For most Americans, the thought of traditional Chinese culture conjures up images of scroll paintings with scholars calmly contemplating the moon. If we've heard Chinese music it has usually been of the northern sort, such as Peking Opera, whose brassy loudness has no apparent relation to the tranquil moon viewer. Both these images are opposite ends of a stereotype. A recent U.S. tour of seven musicians from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music showed us that China's cultural history, and her music in particular, is as complex in stylistic and emotional range as that of any great culture.
Beate Gordon, director of the Performing Arts department at The Asia Society in Manhattan, was responsible for the group's tour. "I've been going to China for years looking for authentic traditional music, but I was always presented with a hybrid of Chinese and Western music," she explained. "Sometimes they would put in different instruments, such as a cello, because they thought its bass tones went well with certain Chinese instruments. That's fine for China today, but for those of us really trying to get back to the original source it creates a very different impression."
Mrs. Gordon met the director of the Beijing Conservatory through Robert Mok, co-author of The Jade Flute, a book on Chinese music. The conservatory director obviously spoke to the musicians at the school after Mrs. Gordon left, for when she returned to Peking they were prepared. "'You want old?' they said. 'Well you got it!' and they played the xun for me."
The xun is an ocarina of ancient origin. Made of clay, slightly egg shaped and about five inches high, it has three small holes on either side, asymmetrically placed, two holes in the front for thumbs, and a slightly larger hole in the top into which the player blows. The xun used in the tour was replica of one excavated from a Shang tomb, which makes the original about 3,500 years old.
The instrument is heavy and cold and seemingly impossible to get a peep from unless you know exactly how to blow. It's more difficult than playing a flute. The sound, however, is far windier than the flute's. It has a haunting, lonely quality, with a slightly tinny echo whispering above each note. If you take the moon-viewing scholar in the scroll and put him in a cold and windy cave having sad and lonely thoughts, you will have the sound of the xun. The flute can sound a bit like this too, when made to, but the xun has no other choice. This is because of the nature of the material and the way it's shaped. The tone is made by the wind and hollow clay, and that's just what it sounds like. This close relationship between the instrument's material and its sound is very important in understanding Chinese music.
The first stop on the tour of the Beijing Central Conservatory musicians was The Asia Society in New York. Chen Tao played the xun at this concert as though he'd been taught by the ancients. Now a ripe twenty-two, he began his studies at the Beijing Conservatory when he was thirteen and plays many other instruments, mostly wind, though he has also studied piano for eight years. Most professional musicians in China do play many instruments, unlike Westerners, who tend to become highly specialized in one or two at most.
Zhang Qiang, at twenty the youngest member of the ensemble, played the p'i-p'a, a
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