Dr Whitney H. Gordon writes:

>I taped traditional Chinese opera music. When sitting in traffic next
>to a student's mega-watt, bass boosted thumper, start the Chinese
>opera music, volume near its maximum and sit poker faced and
>benignly pleased with what you are hearing.

I made a trip to China a few months ago and made a point of visiting
different provinces.  It may be that Dr Gordon is referring to what
we know as the traditional Peking Opera, which is of course a highly
distinctive stylised art-form, but it was most interesting to note as
one flew from the modern capital (Beijing) to the ancient capital (Xi'an),
which is in a different province, how very different many things were
there.  In Xi'an, for example, rice is considered an exotic delicacy,
because Xi'an is in a wheat-growing area so they eat bread.  Music, too,
varies greatly (as would be expected), and when I cajoled Ximei, my guide
in Xi'an, to sing some of the "songs my mother taught me" they were
hauntingly beautiful (she had a naturally lovely voice and a deep love of
her folk-song tradition) and - to come to the point - totally different
from anything I had heard in Beijing.

So I just wanted to put in a caveat that in recent times it was really
only after the death of Chairman Mao that the true vastness and diversity
of the culture of that part of the world that we call China began to be
revealed to Westerners, and what is revealed to those who travel there
is wondrous and eye-opening in its scale, variety and maturity.  We who
perceive important differences between, say, Italian and German opera would
be rightly unlikely to lump them together under the catch-all heading of
'European opera'.  This applies a fortiori to 'Chinese opera'.

I would also like to add that the audience for Chinese classical music
is still very much the ordinary people, and this is true even of the
Peking Opera, a visit to which is still a great occasion for the ordinary
Beijinger, a night out indeed, but of course without the faintest whiff of
top hat or opera cloak about it.  A sort of cross between a pantomime and
the London Proms but - in a very good-humoured way - much rowdier!

Alan Moss