From Mozart to Mao. The Fandango Road

Just as the hanzi characters ( 汉 字 ) are among the main hallmarks of Chinese culture, so is its music, with a history of thousands of years and with a great variety of its own traditional instruments, unique scores, and styles that define the musical expressions of what was once known as the Central Empire.

Music is, first and foremost, a product of interand multi-cultural interaction that has taken place throughout the history of humankind. A clear example is the pipa, a string instrument similar to the western lute, that was incorporated into the group of instruments used in the imperial court during the Wei-Jin period between 220 and 420 AD. Nonetheless, this instrument originated in the Huzhong region, which is located at the fringes of the empire and is considered one of the barbaric regions of the Northwest inside what today is known as Inner Mongolia. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 to 589 AD), there was another kind of pipa, the barbat or “twisted pipa,” which arrived in the empire from Persia. Inside the Arab world, the oud originated from the barbat, while, in Europe, it evolved into the lute and the mandolin.

It is evident how music and musical instruments travel through time and space. The power of music is so immense that it can change our lives. Such is the scenario represented in François Girard’s film The Red Violin (1998), which tells the story of the journey made by Nicolo Bussotti’s violin over three centuries across three continents. In the film, one of the stories of the violin centers on the link it had with China during the years of the Cultural Revolution, which sought to make a clean sweep of a bourgeois and feudal past and incited the abolition of both foreign and Chinese artistic expressions before the triumph of the Maoist revolution of 1949, including the burning of books and musical instruments. In this regard, the character Zhou Yuan plays a leading role in the story of the red violin: he acquires it and carefully restores it, against the policies and restrictions imposed by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Zhou Yuan is publicly denounced for his fondness for Western classical music, but to his surprise, Xiang Fei, a party officer, defends him. The relationship between the master Zhou Yuan and Xiang Fei is based on their respect for music and the red violin. This represents a connection with beauty and resistance through art in a world of darkness.

A NEW ERA IN THE HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA
The earthquake in Tangshan in 1976 marked the beginning of a new era, not only because it was the strongest seismic movement since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China but also because Mao Zedong died in the same year, making the history of the country take an extreme turn. In 1978, with Deng Xiaoping in power, the Chinese economic reform considering economy as the central axis of national security was promulgated. Furthermore, as the pressures of the Soviet Union grew, the Chinese government decided to engage in a dialogue that would lead to a substantial rapprochement with the hegemonic power of the 20^th century: the United States. Just like in a fiction story, sports and music were the main channels that smoothed the way for diplomatic relations between two ideologically opposed countries.

The policy known as ping-pong diplomacy depicted in movies like Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994) consisted of the exchange of table tennis players from the United States and China during the first five years of the 70’s since the World Table Tennis Championship held in Nagoya, Japan, in 1971. A year later, Richard Nixon was the first president of the United States to visit the People’s Republic of China, which marked the beginning of diplomatic relations between the two powers.

As for music, the dialogue began with the visit of Ukrainian-American violinist Isaac Stern in 1979, who was invited by the Chinese government to play as a soloist with the China National Symphony Orchestra and to give master classes at some of the country’s most important music conservatories in Beijing and Shanghai. It was the first time, after years of isolation, that Chinese professional musicians and the conductor of the National Symphony, Liu Dehun, interacted with a musician from the West. During the rehearsals of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3, Stern stopped the orchestra to tell them that every note must be fully played but, most importantly, that every note should have a life of its own. Stern knew that his presence fulfilled a political objective; however, during the three weeks he spent in China, he tried to make Chinese musicians see that what was essential was music (see Lerner, 1979).

China’s long history has had plenty of chapters full of ordeals in which artistic expressions were seen as proselytizing elements that attempted to go against the emperor’s saying. Such is the case of the Three Kingdoms Period (240-249 AD): according to historian Ruan Xian, free thought was restricted during this period and educated people had to remain silent. In order to avoid the imperial court, intellectuals and artists had to hide in a bamboo forest where they played music, recited verses, and drank liquor, cut off from the world.

According to composer Jia Guoping, this situation—which reverberated in modern times, just as it did during the ten years that the Cultural Revolution lasted in the middle of the 20^th century—is necessary to understand the evolutionary processes of Chinese music. For Jia, “the Cultural Revolution is a phenomenon that perfectly exemplifies the fact that artists, no matter the environment around them, will always show their creativity. Inside crevices, they will look for numerous creation possibilities.” And so it happened with Liu Dehai, considered the father of modern Chinese music: he composed the first work for pipa and orchestra, Little Sisters of the Grassland, during the Cultural Revolution and premiered it in 1976.

MUSIC, AN ESSENTIAL PART OF CHINESE EDUCATION
Stern found China transitioning, but he noticed the talent of the students he worked with in Beijing and Shanghai’s conservatories, particularly how they mastered certain techniques from a very early age. This situation, which caught the eye of the great violinist, is due to the fact that the country gives the utmost importance to the study of music. Children become involved with music before elementary school by taking music lessons or engaging in singing or dancing.

Music and musical instruments are part of their lives during the mandatory elementary education. Those who exhibit a natural ability are trained in recruiting centers in order to be prepared for the entrance exams to middle schools associated with the country’s conservatories. While visiting Shanghai, Stern met students from these schools that after a couple of years, would become virtuoso players like cellist Wang Jian.

We could argue that the virtuosity of Chinese players is due to the importance given to music by society, mainly because parents teach their children to love music. World-renowned pianist Lang Lang was guided by his father since he was a child (just as Mozart was, with the same tenacity perhaps also cruelty) so he would become a great musician. In professional terms, music teaching in China has been ruled by the Western canon since the beginning of the 20th century; it was taken up again at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when schools and universities were reopened in 1977.

CHINESE TRADITIONAL INSTRUMENTS
We could not understand Chinese music without taking a look at its long tradition of musical instruments, which is also impregnated with its own philosophical conceptions. According to traditional Chinese mythology, Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, trusted the wiseman Ling Lun to find inside the furthest provinces of the west a piece of bamboo to fabricate a flute capable of producing music that could contain the song of every bird; this is the mythical beginning of Chinese musical tradition. As time passed, Chinese traditional musical instruments were classified into eight categories according to the material used to produce sound: metal, stone, silk, bamboo, wood, membranes, gourd, and clay. Likewise, these categories were related to each of the eight trigrams of the I Ching, the Book of Changes, an essential reading for understanding a significant part of Chinese philosophy. Among these instruments, we can find the erhu, an instrument of two bowed strings whose little sound box is covered with snake skin on the front, has a hexagonal shape and a long and thin neck that breaks through it; it has a modest appearance, and its sonority is one of the most expressive and moving in Chinese music. The dizi is a bamboo flute with a warm and vibrant sound produced by a hole covered by a membrane next to the mouthpiece (it is considered the first Chinese traditional musical instrument). The pipa, king of Chinese traditional instruments, is outwardly corporeal and inwardly incorporeal like heaven and earth, with a curved body and an erect neck reflecting the dual relationship between Yin (the feminine) and Yang (the masculine). The pipa has a mellow sound; it has four strings that represent the four seasons of the year, according to the description of writer Fu Xuan (217-278 AD). Nowadays, its main body is made from a single wood block shaped like a flat pear; its neck is short and ends in a curved peg, and its 30 frets cover part of its sound box. The sheng, one of the most exotic traditional instruments, consists of seventeen bamboo tubes inserted into an air box made of gourd and allows several simultaneous sounds to be played, forming chords; it is considered the oldest free-reed instrument in the world. The guqin is regarded as the father of Chinese music; the oldest musical scores that have been found for the instrument are over 1500 years old. It is like a seven-string zither with a stone base that plays the notes of the Chinese pentatonic scale: C-D-F-G-A-C-D. Its music is part of the cosmogony and way of thinking of the Chinese people: the guqin not only expresses the deepest feelings of whoever plays it, but also makes its performer someone “restricted”: this is a word game based on the Chinese name of the instrument; 古琴 (guqin), where 琴 (qin, “instrument”) is almost homophone to the character 禁 (jin, “forbidden” or “restricted”.) This instrument is played from the outside in; its sound fills the performer with peace, like a vehicle that purifies their body. Traditional Chinese culture’s way of thinking is similar to how this instrument is played: it is an internal struggle where the main enemy is oneself, according to renowned professor of Chinese musicology Tian Qing. The guzheng is from the same family as the guqin, but it has a wooden base; this instrument is similar to a zither and has 15 to 26 strings and a movable bridge. Just like with the guqin, performances using this instrument usually include improvisation.

NEW EXPRESSIONS OPEN TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Since China opened up in the late 1970s, music has been a primary means of interacting with the outside world: understanding a country is intrinsically related to how we can approach and gradually appreciate its culture. Music is codified in a language that has become universal; although a new sonority can be undecipherable to our ears when we experience it for the first time, it can bring forth new elements that can be assimilated—consciously or not—and make us show curiosity or interest in getting to know the other. Thus, in 1978, the year in which the Reform and Opening of China was proclaimed, composer Liu Dehai’s most representative work, Little Sisters of the Grassland, was the first Chinese orchestral work performed abroad: it was played by the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Japanese director Osawa Seiji.

Musical works that were produced after China opened up signified a new chapter in its musical history. Some of its most well-known composers, like Guo Wenjing and Tan Dun, stand out for writing pieces that gave life to the sound scenery surrounding their places of origin: Szechuan in the case of Guo Wenjing and Hunan in the case of Tan Dun. Moreover, Tan Dun’s work is characterized by using instruments made of paper and stone and natural elements like water and voices from his hometown that seem to come from ancient times. This kind of music was called “organic music”: it opens a dialogue between Chinese traditional instruments—like the guqin, the pipa, or Chinese percussions—and Western instruments. This original style and his subsequent incursion in cinema brought him the Oscar and the Bafta prizes for the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo Hu Cang Long, Ang Lee, 2000).

MEXICO LISTENS TO CHINESE MUSIC
The sound waves of Chinese music spread over the years and began to be known in other regions of the world, such as Latin America. In 2004, Mexico listened for the first time to a concerto for pipa and orchestra, Spring and Autumn (Tang Jianping,1994), performed by UNAM’s Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by the renowned Chinese conductor Chen Zuohuang. The concerto is inspired by the Chinese historical period known as spring and autumn (春秋, Chunqiu), which lasted from 770 to 481 BC. This musical work was commissioned to commemorate the 2545th anniversary of Confucius’ birth. According to the composer Tang’s notes, the sound of the pipa embodies the spirit of Chinese rituals that exist in an everlasting harmony between heaven and earth. By mentioning the spring and autumn period, the work expresses admiration for the achievements of the Chinese civilization throughout its millennial history; at the same time, it summarizes the long life of philosopher Confucius. Some of the best pipa soloists, like Wu Yuxia and Lan Weiwei, performed this work inside and outside China.

UNAM AS A LINK FOR WORLDWIDE DISSEMINATION OF MUSIC
While China’s musical interaction abroad has been mainly with Europe and the United States, in the case of Mexico, UNAM’s Office in China has contributed to strengthening Sino-Mexican musical ties since its opening in 2012. In 2013, at the request of the university representatives, the first edition of the Music Festival of UNAM and the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) was held with the theme: La Ruta del Fandango (The Fandango Road.) The event was held between November 27 and 30 at the CCOM, which is considered the highest musical institution in the People’s Republic of China. Ph.D. Gonzalo Camacho Díaz, professor of ethnomusicology at UNAM’s Faculty of Music (FaM), conceived the festival, including conferences, workshops, and concerts to present the unity and diversity of Mexico’s musical cultures, as well as part of its historical process. Two renowned groups from the states of Guerrero and Veracruz, Los Salmerón and Los Vega, respectively, participated in this first musical encounter, as well as eight professors from what was the National School of Music of UNAM at the time. This event was unprecedented since academics from UNAM and the CCOM established a dialogue on the musical expressions of each country. Because of its success, a second instance of the festival was decided to be held, this time in Mexico.

From February 26 to March 1, 2015, the second UNAM-CCOM Music Festival was held under the intervention of the FaM, UNAM’s Music Directorate, the CCOM, and UNAM’s Office in China. Artists and experts from the Eastern country participated. They offered conferences, four concerts (two of them were held in the FaM and the other two in the Nezahualcóyotl Hall), a discussion panel, and a workshop presenting both traditional instruments and current trends in Chinese music. On that occasion, UNAM’s Philharmonic Orchestra (OFUNAM) performed Sound from Tibet by Guo Wenjing, for sheng and six wind instruments; Nostalgia by Zhou Yanjia; Through Heavens by Qin Wenchen; Tone Poem by Xu Zhenmin; The Valleys of Murmuring Pines by Jia Guoping, and Ambush from Every Flank (traditional music for pipa), among other themes. OFUNAM was conducted by Lin Tao, orchestral conducting professor of the CCOM, who mentioned: “The program offered during the festival is a trip through the last hundred years of Chinese music, which has become closer to universal since the country opened up.”

In a series of concerts at the National Theater of Performing Arts, the CCOM, and Tianjin Grand Theater, La Fontegara ensemble (formed by FaM’s professors) delighted the audience of the Asian country with a remarkable repertoire of Mexican Baroque music as part of the third UNAMCCOM Music Festival, which was held within the framework of the Fifth Beijing International Baroque Music Festival in 2018. La Fontegara has an internationally recognized trajectory of more than thirty years in performing baroque music, especially composed in the New Spain. The group’s members are María Díez-Canedo (baroque recorder and flute), Eunice Padilla (harpsichord), Rafael Sánchez Guevara (viol), and Eloy Cruz (baroque guitar). Besides the concerts, FaM’s academics offered a series of conferences and workshops highlighting the connections between New Spain and China. For instance, Díez-Canedo gave a conference about Italian composer Teodorico Pedrini, who sailed in the Manila Galleon from Acapulco through the Philippines until arriving in China.

The fourth UNAM-CCOM Music Festival, Echoes of the Silk Road (Ecos de la ruta de la seda, see p. XX in this issue), held in 2019 at the FaM and Nezahualcóyotl Hall, focused on Chinese contemporary music composition and orchestral conducting. During an interview with TV UNAM, Lin Tao stated:

For Chinese composers, it is important to write not only for the classical instruments of the symphony orchestra but also for traditional instruments like the pipa, the erhu, the guzheng, or the sheng. For this reason, it is ofinterest to the Mexican audience to listen to UNAM’s Philarmonic Orchestra accompanied by these instruments. It is a mixture of sounds in which both an orchestral style and a traditional Chinese style are to be found. It is a way of creating a balance between East and West.

Furthermore, the audience of the Nezahuálcoyotl Hall of UNAM exchanged some comments and questions about their musical works with composers Dong Liqiang (Distance, for symphony orchestra), Hao Weiya (Dream of the Peony Pavilion, for bamboo flute and orchestra), Chen Yonggang (Symphonic Overture) and Chang Ping (The Windblown Clouds, for guzheng and orchestra). Compositions of two of the most prominent exponents of contemporary music in China were also performed: Jia Guoping’s The Wind Passing through the Vast World, for pipa and orchestra, and Qin Wenchen’s The Cloud River, for sheng and orchestra.

In 2019, students from the CCOM had the opportunity to become acquainted with some of the major composers of Mexican music, as well as the composition methods used by these composers during the course taught by Marco Alejandro Gil Esteva, visiting professor from the FaM. CCOM students and professors learned about the works of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas, whose legacy is already part of the history of universal music, as well as an overview of Mexican music from the pre-Columbian period to popular or folkloric music. Professor Gil’s course was an essential bridge for the development of other projects between the two institutions, such as that of a guitar student of the FaM, Luis Angel Poblett, whose thesis project consisted of selecting and performing contemporary Chinese works written by students and professors of the CCOM Composition Department (see p. XX in this issue).

Among the musical exchange projects in composition, it is worth mentioning the participation of Julio Estrada: one of the most outstanding composers of contemporary avantgarde music in Mexico, a professor at the FaM, and a researcher at UNAM’s Institute for Aesthetics Research. Estrada participated in the fourth International Composition Workshop Beijing 2014 and captivated the teachers and students of the CCOM when he presented one of his most representative and most difficult interpretative works for the first time in China. In a CCOM auditorium at maximum capacity, the composer arranged the eight participating musicians at different points between the audience and the stage in order to create an enveloping sound for his work Canto naciente (Nascent Song, 1975), for wind instruments; a work that recreates the situation of a fetus in the womb.

In addition to the concert, Estrada gave a talk to CCOM students about his opera Los murmullos del páramo (Wasteland Murmurs), inspired by Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.

In 2021, FaM’s composition graduate Erick Tapia was selected along with other composers from various parts of the world to integrate the repertoire of the inaugural concert of the International Forum of the Music Education Alliance-CCOM, of which the FaM is part since the FaM/CCOM collaboration agreement promoted by UNAM China was signed in 2018. The work had to revolve around the Silk Road, be a composition from one up to 10 instruments, and include at least one traditional Chinese instrument. Tapia titled his composition for ten instruments La buena tierra (The Good Land) and opted for the pipa due to its versatility to interpret diverse rhythms.

During the pandemic, musical collaboration did not cease; on the contrary, it intensified. UNAM China organized videoconferences such as that of Dr. Francisca Zalaquett (“Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Musical Instruments,” or the participation of the FaM in the virtual choir of the CCOM, which featured pianist Lang Lang during the most critical moment of the pandemic.

This account could keep going for long, as many other conferences, presentations of musical groups from both countries, and solo concerts were organized, such as the piano recital of María Teresa Frenk Mora, director of the FaM, during her visit to Beijing to celebrate the signing of the agreement between the two prestigious institutions of musical education.

This collaboration route is the result of the work and dedication of UNAM’s Office in China to strengthen ties by participating together in one of the first fine arts created by humankind, probably the most beautiful of all: music.

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