At the risk of incurring a law suit, I thought I'd share an article from
today's Wall Street Journal about the life of a symphony orchestra in China.
Chinese Orchestra Is Seeking Harmony Under a New Baton
After Two Decades in U.S., Li Xiaolu Comes Home to Ensemble in Disarray
By LESLIE CHANG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BEIJING -- The trumpet and the tuba were still smarting from a fight
over who played too loudly at a concert a year ago. The heads of
several instrument sections were lobbying for fancier titles. On his
first visit to China after being named principal conductor of the
national orchestra, Li Xiaolu found himself surrounded by discord.
Mr. Li, a 44-year-old Shanghai native, returned to China in January
following two decades as a conductor of community orchestras in U.S.
cities. He wore a blue pinstriped suit, spoke in a booming voice and
used his meaty hands for emphasis as he discussed his dream of restoring
harmony to an orchestra shaken by years of dissonance.
"For young people, for government officials, to sit in a concert hall
and listen to all these people who have different ideas playing one
piece of music, creating harmony, it is so important for them to see,"
Mr. Li said. He felt that was something Chinese society had been
missing in the past two decades as economic reforms fostered self-interest
and sometimes made it difficult for people to work together. [Li]
China's National Symphony Orchestra, like many of the country's
institutions, has been buffeted by the sharp policy shifts that
have marked the contours of life in China in the past half-century.
Established in 1956 and funded by the government, the orchestra
initially sought to build a repertoire of Western classical music.
But during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, such music was attacked
for its bourgeois associations. The orchestra survived by playing a
set list of symphonic pieces with Chinese revolutionary themes.
When the upheaval subsided, there was little chance to regroup and
rebuild. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping approved market reforms in
1979, setting off an economic boom that left many cultural institutions
behind. Many musicians went abroad for study. The national orchestra
struggled with dwindling audiences. Starting in 1996, it endured two
painfully unsuccessful repair efforts by Western-trained Chinese
conductors whose radical shakeups created turmoil.
By the time Mr. Li arrived in January, he faced an ensemble whose
members had grown cynical from watching maestros fly in with radical
treatments that cured little, only to depart amid rumors and
recriminations. The orchestra had been rudderless for 15 months and
had lost a third of its musicians, including principals in most of
the woodwind and string sections. Many had gone to the rival China
Philharmonic, which offered bigger salaries. There was no musical
calendar, and neither the musicians nor the public knew more than a
week or two in advance where the orchestra would be performing.
"We are placing a lot of hopes in Conductor Li, but the task is hard," said
Deng Chuan, a violinist who has played in the orchestra for a decade. "Right
now, hearts are not at peace. People want to know: If I stay, will my best
years be wasted on this stage?"
The orchestra's first would-be savior had been U.S.-educated Chen Zuohuang,
who was named chief conductor and artistic director in 1996. He instituted
daily rehearsals and invited well-known guest conductors. He introduced the
concept of a musical season, which laid out the year's schedule of concerts
in advance.
He also fired a chorus, a chamber-music group and full-time soloists. And he
inaugurated something that had never been seen in China before: Auditions
for all new and existing members, with pay based on merit rather than
seniority.
Veteran musicians were humiliated at having to audition for seats
they had held for decades. More than half of the existing members
didn't make the cut or left, taking with them both the institutional
memory and the musical rapport of experienced players. To those who
remained, the competition was brutal. Members say that musicians would
inform on their fellows to the conductor when someone played badly.
"There was no sense of cohesion in the orchestra. People were coming
and going all the time," says a violinist.
The opponents of change struck back. Anonymous letters charging that
Mr. Chen was financially corrupt were sent to would-be donors. Funding
dried up. The media attacked in articles questioning his loyalty to
China. He left in 2000, saying in an interview after his resignation,
"This is not work that can be completed in a single generation."
His successor, Tang Muhai, a protege of the late Herbert von Karajan,
sought to broaden the orchestra's repertoire and bring in more
international guest artists. But he clashed repeatedly with an orchestra
director appointed by the Ministry of Culture, a former official with
little experience in classical music. Articles attacked Mr. Tang for
an extravagant lifestyle. He left after only a year.
Before Mr. Li arrived, some orchestra members had speculated that he
got the job only by arranging for a large chunk of money to be donated
to the orchestra. Mr. Li says this isn't true. Others said the post
was a mere steppingstone that he would abandon as soon as he got a
better offer. Mr. Li says he has a "short term" contract with the
orchestra but he is considering staying on longer. He says he was
flooded with congratulatory phone calls from musicians who tried to
lobby him on issues such as salaries.
Cultural Differences
On his first day in China, Mr. Li tackled cultural differences. In a
meeting with the orchestra's top administrators, he highlighted some
of those differences, steeling himself and his new colleagues for the
inevitable clashes to follow. Americans like people who talk freely,
while Chinese don't. Americans favor confrontation, while Chinese
don't. Americans readily acknowledge mistakes, while Chinese find it
more difficult. "They responded very well to it," Mr. Li said on the
evening of his first day, sipping jasmine tea in a luxury hotel in
Beijing.
Born in 1958 to a musical family, Mr. Li left home at age 14 during
the Cultural Revolution to play violin first in China's naval orchestra
and later with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. He left China in 1983
to attend the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has since gained a
reputation in the U.S. as the energetic builder of orchestras in
Lafayette, La.; Bangor, Maine; and New London, Conn. He still conducts
for the Bangor and New London orchestras.
In China, he is unknown, and he has to some extent lost touch with
his homeland. He often fumbles in speaking Chinese, trying to use
complicated classical sayings and then relying on whoever is around
to supply the correct one. His effusiveness is distinctly un-Chinese.
When he was a guest conductor of the national orchestra last year,
his boisterous praise put people on edge. "They played well, so I
said 'Bravo!' " Mr. Li says now. "I heard a lot of people came back
and wondered, 'Why does he say that? We're not that good.' "
But Mr. Li can be shrewder than he appears. On the second day of his
January visit, Mr. Li's first meeting was with Wang Lilan, who heads
the orchestra's "old cadres department." It takes care of 500 retired
musicians and staffers, many of whom still live in orchestra-owned
housing behind its white-tile office building in downtown Beijing.
These retirees have no official role, but they possess enough clout
to block change.
Mr. Li asked if Lunar New Year greetings had been sent to the retirees
yet. Ms. Wang said no. Mr. Li suggested that greeting cards be sent,
wishing the retirees good health and asking them to fill out a form
recalling their fondest orchestra memories. "When I am at home in
Shanghai, my parents often receive calls from the old cadres," he
said. It was a canny reference, telling the staff that he was still
one of them and not an interloper from abroad, though he hasn't lived
in Shanghai for 20 years.
Guo Shan, the orchestra's deputy director who was sitting in on the
meeting, jumped in: "Let's do it today. They will get the cards by
New Year, when their family is all around. From now on, let's do
something the moment we say we will." Ms. Guo, an ex-pianist with a
fine-boned face and an imperious manner, is crucial to the execution
of any new plans.
Mr. Li next asked the orchestra's chief of staff, Wang Tie, to write
down a job description of every person on the staff. Ms. Wang, a
middle-age former mezzo-soprano with tightly permed gray hair, was
bewildered: Write down every single thing each person does? It took
Mr. Li 10 minutes to explain the concept of a job description --
details that separate the position from the person occupying the post.
"I feel that our past problems were because things were not written
down clearly," he told her. "So in the future, when we have conflicts,
we can refer to these written descriptions."
Late in the afternoon, after dripping a solution into eyes bleary
from jet lag, he sat down with Tian Zhenlin, who was in charge of
artistic administration. The orchestra desperately needed to build
up its box-office receipts and cut back on the extensive giveaways
that were filling seats. Mr. Li also wanted to broaden the audience
exposed to orchestral music. He suggested two short concerts on
Children's Day in June to bring in a young audience. He planned a
summer outdoor concert, Beijing's first taste of such an event with
a full symphony. He envisioned refrigerator magnets with the season
calendar printed on them and an opening-night fund-raising gala for
big donors. The orchestra depends on funding from Chinese and Western
companies for the bulk of its $2.1 million annual budget, which puts
it at the level of a regional American orchestra.
After another day of meetings, Mr. Li headed back to the U.S. "I'm
afraid I will not get results that fast, and it will disappoint
people," he said. He figured he had about nine months to prove himself.
In the ensuing weeks, the New Year's greetings went out. Many retirees
wrote back sharing their memories and treasured old photographs. The
orchestra's concertmaster traveled to New York to perform in a concert
under the arrangement of Mr. Li. The national orchestra joined the
American Symphony Orchestra League, a grouping of 850 orchestras in
the U.S. and abroad. Inquiries from record companies and music agents
began to arrive, exploring possible collaboration. Ms. Guo, the deputy
director, traveled to the U.S., where she and Mr. Li recruited music
lovers and potential sponsors to a new "Friends of the National
Symphony Orchestra," a nonprofit organization they set up in the U.S.
to raise money and promote exchanges between American and Chinese
musicians.
Ms. Guo, who visited Mr. Li several times last year while assessing
his fitness for the post, was clearly won over. "For a long time, I
thought he was just a dreamer, someone who talked big and indulged
in fantasies," she confided, looking refreshed and energized on an
afternoon in late February two days after her return from the U.S.
She said she realized otherwise when she looked at his musical scores:
They were meticulously marked, with different parts highlighted in
different colors and the hard parts specially clipped. "He is very
organized. He has done a lot in the past one or two months," she
conceded. "We give him the most headaches of all his orchestras."
'More Savage!'
Mr. Li returned in mid-March and began to tackle the music. In two
days of rehearsals and fighting through a bout of food poisoning, he
pushed the orchestra through Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition,"
a complex piece that he added to the program at the last minute,
alongside standards the orchestra knows well, such as Rossini's
"William Tell" overture. By midmorning the first day, after hours of
urging the brass section to play with more verve and volume, his shirt
was soaked through with sweat.
"More savage! More savage! I want a sound that doesn't listen to
reason," he ordered the tuba player.
When the first trumpet began to play the stately opening with a clear,
pure tone, Mr. Li cut him short. "It sounds like a nervous little
child going to school. Can it be a bit more heavy, more vigorous?"
But he also was careful to thank each player after a difficult solo.
Chinese orchestras have distinctive weaknesses, he says. An orchestra
needs vivid individual voices, particularly in the brass and woodwinds,
in which each part is usually played by a single instrument. The
tendency among Chinese musicians is to hide rather than to stand out.
"It's an emotional thing," he says. "Western people turn on when
people are watching them. But in Chinese orchestras, there is so much
pressure for a person not to lose face, that when the time comes for
them to show off, they are hesitant to do it."
Chinese orchestras' relative isolation from the outside world also
hurts. Mr. Li notes that all the principals in an American orchestra
would have studied the entire musical score, not just their own parts.
In China it is hard to find such scores, so only the conductor has
one.
After the two days of rehearsal, the orchestra's first concert under
Mr. Li's baton was the next evening at the China University of Law
and Politics in Beijing. Most of the students had never been to a
classical-music performance. They packed the 1,700-seat auditorium,
crowded along the stairways and against the back wall. They listened
raptly as Mr. Li explained what the concertmaster does, why it's
polite to applaud soloists after they play a difficult part, and how
the crash of the brass section and the timpani is a clue that the
piece is coming to an end. They remained perfectly silent during the
performance, with none of the coughing and rustling, the beeping and
phone-ringing that usually accompany performances in China.
Mr. Li told his youthful audience, "When Chinese are happy, they are
silent. When Westerners are happy, they shout out 'Bravo!' If you
hear us and like us, I urge you tonight to break with Chinese tradition."
After the second encore, an energetic rendition of a Brahms "Hungarian
Dance," the students applauded vigorously. Some even stood up and
shouted out, "Bravo!"
Larry Sherwood
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