Concert Hall Reflections
On the Potentials and Pitfalls of "National Music" (with a cameo appearance by Nancy Pelosi)
Last weekend, a friend from my Chinese program here in Taiwan invited me to see his friend’s orchestra concert. (Side note: my friend clearly knows how to make a musician-scholar feel seen.) What I did not realize in advance was that I was actually going to see the National Taiwan University Xunfeng Chinese Orchestra 台大熏風國樂團.
This sounds innocent enough, yes? Just a nice night out with one friend to support other friends, right?
Fear not, I can make this complicated.
From Inversions to Reflections
I said a few weeks ago that the Bruckner performance in Taiwan’s National Concert Hall was a strange inversion of my final pre-COVID trip to a symphony hall. In contrast, this most recent concert represents a surprising reflection of that same pre-COVID concert. Both concerts presented a genre of music known as guoyue 國樂, which translates literally as “national music.” But as I’ve talked about elsewhere, the “national” is a product of the imagination—a powerful collective imagination with profound real-world consequences, but imagination nonetheless. How then did we end up with ensembles from both Mainland China and Taiwan presenting “national music” in a relatively unproblematized way?
Whose “National Music”?
From the latter half of the 19th century, following a string of humiliating military and political defeats, late Qing social reformers looked to “science” and “democracy” as panaceas for China’s host of social and political ills.
In music, the guoyue orchestra is a legacy of attempts to reform the arts along “scientific” lines. Bowed string instruments like the erhu 二胡, beloved of buskers from Beijing to Boston, take the place of the Western orchestra’s string section. Elsewhere, plucked/strummed instruments such as the lute-shaped pipa 琵琶 and the moon-shaped ruan 阮, the dulcimer-like yangqin 揚琴 and the zither-like guzheng 古箏 have no direct analog in the Western orchestra.
The guoyue orchestra also includes a full complement of wind instruments, including the dizi 笛子 (a bamboo flute with a distinctively buzzy sound), the suona 嗩呐 (a double-reed instrument with a wooden body and a metal bell that combines the nasality of double reeds with piercing brassiness—think oboe meets Ethel Merman), and the sheng 笙 (a mouth organ that produces sounds ranging from high-summer carnival to Halloween creepy). And all of this is backed up by a large percussion section that includes instruments like the gongs from traditional Chinese opera and a variety of traditional drums.1
As the name “national music” implies, this new kind of orchestra was to capture the essence of traditional Chinese culture. At the same time, by creating a large-scale ensemble along “scientific” lines, the national music orchestra (allegedly) advanced Chinese musical tradition into the modern era.
Today, guoyue is alive, kicking, and popular with audiences around the world (although in Mainland China, the term minzu yinyue 民族音乐—“the people’s music”—has largely supplanted guoyue). Whether “the people” or “national,” this musical genre begs the question: “Whose people? Whose nation?” As such, guoyue is both brimming with imaginative potential for the future and laden with serious baggage from the past. Which brings us back to the present!
Divergences and Possibilities
While the broad contours of guoyue’s instrumental forces are fairly consistent, the genre’s repertoire reveals that the developmental track of guoyue varies significantly from place to place. It is these differences that help us to understand the imaginative potentials of “national music.”
Take the 2020 program presented in Chicago by the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra 上海民族音乐团. This is a performance by an elite professional ensemble, focusing heavily on soloists, all of whom are both tremendous technicians and consummate entertainers. The repertoire they played ranged from pipa staples like The King Doffs His Armor 霸王卸甲 to a scintillatingly virtuosic arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee arranged by Kong Zhixuan 孔志轩 (seen in the video below. Although this is not the Chicago performance, the soloists are the same as those who performed in Chicago.)
Whether an age-old classic like The King Doffs His Armor, or Han Wenhe’s 韩闻赫 2019 composition Landscape around the Lake 湖光, the vast majority of pieces on this program imagine China as a Han nation.2 For example, in Landscapes around the Lake, not only are the melodies pentatonic, but the soloists were also dressed in hanfu, the traditional Chinese clothing that has in recent years been reinterpreted as a marker of Chinese nationalism.3 This hanfu is in stark contrast to the modern concert garb worn by the rest of the ensemble. And even in cases such as the reworked Flight of the Bumblebee—hardly a cornerstone of traditional Chinese repertories—the performers’ technical prowess redefines standards of virtuosity for contemporary audiences.4
This is in contrast to the performance by NTU’s Xunfeng Chinese Orchestra, which crafts a more diverse social and cultural imaginary than the Han-centric performance of the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra. The program opens with a piece originally created for a Hakka cultural festival,5 and includes a yangqin solo rich with the crunchy harmonies of French impressionism, a percussion solo originally written for Evelyn Glennie, and even the theme song to Neon Genesis Evangelion. In this program, the “national” is not beholden to a particular racial frame or geographic territory. Rather, the national both celebrates local heritage—be it Han, Hakka, or even Japanese—and casts outwards towards global musical flows.
Thus, despite the outward similarities between these two ensembles, their programs reflect two very different national imaginaries.
Convergences and Baggage
Despite the possibilities for distinct national imaginaries that emerge from these two visions of guoyue, this doesn’t mean that this story is one of unalloyed celebration.
Most importantly, the idea of “legacy” in the arts is a Janus-faced phenomenon, imparting cultural capital through “tradition,” while inevitably weighing that tradition down with the baggage of yesteryear. Ultimately, both ensembles seek to travel light, attempting to leave their baggage outside the concert hall without losing the cultural authority granted by tradition. In their program notes, the NTU Xunfeng Chinese Orchestra stresses respect for tradition without suggesting slavish devotion, saying, “The members of the Xunfeng Chinese Orchestra, in the spirit of seeking change and renewal, strive for the rejuvenation and enlivenment of traditional art.”6
Similarly, the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra’s website underlines respect for tradition, saying, “The splendid Shanghai-style Chinese music has been inherited across generations of SHCO artists.” At the same time, any suggestion that this tradition is moribund is foreclosed with statements expressing devotion to an ethos of
‘Chinese music, contemporary temperament, and international expression’ … In the future, SHCO will continue to promote the rejuvenation of Chinese music, to present the new era and the beauty of Chinese music with a more open, inclusive, and pertinent voice.
This sounds great! We can be traditional and move past tradition, all at the same time! But what does this look like in practice? One data point that might help us get a handle on this is the closing piece on both of these concert programs. That’s right, both ensembles chose the same piece as their big finisher!
And what was that finisher? It was none other than the 2014 composition Silk Road 《丝绸之路》by the award-winning composer Jiang Ying 姜莹. And it’s no wonder that both ensembles chose it. It’s atmospheric, it showcases instruments like the suona at their most exotic-sounding, playing melodies whose half-steps and augmented 2nd intervals call to mind the modalities of Uighur muqam.7
But herein lies the problem. Whether in Taiwan or in Mainland China, neither ensemble can fully shed the Han-centric past of the guoyue orchestra. As such, this newly composed piece—presumably the kind of piece that “rejuvenates” guoyue and “presents the new era of Chinese music”—draws the musical traditions of the Central Asian Uighurs into the Sinicizing orbit of the guoyue orchestra. In an era of mass incarceration and cultural persecution in China’s western region, the casual sublimation of Uighur musical tradition into “fun color pieces” to be performed by a historically Han ensemble seems tone-deaf at best. At worst, for NTU’s Xunfeng Orchestra, it seems troublingly callous; for the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra—which toured in 2020 as a nationally-representative ensemble, with appearances at the concert by Chicago’s Chinese Consul General—it smacks rather transparently of the “happily dancing Uighurs” video that the Chinese government tried to sell to the world in the wake of international outcry over the plight of Xinjiang’s Muslims.
The Burden of Legacy
The line between inspiration and appropriation is always a fine one. Could Silk Road just be part of the same cosmopolitan ethos that inspired Xunfeng’s crowd-pleasing arrangement of the Evangelion theme song? Maybe. But as far as I know, no one has used anime music to enforce colonial rule over Japan, or to sell mass incarceration to a global audience. (To be clear, I am not trying to single out guoyue on this issue. Many other musical traditions encounter the same conundrum, from the Janissary marches of Mozart to the uncritical adoption of hip-hop culture by coifed and coutured boy bands across the globe.)
Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan (beyond failing to comply with federal flammability standards) reminds us that the national imaginaries of Taiwan and China are of critical importance to the global geopolitical order. Performances like those by Xunfeng and the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra are the mundane, seemingly insignificant spaces that, taken in aggregate, craft collective imaginations of these nations. These same imaginations help to define the contours of the current conflicts over the status of Taiwan.
But performances like these also remind us that, no matter how liberal the nation imagined by genres like “national music,” we cannot wish the history of a genre away. If we are going to purge some of the demons of institutionalized musics—whether guoyue, Western opera, or even academic music research—we have to start by acknowledging that, for every moment of transcendent beauty, we can find an equally fraught moment of power and domination. How we respond to these legacies will not only shape the aesthetic future of many musical genres, it will also set the conditions for their ongoing social relevance, or lack thereof.
Frederick Lau has an excellent summary this history of guoyue in ch. 2 of Music in China: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Lau also points out that guoyue can mean different things in different contexts. However, for the sake of this discussion, I use it to point specifically to the modern tradition of the Chinese orchestra.
The Han is the majority ethnic group of China, comprising well over 90% of the population. Nevertheless, the Chinese government officially recognizes almost 60 ethnic groups, and officially considers China to be a multiethnic nation.
See Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
Although my memory is generally good, I am indebted to the help of the staff at the Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who were able to scan the 2020 program for me on short notice.
The Hakka, though a Han subgroup, have for much of Taiwan’s history been marginalized within Taiwanese society
「熏風國樂團員們,本著求新求變的精神,努力讓傳統藝術年輕化、活潑話」。
Muqam is the modal system used by Central Asian musicians of Western China. It is related to, but distinct from, the maqam system of modes found throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa. Rachel Harris eloquently describes the system, as well as the cultural milieu Uighur music-making, in The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).