Xiaogang Ye laughed awkwardly as he recounted a conversation with a western music lover. “He said: ‘Hey, your music interests me. But it’s very high—I suppose the voice has to be high when reading Chinese poems.’” Ye, China’s most prolific contemporary composer, was perplexed by the remark. “I just use the basic register for the soprano. It’s not actually high at all.” Though Chinese performers of the European classical music canon have long been part of the mainstream, Ye’s anecdote shows just how far there is to go before Chinese music itself banishes the clichéd image of Peking Opera-style warbling and folksy stuff with “peculiar” instruments.
But maybe it’s not as far as we once thought. We had been discussing—over a crackly line from Beijing—a new recording by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO), which pairs Ye’s Song of the Earth for soprano, baritone and orchestra with Gustav Mahler’s famous song cycle of the same name. The newer composition, in which soprano Zhang Liping sings very much in the normal register, is based on the same poems from China’s seventh century Tang dynasty that Mahler used in translation for his Das Lied von der Erde in 1909.
For Ye, the double bill is a relatively rare opportunity to showcase music composed in China beyond its shores. “Mahler’s piece is known throughout the world, using poems translated from Chinese to French to German,” Ye said. His own composition deals with the themes of love, pleasure and death found in the original Tang-era texts. Compared to Mahler’s dark meditation on sadness and disillusionment—written not long before his death—Ye’s piece is lighter, with subtle Chinese flavours. “I’ve tried to express my own understanding of what the poet really means. This was an opportunity to make a symphonic structure with Chinese themes.”
Long Yu, the SSO’s conductor, called the recording a “cultural event”—and with Covid raging, it’s a miracle it happened at all. American soloists Brian Jagde and Michelle DeYoung, along with Grammy-winning producer Chris Adler, had to negotiate closed borders and lengthy quarantine requirements. Other major recordings and festivals planned to mark the 120th anniversary of Mahler’s death were cancelled. It’s a testimony to China’s international ambitions—as well as the classical industry’s thirst for the growing Chinese market—that this one was not.
Tellingly, the record’s publisher Deutsche Grammophon, among the most prestigious classical labels, had previously chosen Beijing’s Forbidden City to launch its own 120th anniversary celebrations in 2018 with an SSO concert. The following year, SSO signed with them and performed at the Proms. The orchestra, then, is already tightly knitted into western music ecology—but such links are still overwhelmingly about its performances of western music.
When Mahler composed his Song of the Earth more than a century ago, Chinese musicians did not have the well-supported orchestras, millions of children learning to play or a growing school of composers with which to respond. They do today. The present flourishing is usually traced back to the enthusiasm that followed the wilderness years of the Cultural Revolution, when the art form was suppressed as a bourgeois abomination, but its roots go much deeper.
According to Sheila Melvin, co-author of Beethoven in China, the official introduction of western music into China dates back to 1601, when a Jesuit missionary called Matteo Ricci presented a clavichord to Ming emperor Wanli. Further musical Jesuits followed. In the late 16th century, Chinese musicologist, mathematician and prince, Zhu Zaiyu, was among the pioneers of a landmark mathematics-based system of “tempering” keyboard instruments to make them play tunefully in every key.
In the 18th century and following the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, a European vogue for all things Chinese led to composers such as Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Puccini using melodies brought out of the country by musicians and traders, including tunes from music boxes. In the early 20th century, several composers—notably Russian-born Alexander Tcherepnin, who fled the Bolshevik revolution, and Aaron Avshalomov, born to a Jewish family in Siberia—went to China, where they encouraged classical music that “sounded Chinese.” In 1947, Sang Tong, having met Jewish refugees who had worked with Arnold Schoenberg, composed China’s first atonal piece.
By that time the SSO was already on the scene. Founded in 1879, it is older than many leading European orchestras. Originally for expat Europeans, it was first conducted by French flautist Jean Rémusat who had worked with Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. Gradually, from the mid-1920s onward, Chinese musicians took over. It survived the Cultural Revolution by playing a small repertoire of approved revolutionary songs, but its musicians were still attacked for promoting western ideology. The house of current conductor Long Yu’s grandfather—composer Ding Shande, who had worked with Nadia Boulanger in Paris—was ransacked and his music burned. The orchestra’s then conductor was locked up and forced to clean toilets, before eventually being executed. On his way to die, he hummed Beethoven’s Missa solemnis.
The post-Mao class of 1978 at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music was a golden generation. As well as Xiaogang Ye, there was Zhou Long—whose opera Madame White Snake is inspired by a Chinese legend—and the pioneering female composer Chen Yi. Many of them also studied abroad.
Bass-baritone Shenyang, a member of a younger cohort of US-educated Chinese musicians who sings on Ye’s Song of the Earth, told me that contemporary Chinese music is a fusion of influences. “By the end of the 19th and 20th century, there were many composers whose work was influenced by China,” he said. English composer Cyril Scott used Chinese themes and melodies, and Benjamin Britten composed eight Songs from the Chinese. Both of them, of course, produced their powerful works without setting foot in China.
“How do we avoid parochialism? As a musician it’s the first thing we have to conquer,” Shenyang told me on the phone from Sussex, where he was preparing for a Glyndebourne production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. While Ye’s music uses the five-note scale, vocal glissandi and the colour of Chinese traditional instruments, Shenyang says it is “actually quite similar to Berg or Wagner or Stravinsky. Learning his music is like learning any other great composer.”
Shenyang’s cross-cultural enthusiasm is infectious. But when I questioned him about a recent New York Times story profiling Asian musicians who had faced racism and stereotyping in American orchestras, he confirmed with frustration that: “Yes, we hear stories like that.” Even established Chinese composers living abroad complain about being “exoticised.” Amid increasing tensions between Beijing and western capitals, Chinese instrumentalists have also faced resentment for their growing prominence and startling technical skills, which some dismiss as wizardry devoid of emotional understanding. This is an outdated attitude, contends Linda Hawken of music publishers Edition Peters. “Yes, they’re incredible technically. We publish some of the most difficult music in the world. When I take it to China, they just say—‘haven’t you got anything harder?’” she told me from Leipzig. “But now they also understand the idiom—playing like that, there’s no stopping them.”
“I’m an individual. I am also marked as a Chinese composer? Which I am. Or a female composer. Which I am. But I’m just a composer”
Chinese-born composers are now catching up with the hard-grafting pianist and violinist virtuosos. Chou Wen-Chung was one of the first to point the way: he moved to the US in 1946 and remained there until his death in 2019. He composed music by drawing on his Chinese heritage, such as calligraphy and philosophy. He founded and taught Asian music courses, and organised US-China cultural exchanges. “He very much felt the weight of continuing traditions in a way that was authentic,” according to his son, Sumin.
Another aspect of his inheritance was the brutal history of early 20th-century China. Music helped him deal with his early childhood during which, in the long shadow of civil war and the horrors of Japanese occupation, he was separated from his family. Sumin told me his father suffered from PTSD. “You hear it in his music—it’s hardly easy listening. It was my father’s way of expressing his emotion.”
Chou Wen-Chung’s influence has grown on US-based Chinese students, including Oscar and Grammy winner Tan Dun and Pulitzer Prize runner-up Bright Sheng. But how are his works to be labelled: Chinese or American? Does it matter? Chou Wen-Chung embraced his Chinese heritage in his music, but refused to be pigeonholed. The younger generation is even more resistant. Du Yun, 44, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music with her opera Angel’s Bone, has said she found the discussions of east meets west “tiring.”
The same goes for Du Wei, an award-winning female composer whose varied compositions grace film soundtracks and are performed in cities across the world, from Philadelphia to Amsterdam. Having studied at Beijing Central Conservatory, Du Wei explained how she began by learning western classical techniques, and then spent years trying to develop her own musical language—emphatically not the language of “any school of music.” (Her opera, Nora, is inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.) “I’m an individual,” she said. “I’m also marked as a Chinese composer. Which I am. Or a female composer. Which I am. But in the end, I’m just a composer,” she said.
There are many starkly different voices in Chinese classical music. In a lively interview from New York, Joel Sachs, pianist, conductor and professor of music history at the Juilliard School, painted a cosmopolitan picture of Chinese musicians composing anything, from music that sounded romantic and melodic to outright jarring. His list of must-hear Chinese composers includes Guo Wenjing, who fuses western and Chinese styles. He believes Guo Wenjing could be the one to write the first “Great Chinese Symphony.” Others include the popular Qigang Chen, who is based in France but runs a summer workshop for young composers in the Chinese mountains, and Zhu Jian’er, “a remarkable symphonic composer,” who died in 2017. The versatile Liu Sola has diversified into composing for film and TV, as well as in other musical genres like reggae, soul and rock.
The reason these composers are not widely played in the west isn’t necessarily because of their nationality, Sachs said, but because, when it comes to any new music, people who programme concerts “don’t look beyond their noses. Many conductors think that doing one or two new pieces per season is about the maximum to ensure that the audience doesn’t walk.” In China itself, by contrast, Ye said, “a new piece by any Chinese composer always gets a lot of attention.”
Do Chinese orchestras play differently? Ye racked his brains. “In his Mahler, Yu expresses something very different from western conductors. More aggressive. Bigger contrasts. When oriental conductors play western music, naturally they have their own music background.” But how different is this from comparing one western conductor with another, he then wondered aloud—such as Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan or Claudio Abbado? “Music is music. I don’t feel a need to divide it into ‘eastern’ and ‘western,’” Ye said. “I don’t think that I experience different feelings deep in my heart just because of where I grew up. Perhaps I interpret it in a particular way because of my personal experience, but not because I’m Chinese.”
Regardless of how the music is categorised, there’s likely to be a lot more in the mix. Already some European and US composers are drawing on the rich seam from China—for instance, the German composer Bernd Franke, who has been writing for Chinese instruments and instrumentalists. Increasingly, music exam books in the west contain works by Chinese-heritage composers. Linda Hawken of Edition Peters, who is well-travelled in China, said hundreds of composition students were flowing into the Beijing Central Conservatory each year. So, is the future of music Chinese? “I don’t know,” she told me, “but a German music professor said to me recently—give it 10 years, and we’ll all be going over there to learn.”
