China: Eastern Hope for the Decline of Western Music?

By Michael White

To read the Western press is to believe that China is the new Japan, new Jerusalem, and new Babylon rolled into one: poised both for take-over and take-in on a massive scale. And given that everything about China comes on a massive scale, thanks to a population of 1.3 billion, the accompanying data tends to mesmerize.

This is a country, we are told, whose GDP is growing at an awesome 9 percent per year and whose imports market will be bigger by 2010 than that of Germany and the United States. What's more, by 2020 the size of the literate Chinese middle class is likely to account for 40 percent of the population (which by then will be 1.4 billion), with the result that China will probably overtake Japan (and certainly America) as the world's largest consumer of luxury goods.

Add together those few comfortably co-existent concepts--literacy, class, and luxury--and it's not hard to jump to the conclusion that the Western arts will find a place in this amazing oriental El Dorado. Western theater, painting, architecture will strike gold; and the great but, some would argue, dying tradition of Western classical music will be rescued by the demands of a new market beyond its dreams. Or so people say.

The other year, when Kurt Masur was touring China with the London Philharmonic, he made a point of saying that the future of Western classical music now lay in the East. When Simon Rattle was on tour more recently with the Berlin Philharmonic, he made similar remarks. And he may well be right. The last time I visited China I was told that some 40 million children there were now learning the piano. As statistics in the world of serious music go, that's prodigious.

But the first caveat in any overview of Chinese musical potential is: Do not be too impressed by the statistics. On that same visit to China I was also told that there were 20 million children learning the piano and, quite separately, 100 million. As if anybody really knows. With figures so enormous, this is territory where economic forecasters get trigger-happy when they fire off their predictions.

The second caveat is: Don't imagine that the Chinese appetite for Western music is already ravenous. There aren't so many peasants humming Schubert in the rice fields. It's a chic minority who take an interest--people who (it was explained to me) have just discovered French red wine, the latest craze among the Beijing affluent.

And the third caveat is: Don't imagine that Western classical music is a new arrival on Chinese shores. It's been around in one form or another since the 17th century when a missionary Jesuit gave the emperor a clavichord. The only problem was that the music, like the mission, never quite took root.

There was a symphony orchestra established in Shanghai during the 1890s. By the 1950s there were conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing teaching Western repertory; and through much of the 20th century it was possible to hear live performances of core Western classics in the larger cities, if only at the initiative of European expats in colonial settlements. And there was a major Chinese orchestra (though you might challenge definitions here) in the Hong Kong Philharmonic--not totally professional until 1974, and not necessarily something the mainland Chinese would choose to identify with, but nonetheless around since 1895 and of symbolic significance as a cultural bridge between East and West.

Through all this time, though, China never quite shrugged off the sense of being culturally self-sufficient and impervious to Western influence. The prevailing stance was fixed historically by the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong who told King George III that China needed no trade with Britain because it "already possessed everything a civilized people could ever want." For centuries that didn't change much. And although, around the middle of the 20th century, the Chinese started to embrace symphonic music as indicative of "progress," official attitudes were governed by whichever passing political ideology prevailed at any moment.

Chairman Mao initially encouraged his people to like Bach and Beethoven, importing music teachers from Russia to spread the word. But after the split with Russia in 1960, the teachers stopped coming. And by 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began in earnest, Mao's sympathy for Bach and Beethoven was over.

Every Chinese musician above a certain age has a story to tell about the Cultural Revolution and how he or she survived it: hiding music under floorboards, practicing in secret with the doors and windows locked--while Red Guards in the street were smashing pianos, violins, anything that represented bourgeois sensibility, and hounding music teachers (literally) to death.

"It was a tragedy of history," I was told by Yu Long, the 42-year old conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra who, like most Chinese of his generation and upbringing looks back on what was happening 30 years ago with pained contempt. His grandfather had been a well-known professor of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory and, accordingly, a particular target for the Guards.

"He was humiliated, stripped of his property, forced to burn his music. It was a terrible time for him," said Yu Long when I met him, pointing to the photo of his grandfather that takes pride of place on his office wall. "And you know, it was senseless. Without reason. Even today it's hard to explain how or why these things happened."

Part of the senselessness was that the values of the Revolution were so arbitrary and so incoherent, no one knew exactly where they stood. At the same time that Western (and for that matter, Eastern) classical performers were being punished as bourgeois reactionaries, a Beijing symphony orchestra known as the Central Philharmonic carried on playing--albeit with a repertory confined to seven works, with names like Women of the Revolution March to Victory and the odd piece from the Western canon that could pass political muster.

Madam Mao herself took a personal interest in this orchestra and is said on one occasion to have told the director to get rid of the trombones on the grounds that they made an "unrevolutionary" sound. Alarmed that losing his trombones would limit the repertory still further, he apparently persuaded her that what she had heard and disliked were in fact tubas. So the tubas went, causing considerably less of a problem.

"You see," says Yu Long, "it was laughable what happened.Mao and his circle, these people were idiots. Because of them a generation was lost to music, sent out to plant rice when they should have been in the conservatory. We have a lot of catching up to do."

Yu Long himself is a spectacular example of how fast the catching up has been. Born in 1964, he personally missed the worst excesses of the Revolution, which was over by the time he was ready to study seriously. So he was one of the first generation of modern Chinese free to study abroad (which he did, in Germany). And as his family were friends with Deng Xiaoping it did him no harm when Deng took power in 1976.

Deng had an ear for Western music (when he died in 1997, the event was marked officially by a performance of the Mozart Requiem), and he passed it on to his successor Jiang Zemin who turned out to be the Edward Heath of Chinese politics, conducting orchestras at banquets. All of which helped to create a climate in which the extraordinary Yu Long has emerged as the near-universal Mr. Fixit of Chinese music-making.

According to his business card, Yu Long is a conductor--and, you might add, with little profile in the West, although he has made a couple of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and appeared on tour at London's Barbican Centre and New York's Carnegie Hall. But in the East he collects jobs in the way the rest of us collect air miles. Before so much as hitting 40 he was the founder-conductor of the China Philharmonic,
founder-director of the Beijing Festival, artistic director of the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center, music director of the Guangdong Symphony and Academy, conductor of the Central Opera Theatre of Beijing . . . all of which positions he still holds.

It's like having the same man run the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Met, the Mostly Mozart festival, the Curtis Institute, and several concert halls besides. Unsurprisingly, he told me he gets tired. But when I asked him how he manages, he spoke with breathless, missionary zeal about the need for "global outlook" and about Chinese audiences hungry for "what used to be called Western culture, though I don't think of it as that any more. Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini belong to the whole world, which now includes us."

China's claim to musical inclusion owes a great deal to the Beijing Festival, which Yu Long set up in 1998 and is far and away the biggest fixture of its kind in the country--running on a budget of $3 million and pulling in the glossiest Western names like Maazel, Rattle, and Dutoit, as well as the new Chinese ones like Lang Lang and Tan Dun.

"It’s important," Yu Long told me, "to reclaim our own"--which clearly means drawing back the musicians of the Chinese diaspora who left the country as soon as they could in the 1970s, as well as the ones who were never there to begin with. People in the Beijing music business talk determinedly of Yo-Yo Ma as "one of us," despite the fact that he was born in Paris, raised in New York City (went to the Professional Children's School there), and moved to Massachusetts when he went to Harvard.

Armed with these kinds of artists, the Festival sets out particularly to attract the new, young-middle-aged sophisticates of Beijing society. Those red wine drinkers.

"And there are many of these people," Yu Long told me, "but there is also a learning curve to be addressed. At first they didn't know how to behave in a concert, how to sit still and keep quiet. Now they do. You have to explain these things and have patience."

Meanwhile, as Yu Long does his explaining, China's Western music industry seems to be growing at the same, frantic pace as everything else in the country. There are now over 30 full-time, full-sized, fully professional symphony orchestras in China--more than in the United States. And to accommodate them, the past few years have seen a spectacular building program of architecturally striking, state-of-the-art, and wildly expensive
performance centers mushrooming throughout the country.

The best-known is the $350 million National Grand Theatre complex, designed by Frenchman Paul Andreu for concerts, plays, and opera, and sitting like a giant steel slug (though locals prefer to call it an "Egg") close to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing: a site of some political significance. But there are equally astonishing new buildings, variously termed opera houses or arts centers, in Shanghai, Hangzhou (by Carlos Ott, architect of the Bastille Opera, Paris), as well as Nanjing, Wenzhou, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen . . . the list goes on.

To see these glittering palaces of culture--or their photographic images--is to be overawed. But as things stand, these projects are more gestural than actual. The "Egg" is still under construction after several years, and is not yet ready for operation. Enquiries about when the place will open are invariably met with shrugging shoulders. It's a mystery. No one knows--or else no one will say. And as there appears to be no artistic program in preparation, the word on the street is that it may still be a mysteriously empty building when the Beijing Olympics open in 2008. The Chinese care deeply about "face," however, and chances are that they are doing their utmost to make sure it is ready in time.

As for the other arts buildings, several of them have fallen into pits of controversy for their "un-Chinese" design by foreign architects; most of them are currently under-used; a few are in serious financial trouble; and the ones that call themselves "opera houses" have only the barest claim to being anything of the sort.

The Shanghai Grand Theatre, for example, opened with a suitably grand Aida but now plays host to The Lion King. Meanwhile, the Shanghai Opera Company, one of the most established companies of its kind in China, only manages to stage two or three productions a year--invariably of core Romantic repertory, and playing to an audience so unfamiliar with the whole process of Western opera that the artistic director, Zhang Guoying, has to (in his words) "put up a sign saying 'Rest' during the intermission so the people know they have to come back."

What's more, Shanghai only manages to mount its two or three shows with considerable Western aid. A recent Pearl Fishers was paid for by the French government. And appeals to the West are still standard at all levels of Chinese musicmaking--with respondents ranging from the big worldwide conglomerates who write checks for the Beijing Festival down to the Elgar Society of Great Britain, which sends packages of Elgar CDs out to Chinese radio stations.

"Money is always a fundamental problem," says Yu Long who, courtesy of the Beijing Festival, manages the most adventurous music projects in China (last year they included a Ring cycle) but accordingly has to support the most challenging budgets. "We need sponsors, but as yet there aren't the tax breaks to encourage them," he says, concerned that there was more state funding in the early days of the post-cultural revolution thaw than there is now, when, typically, the government is reassessing the allocations of resources to culture.

And reliance on native Chinese business support can be precarious--as proven by the recent downfall of one of the biggest single supporters of opera in the country, an entrepreneur named Chan Bonko. The Alberto Vilar of the Orient, he was imprisoned for fraud, leaving a trail of financial chaos and cancelled projects in his wake.

All of which leaves Yu Long and his arts-management colleagues with the annual task of either buying Western-originated initiatives at knockdown prices or charging $200 for a ticket in the knowledge that most of his potential audience would find $20 unaffordable. So far, the West has been accommodating. Earlier last year New York's Metropolitan Opera sent a B-team cast to Shanghai to workshop (very successfully, I've heard) Tan Dun's new opera, The First Emperor, before it opened in December 2006 on home territory (with an A-team led by Domingo). A few years back, Welsh National Opera workshopped a Figaro at the Beijing Conservatory with similar results. And there can be no doubt that the inspirational effect of such initiatives is paying off. A sudden rush of excellent young Chinese singers--many of them from the opera class of a formidably powerful 90-year old teacher, Madam Zhou Xiao Yan, at the Shanghai Conservatory--has flooded the international market with stars like the winner of the 1997 Operalia competition, baritone Liao Chang Yong. Alongside them is an emergent generation of Chinese conductors, instrumentalists, and composers, all highly promising and fiercely ambitious.

But the ambition of the Chinese is itself a problem. No one in this most collective of societies seems to want to make collective music. Every student wants to be a soloist, spurred on by (probably parental) visions of becoming the next Yundi Li or Lang Lang. Chamber music isn’t valued. And ensemble playing in the orchestras is in its infancy. You feel, almost, a desperation in much Chinese musicmaking: an emphatic, driven, not particularly healthy need to work, achieve, and catch up with the West.

As Yu Long puts it, "We're going through a period of nervousness. We can't relax and be reflective. Which is why it's hard for us to play Mozart. This we still have to learn."

And for a paradigmatic picture that illustrates both the hopes and fears for music in China, you might try the Jiangjie Piano City, a battery farm for budding keyboard players with 12 branches throughout Beijing and a total of 12,000 students--each one packed into a sound-proofed cubicle four meters square, containing a piano, two seats (the second for a teacher), and a coat hook: 12,000 wannabee Lang Langs, with 12,000 sets of parents who expect nothing less of their offspring. It's impressive but alarming.

What should also ring alarm bells for the Chinese is the tendency among its ablest young musicians, when they've tasted some success, to up and leave for Europe or America. And that's the litmus test of China's musical maturity: As yet there's still no solid cultural infrastructure to support them year-round with enough work of sufficient quality. Ambition far outstrips reality. And significant aspects of cultural management are still stuck in the old ways. Bizarrely, one of the main (functioning) concert venues in Beijing, the Poly Theatre, is still owned and run by a branch of the military.

But that said, there are plenty of high-level operators in the international music world prepared to work within the current restrictions and see beyond them an encouraging future.

One of them is the ubiquitously influential artists' agent Jasper Parrott whose company, Harrison Parrott, represents a blue-chip roster of musicians from Ashkenazy to Andreas Scholl. I ran into him on my last Beijing visit; he was there on spec, pursuing possibilities. And as we sat together through the interminable length of a traditional Chinese opera, looking slyly at our watches for fear of causing offense, he acknowledged that these are early days for the professional arts industry in China. "There's still," he said, "a lingering expectation that everything will be paid for from outside, with Western subsidies. But that's changing fast. There are people here you can do business with on sound commercial terms with proper fees, and they're building up an audience with amazing growth potential. So people like me have to be here. China's unignorably now on the Western-music map."

Then there's the CD market. At a time when the classical record industry in most parts of the globe has slumped into post-party mode, in China the party is just beginning. According to Peter Alward, the recently retired president of EMI Classics, "They've got to control the level of piracy, which is rife, and sort out the product pricing, which is too low to be viable. But otherwise it's the land of opportunity. The place to be. And the place to which, if I were still in the record industry, I'd be paying very close attention."

That, it seems, is the appropriate message for the music world on China, for the moment. It's a market in transition with a long way still to go and with its real achievements hard to sort out from the bluster and hyperbole. But out of all the undeveloped music markets in the world this is the one to watch, the one in which to start building relationships, the one to learn to read. It won't be easy; fingers will be burned. But as Masur said, it looks like the future. Just don't ask too much of it too soon.

Michael White has been chief critic for the Independent newspaper and author of the popular Whitebait column in the BBC Music Magazine. He now contributes to the Sunday Telegraph and The New York Times. As a librettist his work has been performed in theaters throughout Europe. And he has written two books: Wagner for Beginners (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (Harper Collins).

The editor thanks Cathy Barbash and Ryan T. McCarthy for their invaluable editorial assistance in the preparation of this article.