As appeared in another context this week (_The Butterfly Lovers_), i've
done a bit of reading & listening on PR-Chinese music (which may - or may
not - be what you mean when you say _Chinese music_); & currently have a
couple of webpieces on the subject starting at:

   http://www.ausnet.net.au/~clemensr/bamboo-c.html

Even if you strip things of Maoism (in theory, at least, Mao's take on
revolutionary art was a deliberate eclecticism taking the supposed bests
of the West & East together), the collision between Western modes & more
traditional Chinese venacular has tended to dominate the agenda in the PRC;
with the balance between the twin approaches flexing with the ides of Long
March...  to use only the most famous example, HE Zhanhao (cocomposer of
The Butterfly Lovers violin concerto) also experimented with creating what
he considered an idiomatically Chinese style of violin performance; & it
seems that the concerto itself was written (at least in part) as a
technology demonstrator for the aproach.

(A sort of a PRC orchestral Deep Space 1, if you like)

Most of the major - & plenty of the minor - figures in PRC music
studied in the USSR; which both acted both as a conduit for Western
musical thought & a brake on its timeframe:  although a few composers
have explored post-Schoenbergian ideas (Song Tan, Zhu Jian'er, etc), the
mainstream explores - or is mired in, depending on your personal tastes
& theories about artistic progress - in late, somewhat light Russian
Romanticism.  Until recently, few PRC composers actually studied in the
west; & of the those, one of the most influential - Xian Xinghai...  he
of the mighty _Yellow River cantata_ - self-consciously rejected a lot of
his learnings in developing his own style (there's more than a few grounds
for describing Xian as China's - technically, he predates the PRC that he
became a artistic folk-hero/curse to - Charles Ives; although Ives seems to
have been a more successful musical student).  Xian's richer contemporary
Ma Siccong also studied in France & for a while acted as a kind of critical
balance to Xian's revolutionary primitivism; but ended up having to escape
to the US during the opening salvos of the Cultural Revolution.

(I have to say, though: as composers, the literate Ma is no match for the
sometimes crazed maximimalism of Xian)

Trying to make sense of thesubtle tension between east & west which
dominates the PRC musical agenda would be a lifetimes work for a real
musical scholar...  to a dilettante who can only visit mainland Asia
every couple of years, it seems an awfully wasted opportunity....

Outside the PRC (at least:  as far as i can tell), Chinese music has been
open to all the pressures to advance that dominate western agendas; with
one significant difference:  in Asia, the CM is still (relatively) healthy
as a popular music tradition (a fact the Anglophone - if not the Romantic
- west has, essentially, lost).  A HK composer, say, will be encouraged to
write in venaculars which appeal to a wide audience because that audience
might actually turn up if he/she succeeds...  not a realistic possibility
for someone writing in Australia, say....

All the best,

Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>
<http://www.ausnet.net.au/~clemensr/welcome.htm>