While it's a truism that Hong Kong relies on the tourism dollar,
reality is somewhat more complex, the real money comes from other
industries.  With music, the internal domestic market alone is several
million people and the extended market is all of south and east Asia.
Almost none of the CM sales are from tourists unless they come from
places where there is even less available, and such people would be
already fairly aware of the genre.  No way is classical music in any
conjunction with bootlegs of Cantopop everywhere in backstreets and
market stalls.  I was thinking in terms of conventional music stores.
What is interesting is the demography of the HK internal market, but
that is probably outside the scope of this.  These are sophisticated
people, many of whom have been brought up on classical music from
childhood.  I'd even venture to say that the average standard of musical
appreciation is higher in some circles there than in the west.  So why
the strange choice in shops?  I saw more Enescu there than in London and
this week, Hong Kong is hosting a Finnish contemporary music festival,
(reports please if anyone goes - fascinating to hear how the audience
reacts) And these rub shoulders with three tenors compilations....

As for Xian Xing Hai: In the western CM tradition the composer is
paramount.  But in Xian's particular post European circumstances,
everything pulled against that way of thinking.  For those who don't
know him, which is most of us, he was the posthumous son of a fisherman,
who grew up in desperate poverty on a beach in Macau but by a fairy tale
like stroke of luck, moved to Singapore where he got scholarshiops and
a western education.  Back in the glittering world of 1920's Shanghai
and Peking, he was a virtuoso clarinettist, but quietly also doing a PhD
in Chinese folk music and learning Chinese wind instruments.  Then off
to Paris where he was a composition student of D'Indy and Dukas.  The
Japanese war and the horrors that followed changed the course of Xians
life yet again.  Returning to China meant for him not only abandoning a
traditional career path but submersion of his creative personality for
a higher goal.  Xian actively participated in the life of the Communist
guerillas - the Yellow River Cantata was written in the caves at Yenan.

How politicised he was before this, I don't know, and at what cost it
meant for him to renounce not only the western career progression but
also his individualism in the service of the Party.  Studies of other
intellectuals in this era indicate that it may not have been as smooth
a transistion as the official view would have it.  Xian never wrote
outside the western tradition and his "Chinese" flavour is not pastiche
like so many "national" composers.  The primary direction of his work
was now to further a patriotic cause, not just for the sake of art.
Yet, since that war was so horrific and the Chinese predicament so
extreme, he could express genuine emotional commitment and passion,
without sacrificing his integrity as an artist.  An interesting parrallel
is Hanns Eisler (whose brother was Comintern in Guangchow and Shanghai)
for whom political struggle was paramount, but whose instincts as a
musician won out.  The political balance was however different.  Eisler's
art existed outside the party: Xian 's very life depended on the Party,
and Maoism required far more total subservience from the individual.
That's perhaps why Xian isn't "available" in the way that other composers,
including other Chinese, can be accessed.  Even his famous Cantata is
known to most in the bowdlerised Yellow River Piano Concerto version,
written twenty years after his death by a committee of official Party
composers.  The real composer is obscured by the officially sanctioned
myth.  He died 1945, early enough for him to be more useful to the cause
as archtetype than in reality.  We probably hear more Xian than we know,
but it may be in versions modified by time and circumstance, his name
long removed in the interests of political solidarity.  Xian left a
considerable oeuvre and would repay detailed study, particularly in the
context of his times.  If anyone has any new information, recordings and
scores, I'd be delighted to know.  The militant song scores should be
easy to find as they were printed for mass circulation but what I'd like
to learn more of is his other work.

PS for those who are keen on the obscure there are several recordings
not only of the Piano Concerto (Bernstein?) but also of the original
Cantata.  And of the unrecorded material, here's one for Martin.

Anne
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