Cemented History and Musical Relics

The Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, famous for his wildly enjoyable "magical realism," has a novel titled Shou Huo (2005, translated as "The Joy of Living" but I prefer "Orgy") about a rural official who wants to buy the statue of Lenin from Russia in order to develop "red tourism" which he hopes will guarantee the prosperity of his village and thus his own immortality. Five years later (last year), some Russian people in urgent need of money came up with a brilliant idea: sell their statue of Lenin to the Chinese!

I couldn't help laughing when I read about the news: fiction and life is seldom better fitted with each other.

And now China is in its own third decade of economic Capitalism developing under the thin cover of Communism. Which means, while the Party still preaches Communist ideas such as “selfless collectivism,” the people, inspired by the Party’s own policies, have long been thinking otherwise. They wish they could do away with ideas that have become relics, but they can't because the Party still uses them. So they just don't mention them unless necessary.
In this drastic change of thoughts, music suffered, too. Back in the 50s and 60s, composers wrote a lot praising the good new days: lauding the Party, depicting the new life, looking forward hopefully to a brilliant future. Such works are rarely without pomposity, but many are written with real sincerity and willing devotion. Among the large bulk of “red works,” musicians, guided by and together with the Party, selected a few of them to be "representative" ones, and they became household classics through tireless propaganda. They still dominate the "Chinese music" section in music textbooks for nonprofessionals. Some of the representative works are really good. Scrub the redness off and they stand perfectly on their own. More, however, just sound old and distant now. But since the people, conservatories included, are eager to head on new paths, old stuff – good or not – are just thrown away all together. Even the two most popular classics – the Yellow River and Butterfly Lovers concertos – no longer appeal to people with a young mind.

Under such circumstances, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra dedicated a whole concert last week to the works of Qu Wei (1917-2002), its former Composer in Residence and an old-school party-line composer who's now remembered for only one work: the 19-minute symphonic poem Monument to People's Heroes written in 1959. Well, not that bad – when I read materials online and in the archive for program notes, the image of Qu Wei the man gradually came alive. The moment of epiphany in his life was in 1942, when he heard in person Mao Zedong delivering what became the Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art, after which he firmly set up his ideal as a composer and music worker (but the articles never revealed what it exactly is). He was warmly remembered as a very nice and low-profile grandpa warm-hearted in music education of university students and the general public. Many of his colleagues and friends also praised, full of emotion, in recollection and commemorative articles, his dedication in looking after his Alzheimer-stricken wife, who was a composer of children's songs including the Song of the Young Pioneers every Chinese child still sings during their (compulsory) years of being Young Pioneers.
But Qu Wei the composer and his music are discussed nowhere in details. There are 5 other works in the program aside from the Monument to People's Heroes, and I could find absolutely nothing about them besides very basic facts: titles and year of composition. There're no recordings of (perhaps except in government archives), no writings about and no study on them. The scores and parts are not published, and, like the conductor and the orchestra, I have to read the full score (and I'm so poor at that) in manuscript (ooops, his handwriting...) to see what the music was like. In the end, I found in the orchestra's own archive the program sheets featuring all these works except one, and copied the 50-year-old program notes from them since they're the only thing available in all these years.

Performance records show the trend. After Qu Wei became the Composer in Residence of Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 1959, the orchestra performed his key works (about 5 in number) frequently. After the Cultural Revolution which forbade all normal music-making, only the Monument and the White-Haired Girl Suite remained and were performed scarcely. On May 21, 1999, a concert dedicated to his works was held – the first and the last before he died. It was clearly a government-sponsored event honoring his lifelong dedication to (party-line) music. The rest is silence.

People would love to remember him as an important figure but disregard his dedication and his work.

So how the orchestra got the idea of this concert? It turned out that Qu Wei's son wrote to the central government saying his father's works needed to be performed and the government redirected the task to us. The box office was one of the biggest disasters the orchestra has ever had. Nobody was wrong. Nothing helped.

What about the music then? I wanted to go to the concert before I heard several minutes of the rehearsal and was shaken by its naive, blank pomposity. Sorry, man, I know you were sincere, but it's really not good music.

Qu Wei, 1917-2002

Unfamiliar Connections -- Chinese musicians and the world

Though young Chinese musicians are daringly making their way into the International stage, and news such as one Chinese pianist invited to perform with top conductors like Claudio Abbado and Seiji Ozawa or another Chinese pianist winning a competition is beginning to lose its "wow" effect. Yes, young Chinese musicians are blending well with the musical world.

But not the old ones.

For the present moment I'm listening to a 3-CD collection featuring the pianist Liu Shikun. Born in 1939, Liu is one of the older-generation musicians who have become textbook symbols. Academia people (seem to) revere him and hail him as one of the best Chinese pianists, and music lovers generally just accept this idea. But then, Liu is more heard of than really heard. First, classical music recording industry is always remarkably weak in China, so, before this 3-CD set, no one around me knew whether he had made any recording or not. Then, Liu doesn't perform often, and when he does perform in concerts, few music lovers would pay to hear him -- tickets are always expensive and no one would risk the money for someone he had never actually heard. So I've always been curious about his playing. That's why I want to buy the CDs in the first place.

The "unfamiliar connections" referred to in the title occur when I browse through the track list. All are "historical" recordings made around 1960, except one. Liu performs a few concertos here, and is accompanied by, apart from the most important Chinese orchestra under one of the most revered Chinese conductor (who is 90 years old now), Dresden Philharmonic under Heinz Bongartz, and -- my jaw dropped -- Moscow Philharmonic under Kirill Kondrashin!

A rarely heard old Chinese pianist performing with Kirill Kondrashin?! This fact alone can make him a legend in the heart of many music lovers in China. Yet few people know about this and even care about this!

*****

I was reminded of a treasured conversation I had this summer with the 89-year-old composer Zhu Jian-er in my Archivist's office at the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Zhu is unquestionably my favorite Chinese composer, not that he began writing symphonies in his 60s (after the Opening-up Policy, that is) and wrote no less than 11 of them (if you include the Sinfonietta) in less than 20 years, not that none of the 11 sounds the least similar to each other in their stunning display of all sorts of techniques -- from fugues to pre-recorded tapes to controlled aleatorism, but that all of them show a deep-rooted, rock-solid, intensely spiritual, powerfully immense Chinese soul. (Listen here if you're interested, in Chinese though.) However, since it's already more than a decade since he virtually retired after his final symphony in 1999, with performances becoming scarcer, he is becoming another textbook symbol of rather than an active living legend. His fame in the West, if any, may be dwindling, too, since Alex Ross didn't mention him in The Rest is Noise.

That morning, Mr. Zhu came to have a few of his photos scanned and emailed. And in one of the photos I recognized Tikhon Khrennikov, who is supposed by many to have denounced and persecuted Shostakovich and others in 1948. I was kind of shocked to see the beloved old man sitting beside me in the same photo with a "Communist Devil." But reason immediately interceded: of course it was perfectly normal that back in the 1950s & early 60s Chinese composers who visited the USSR would take a photo together with the Head of the Union of Soviet Composers. So I excitedly pointed at Khrennikov and showed that I knew he was the Head of the Union of Soviet Composers. "Oh, you know about him." Mr. Zhu, calmly excited, commented in his frail voice (he's 89 anyway), "he was also a member of the Central Committee." And he pointed at another man in the photo: "this is Shchedrin." I didn't know Shchedrin was that handsome. There was no trace in Mr. Zhu's voice that showed he was aware of the popular trend that regards Khrennikov as a symbol of the evil, and I didn't ask. As the composer who wrote one of the first symphonic works that reflected (upon) and criticized the Cultural Revolution, he would surely understand if he knows this.

Mr. Zhu Jian-er, June 2011

*****

Chinese people never like to dig up cemented history. They would rather not talk about it and just move on as peacefully as possible. So different strands of history often run apart unnoticed and buried, until someone notices the connection and wonders at how it could be like that and gets shocked. As an archivist, such shocks come often and stir up all kinds of emotion in me. Some of them, such as Liu Shikun's collaboration with Kondrashin, show how the buried history could be brilliant and important, but people would rather bury them anyway. Others, such as Mr. Zhu's photo with Khrennikov, add to the bittersweetness one feels in the smiles that only shake it off.

BTW, Liu Shikun indeed plays very well in these recordings made in his early 20s.