work because they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.”