By Stephen Moss (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-14 07:18

I am watching a six-piece Mongolian boyband dressed in gold lam suits playing folk tunes on traditional stringed instruments.

It is the first "serious music" I have experienced in China and it is on the hotel TV, airing on what I was assured was the classical music channel.

It gave me an early indication of the complexity of nailing just what the term "serious music" means in China. The Amadeus string quartet it is not.

Holed up for a week in a cheap hotel on the edge of the Forbidden City, close to Tiananmen Square, I am in Beijing to explore classical music in the Chinese capital and beyond.

I am also here to seek out China's indigenous traditions: the music of the villages, the opera derived from the imperial court, as well as the "model" operas about heroic peasants, written in the mid-1960s, and good enough to have survived beyond that grisly period. China has such a rich musical heritage of its own - why does it even need Beethoven and Brahms?

The mega dumpling of classical music in China is Yu Long, artistic director of the China Philharmonic and the Guangzhou Symphony, as well as founder of the Beijing Music Festival.

This confident, pinstriped, Shanghai-born grandson of a composer is both artist and bureaucrat, proudly proclaiming China's potential as a classical music powerhouse - even if, after graduating from the Shanghai Conservatory, he himself studied in Berlin and built a career in Europe.

"Everybody laughed when I came back to China," he tells me when we meet at the festival's smart Beijing offices. "Nobody believed China could be an important country for classical music. But I had an instinct."

It paid off: the festival is now in its 10th year, a glittering collision of Western artists and Chinese money. What is more, the China Phil has just signed a deal with Decca, all of which has made Yu the public face of Western classical music in China, along with the pianist Lang Lang and the composer Tan Dun.

Curtis Price, principal of the Royal Academy in London, even believes China will be the "salvation" of classical music, taking up the slack as its audience declines in the West.

Lorin Maazel - music director of the New York Phil, which I saw perform in Beijing for an outrageous $234 - agrees.

"I think the Chinese people, who have shown their passion and high sense of aesthetics, are an ideal spawning ground for burgeoning interest in classical music," he said while in the capital. "It could be that one of the most important defenders of classical music will be China."

Can this really be? Have I arrived to find China on the cusp of a golden age for classical music?

Such talk is disputed by music critic Liu Xuefeng. He argues that, in the 1980s, there was an upsurge of interest in Western classical music, but it has now waned. "Then, we had an audience but few musicians," he said. "Now, we have musicians but no audience."

Events such as the festival, he maintains, are built on shallow foundations: audiences enjoy big, romantic repertoire, gala events, Lang's emphatic style, but they are not being educated to appreciate music in the round.

Liu explains how localized Western music is in China, concentrated in the big cities. In this vast country, only 30 orchestras give more than 10 performances a year. And, Liu said, most of the provincial outfits "would make you want to commit suicide", so low is the standard. Even the top orchestras in Beijing and Shanghai have a long way to go before they can compete with those in the West.

One hopeful sign, Liu said, is that most provincial cities are building new concert halls, part of China's current construction mania fuelled by economic growth.

Someone will have to perform in them, and Liu hopes this will lead to a new generation of orchestras. The other key development is the mass production of musicians in China: a staggering 20 million youngsters are said to be learning the piano, 10 million the violin, and the conservatories are bulging.

The new multi-storey Central Conservatory building in Beijing will house no fewer than five recital halls. This, surely, is the future - the source of the salvation Price talks about.

Perhaps. But a visit to former army accordion-player Jiang Jie's central piano school (he has 14 others in Beijing, with 30,000 pupils) made me doubt the value of the numbers game. There, in rooms arranged around a spiral staircase, children aged 6 to 18 were rehearsing, many overseen by eager parents.

I asked one youngster to play a piece for me. "Some Chopin?" I suggested, but he insisted on Liszt. It was showy, bashed-out virtuosity, not too accurate, though impressive in its sweaty energy.

Musical education in China seems to be about passing exams, becoming a virtuoso, and getting to a music school so you can earn lots of money by taking private pupils. It is musical pyramid-selling.

Lured by cash incentives and teaching jobs, many of China's leading classical musicians have come back to their newly affluent country in the past 10 years.

The country has produced many fine singers. Its conservatories are churning out many more. Yet the infrastructure for Western opera is almost non-existent. Partly, this is because of the dominance of China's own operatic tradition.

The growth of classical music in China, its sonic brilliance and attraction to sponsors cultivating Western links, has posed a challenge for players of traditional instruments.

For them, earning a living, let alone building a recording career, can be a struggle. The problem is that their instruments - the guqin and zheng (types of zither), the pipa (lute) and the erhu (a two-stringed Chinese violin with a wonderful, unearthly sound beloved of buskers, who often pretend to be blind) - were not designed for the concert hall.

Bigger ensembles just do not suit them; they are better played singly or in small groups, where the delicate solo passages can breathe. Large groups have been assembled, serried ranks of erhu and pipa players, all performing as if their lives depended on it.

But the results, said the China Phil's Yu, were a disaster. To survive, he insists, traditional Chinese music has to be true to itself. There is belief that true Chinese music must lie in its villages.

What does it all add up to? Classical music in China - despite the mass production of musicians, the vitality of "high-end" music-making in Beijing and the phenomenon that is Lang - is still in its infancy.

It has yet to truly enter the bloodstream: it feels thinly spread, sponsor-dependent, in some ways misdirected. Every music student wants to be a superstar soloist, another Lang; established artists are happy to be teachers or gala stars.

China needs opera houses and touring companies (the country produces plenty of singers but they have to go to the West to work), chamber orchestras, recitals. China may yet be the salvation of Western art music, but it will take several generations.

The Guardian

(China Daily 03/14/2008 page10)