2011 6月 29 号
Schedules can change rather quickly around here. I was expecting to get attend a dizi master class in the morning and squeeze in a visit to my yangqin tutor before it to hear her play a duet that she is preparing with another masters student. After breakfast, I arrived at the office of the yangqin master, Chen Laoshi. (Laoshi is the honorific given a teacher. In person, I usually address Professor Meng as Meng Laoshi. Oh, and “shi” is pronounced as choked-off “sure.”) When I arrived at Chen Laoshi’s office he asked me, through the translation of Tao Yi if I was coming to class at 9:30. (I learned later that he would be out of town the following day and must have just switched it.) This put me in a double quandary as J’Lan (the other yangqin student in our group) probably didn’t know about the change either and I couldn’t reach anyone by phone. So, after enjoying the master class for my tutor, I was rushing through the streets back to the hotel to collect J’Lan and get back to what was left of the master class for us. Despite all of that and despite missing my dizi class, I learned a lot form both watching the other student’s interactions with Laoshi Chen and then, when it was my turn, he gave me some exercises and new techniques to work on that will keep me busy for months. As I think you all know, I have been playing hammered dulcimer since that fated day in 1985 when I wandered into the dorm room of a beautiful young woman who was playing one and more or less promptly fell in love with both the instrument and the player. I have told most of you, as well, that playing the yangqin is just the same only different as/from playing hammered dulcimer. For those of you who play the piano, imagine that someone has rearranged the key. I know how to hit the instrument (mostly anyhow), but I struggle with where to hit the instrument. My lesson with Chen Laoshi really turned the tide in that battle. After lunch, I spent about two hours doing his exercises and working on the new piece that Tao Yi gave me and by the time we started our lesson at 4:00, I was already much more able to follow what she was showing me. It was like someone turned on a light in a cluttered room that I was trying to navigate in the dark.
Speaking of navigation, it is a humbling experience trying to function as a near-illiterate in the streets of China. Mind you, Shanghai has nearly all bilingual street signs, so I can look at the roadsigns at my closest corner and see that I am at the corner of Shaanxi (shan-shee) and Fuxing (fu-shing) Roads. The problem comes with the maps we were given and most of the on-line maps are primarily printed in Chinese characters. So even though, I have the western letters written right out on the sign beow the Chinese characters, finding those characters on the map amid the sea of other characters that I cannot read makes me think constantly of what it would be like to be illiterate in my own language. On top of that, my one semester of Chinese did not include vocabulary for giving or receiving directions. My roommate has been doing an ever-better job with this and I have yet another reason to be glad that we are rooming together. More than anything else, if or when I return to China, I will definitely work hardest on my “getting around” vocabulary and grammar.
2011 6月24号
Two nights ago, the concert was traditional eastern Chinese music made up of small groups, soloists and soloists with orchestral accompaniment. Many of the performers were teachers and masters students with, I think, some guests. The music was stunningly well done. I really have a sense that I am getting exposed to the best of the best music that China (or at least Shanghai) has to offer. As I think I mentioned, I was terribly sleepy due, I think, to jet lag, but the music kept me awake. Something about the half-dream state of my mind will serve to keep those memories as highlights of the trip, but last night, I think that we experienced something that the Chinese will also talk about for years to come.
The concert consisted of four newly composed works by four composers who were commissioned by the Chinese government to compose new music for orchestra that featured the music and talents of ethnic minorities. The first piece featured two Mongolian singers (a man and a woman wearing traditional Mongolian garb. The man played a two-stringed horse-head fiddle and sang in that growly-voiced throat-singing style that allows the singer to produce two tones at once, the first with the vocal chords and the second as a harmonic generated and controlled by the shape of the mouth. It’s not exactly easy listening and it is an acquired taste, but it is always amazing to hear the scope and range of the human voice. The woman’s singing reminded be of the Bulgarian women’s choirs that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s (at least among my circle of friends). It is a very nasal, piercing style that is intended to be heard over large distances when, say, harvesting wheat on the open plains in a moderately strong wind. The singing was great and I was really glad to have a chance to hear that style of singing in person – I’ve only seen videos of it before—but the orchestra only added melodrama to something that didn’t need it.
The second piece featured percussion from the horse country of the Chinese west. I would have thought that this was Mongolia, but apparently there is more than one Chinese minority that live on horseback in the wide open spaces between the Goby Desert and the rivers and mountains country to the east. This piece featured a group of about 10 percussionists. The two women played small gong-like instruments that were probably originated from pan lids. (Not the actual instrument, the history of the instruments.) The men all played salad plate-sized cymbals that the banged, clashed and ground together in different ways to great effect. The over-all, unmistakable them in the piece was the sounds and rhythms of horse’s hooves. It was done to great effect without being cliché or silly. (Okay, I did smile once to myself as I thought about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but then they really started getting down and I forgot about coconuts.
The last piece featured the long southern flute (竹笛 zhu di) and the long zither (古筝gu zheng) which I will always think of by its Japanese name, koto. The flute had a melody that captured my heart and caused me to sneak my iPod out and record a portion of it. I am finding myself falling in love with the sounds of these instruments and the music that is possible with them. If I had room in my luggage, my house and my life, I would by a gu zheng and start learning how to play it as well, but the flutes and the yangqin will be more than enough for my lifetime.
The last piece featured ethnic Koreans playing a slightly different gu zheng (which undoubtably has a different name), a wooden, Bohem-system flute, and a two-headed drum that was played like a tuppan; the drum is place horizontally on a stand and the drummer has a beater in the left hand and thin, wand-like stick in the other. All played excellently and the drummer rocked.
I have to tell you one more thing about the third piece. I was sitting the front row near the center and sitting next to me was a guy who seemed to know the people on stage. The flute player had one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen in my life and this guy sitting next to me gave her a little thumbs-up signal. She responded with a little shake of her head and then a smile so secret and loving that I blushed to have witnessed it. She was young and beautiful and talented and her lover was sitting in the audience and her whole life was a head of her. And then she began to play.
I’m still trying to get my head around what that moment means to me. I have already told this story twice to friends here on the program and each time, I felt as though I was not telling wrong. I am sure that I am not jealous, nor do I wish that she was looking at me that way instead of him. I already have someone who has a special smile for that is just for me, and indeed, perhaps that moment reminded me of my own, similar moments. But, I think that perhaps that I am beginning to feel my age; that when I am around youthful beauty and young love, I am simply grateful for it in the same way that I might be grateful for seeing a beautiful work of art or a great movie or play. It might be akin to why some people like to watch sports in which athletes do things that the watchers could never hop to do. It is like seeing a bird fly, wishing on some level that you could fly, but being happy in just seeing the bird as it is lifted away on the breeze. You watch it until it has disappeared from sight and you keep the vision of it in your heart.
2011 6月24号
I am starting into this section to place discussions about music, language and culture that may fall outside of my more chronological accounts. I will contribute here as the spirit moves me throughout the rest og the trip.
I went to a 笛子(flute) master class yesterday. The teacher, Zhan Yong-ming, was a kind and easy going fellow with good English. I learned some more nuanced vocabulary about the bamboo flute. 笛子is generic for any bamboo flute 笛 means "flute" and the 子is just a sound to keep the di from being a small and lonely single-syllable word. 竹笛 (zhu di) litterally mean bamboo flute and refers to the longer/lower flutes that are most common in the south, which includes Shanghai. THere is also a smaller, northern flute called the 笛伴。I'm not sure if I am getting my character right here, but it would make sense for the small flute to be called the "half flute" which is what I have written here. I'll let you know. It has a much different style from the the 竹笛, which is much more shrill and lively. The southern style (as is common through the musical world) is a little more laid back, though both styles kick butt from time to time. My experience so far is that the northern style gets right to the kicking from the get-go while the southern style asks you if you are comfortable, would like something to drink, asks after your health and that of your family and THEN kicks your butt.
From my History of the English Language and Intro to Linguistics classes, I have learned that all languages change. No real news to anyone who has read Shakespeare or even F. Scott Fitzgerald, but English is evolving more quickly than, say, French, because unlike French, it is an unregulated language. The French have L'academie Francaise which is a college of language experts who say what is proper French and (more often) what is not. This has a slowing effect on change. The proper way to say "weekend" in French when I was in high school was la prochaine de la semaine, but my friend, Elizabeth told me that everyone just said "le weekend." I just checked on Bable Fish (Google Translate wouldn't load today) and sure enough, weekend translates into "week-end." No one is regulating English. English is essentially owned by its speakers and regulated by the people who speak and understand what is spoken. As someone who grew up in the land of liberty and that, it seems like just another extension of American/English independence/free-market/I'll-do-it-my-way values, but just like the folks in the west who claim to believe in the free market while things are good and then go whining to the government to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW when the free market collapses, English is just about to slip out of the control of the people who think it belongs to them. There are now (or about to be) more people who speak English as a second (or third or fourth) language than there are native speakers. Suddenly, English is going to change away from what we think of as proper and I have been seeing all sorts of examples around me. Here is one:
What do you suppose that the person or persons who designed this sign thought that BRICK means to the the average reader of English? What does zero burden mean? No calories? I wonder what native Mandarin speakers who also know English think of this sign. BTW, if you are thinking to yourself, "We've got to regain control of our language!" take a deep breath and give up now. It was too late before you were born. I promise to continue speaking more or less "standard" English in your presence, but to quote Paul Simon, "Who am I to blow against the wind?"
2011 6月24号 (晚生 - evening)
Today has been much like the others except that I didn't have any classes scheduled. I spent my time trying to learn the Chinese numerical music notation. I discovered the same notation to be maddeningly confusing for flute but surprisingly simple for yangqin. Here's why: the system is simple enough. It works on a movable "do," that is to say it doesn't really matter what key you are in, it just tells you what degree of the musical scale you are on. Most people don't have perfect pitch, they just start singing or humming a tune where-ever they happen to start. Numeric notation is like that, to only it tells you 1 (do) = C (or some other note, A through G). If the note falls into the middle range of the instrument, it shoes just the number of the note. If the pitch is in the lower octave, then there is a dot below the number and if it is higher, there is a dot above it. The reason that it is relatively simple for yangqin is that the dots correspond very strongly with what bridge one should use to find the note in question. It gives the learner a sense of where on the instrument to find the note. Very, very useful! For the flute, though there are layers of interpretation. For the flutes that I have been playing for most of my life, three fingers on my left hand covering holes with the three fingers on my right open equals the note we call "G." Six fingers down (three and three on each hand) equals "D." In the west, we name the key of an instrument by it's lowest note that can begin the simplest scale. (This is a slight over-simplification, but just go with me.) My blackwood "Irish" flute is pitched in the key of D. The same fingering on my metal (classical) flute is also a D. In the past, if I have ever wanted to play on a different key I have either ignored the new pitch of the instrument and played it just like I always do on a "D" instrument from memory or I have transcribed the tune so that the new pitch reads like the fingerings I am used to on the D flute.
That is the way things have worked in the west for hundreds of years. I am certain that really good baroque and classical flute players could read something in F and play it in D, but for the most part, flute players read on dot on the page and it always equaled a given fingering. Not so in the number notation system in China. At the beginning of each piece of noted music, there will be a key/note assignment telling the reader/player that 1=C or something like that. I am fairly sure that the number will usually be 1, but it should not be a forgone conclusion. Here's where it gets confusing: In China, the Key name of a flute is the three fingers on the left hand down and three fingers on the fight hand up. So in the west, my "D" flute would be considered by the Chinese to be a "G" flute. Okay, fine. That is nothing to get my shorts in a bind, but then I was given a piece that said 1=F, but then told to play it on a C flute. I was shown a notation chart in the front of the book, but after transcribing the piece in question using that guide and then listening to the recording I made of my teacher playing the piece, I re-transcribed the piece a step up and practiced it that way. When I arrived to class a week later, I discovered that I had been practicing on the right flute in the wrong key and so, as I played the piece for the teacher, I was very nearly sight-reading for him, except that I knew how the piece went. If this makes your brain hurt, just reading it, then you have a good idea of how mine was feeling as I worked through all of this.
22 June, 2011 (later)
Today was a mixed bag. Breakfast was another adventure, but a good one. (I am still hoping to get some photos up for you to see, but I am still having problems uploading media of any sort and have no IT Department to turn to for help. I am also writing this at 9:00 PM local time, but have already missed the Internet window, so I will have to post it tomorrow, which of course is late in the day for you all.)
After breakfast, I went with Professor Meng, J’Lan (the other yangqin player in our group) and an administrator named Yue (which means moon) to the Mao-era building where (among other things) they store the left-over instruments. It was, I think, also the repair shop and the gentleman there had sorted through the old instruments to find us some loaner yangqins and pipas (lutes). The yangqins had seen better days. They say that beggars can’t be choosers, but we eventually chose only one of the two instruments offered and J’Lan and I will work out sharing one instrument to practice on. (One of the recipients of a loaner pipa said that his teacher told him to get rid of his instrument.) The cool thing about the instrument room was a stack of old yanqin cases that was well over my head. It struck me that there was history here. How many people’s musical educations were represented by that stack? The school was founded in 1929. Could those yanqins represent all that time? I really wanted to open all the cases and look at the evolution of the instrument. Yangqins used to be as simple as hammered dulcimers. It has really evolved and become a more complex instrument even since the second half of the 20th century. What would I find in those cases?
We trundled the yangqin down and out of the building and rolled it across campus to a high-rise building full of teaching rooms and practice rooms and up to the 9th floor to meet our yangqin teacher, Chen Haihua. He recognized me immediately from his visit to Valparaiso late fall and greeted me like an old friend… in Chinese. Fortunately we were joined by a master student whose English is very good and she proceeded to teach J’Lan and me how to read the Chinese number notation system. It’s easy enough to understand, but as she explained it, I heard the voice of my friend, Sandi Goldring, when he was telling me about getting his first handheld device: “AFLC, Another Frakking Learning Curve.” (Okay, he didn’t say “frakking.”) It was, as I said, a mixed bag. I had no real piece prepared (the news that the lessons would be master classes arrived in the middle of last week) and the yangqin I have at home has all of the note names taped onto the sound board under the strings and, of course these were without markings of any kind. Professor Chen was kind, though and took an interest in the dulcimer hammers that I brought and I played an English country dance tune on the yangqin a little with them. Anyhow, I have an assignment to work on the book version of a piece we play together in the ensemble. I learned a new damping technique and have to learn to play one passage in parallel octaves. That should keep me fairly busy.
We went from the class to lunch and then after lunch, had a bit of down time before a lecture on the history of Chinese music. Several times, I asked if the lecture was in Chinese and eventually it came out that the talk would be translated. It was, well, a challenge. First of all, the translation happened like this:
Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese
[pause]
English English English English English English.
Secondly, either through inadiquate translation or a profound misunderstanding of western music, we were informed that westerners had trouble understanding improvisation of folk tunes and later, that modern dancing to Bach somehow communicated a Chinese esthetic and was somehow related to Chinese folk music. We were also subjected to Chinese opera. I spent my down time in the lecture trying to learn some new characters using my Chinese Dictionary App on my iPod. Most of the Gary students and Professor Meng spent the time with their eyes closed. ‘nuf said.
After the lecture, Professor Meng asked Patrick (my copacetic roommate) and another VU student to come with him to pick up the instruments that he was buying for the Confucius Institute and… my new Chinese flutes! At the moment I have two very nicely made bamboo flutes (笛子 dizi) in the keys of “D” (which would be considered an “A” in western music) and “C” (or G). Tomorrow I will pick up my G/D flute. Professor Meng really came through on this; I paid a fraction of what one of these flutes would have cost me in America and I got to play them first. I am very pleased with them. I was able to play a very impressive-sounding tune that I wrote (Dr. Eberhardt’s) right off the bat with it. As many of you already know, I have several very nice bamboo flutes. The thing that makes the dizi special is that it has an extra hole in it that gets covered with a bamboo membrane that is half way between tissue paper and cellophane tape. When one plays it, not only does the hooting bamboo tone come out, but the membrane gives the sound an extra buzz with a vaguely kazoo-like tone. It makes the dizi almost a reed instrument and I like the edgy tone. Someday, I will play it in my world beat band.
Tomorrow I go to a master’s class with my new flutes and look forward to a) learning how to properly apply the membrane to my new flutes, b) learning something more about how to play it in the Chinese traditionand c) not sucking in front of the professor
Dinner was the usual adventure. The serving trays and kitchen staff are behind glass not unlike a ticket counter or even a bank in the U.S. In some lines, the food offerings are numbered, so it is possible to just say a number to get the thing you want… or think you want. Therein lies the rub. This evening I saw some dark, rich pieces of meat that looked like the shredded beef you can get on your burrito at Chipolte’s. I said the number (correctly) and received the item that I asked for… which turned out to be more of the pig’s intestine that I ate last night in the restaurant upstairs! Did I eat it? Yes. Did I finish it? No.
We were given tickets to a concert again tonight. This was the interestingly named trio, “Ensemble des Amis,” consisting of clarinet, violin and piano. I arrived at what I thought was on time with two other students, but my roommate forgot his ticket and could not talk his way in and the other fellow stayed ut in solidarity. This all happened after I went inside and didn’t realize that they were not with me until I was entering the darkened balcony and groping for a seat. When I sat down, a gentleman on the stage was talking and seemed to have been doing so for some time. I settled in quietly and waited while he spoke (in Chinese and not understanding a word of it) and then settled some more and a few minutes later woke up from an unintended nap only to discover that he was still talking. The students around me seemed to think that he had gone on long enough as well, but he continued for another 5+ minutes before the trio finally took the stage. Then they started playing an ultra-modern piece with little discernable melody and lots of banging of piano keys contrasted with long dissonant harmonies from the violin and carinet, occasionally interrupted by flailing runs. It, like the Chinese opera I survived earlier in the day was flawlessly executed and musically played, but I had to face the fact that I just wasn’t into it and slipped out after the second piece when I was so sure that I was done that I didn’t care who thought I was a rude American barbarian for leaving before intermission.
So here I am. I arrived back at the hotel after walking around for a bit and have been writing to you and chatting with my roommate (who is not fast asleep) ever since.
22 June, 2011
Yesterday afternoon, we had one of those communication/organizational breakdowns that I have come to expect when dealing with the Chinese. (Mind you, I have not been in a student situation in any other country before, so it might be much more universal than I am suggesting.) So, yesterday after lunch the word was passed to me by my roommate, Patrick, that he had heard that we were supposed to meet in the lobby at 4:30 to go out and do something and then dinner. We dutifully arrived in the lobby on time to find that the new word was that we have free time because Prof. Meng is in a meeting and we should reconvene at 6:00 to walk to the Conservatory to eat dinner there. When Patrick and I arrived in the lobby, only Micky, one of the other VU students and one of the Thea Bowman Academy students were there with one of the Thea Bowman teachers. No one had any information on anyone else except for the teach who said that the other teacher was not feeling well and would not join us. Prof. Meng made several calls to several rooms and got no answer, Micky went looking for several students and finally only Prof. Meng, Patrick and myself went on to dinner which was going to close in 15 minutes and we had a fifteen minute walk in front of us. When we actually arrived on campus, I saw a food service worker walking out and saw him glance down at the ticket in my hand with a sort of startled “good luck with that” look on his face. Then we rounded the corner of the building and saw why: the dining hall was closed… and had been since 6:00 PM. Here is where Meng get’s his classy credits: we walk upstairs to the much more expensive sit-down restaurant and he orders us an interesting and edible meal and we have a nice time talking and eating together.
The meal consisted of three dishes. One was pork served in a heated crock. The fat and the skin were still on the meat, but when I used my chopsticks to remove most of the fat, it was tasty. Also in the pork were long brown things that looked a lot like cooked shoe laces and were wound up in a similar fashion. Trying not to think too hard about what part of the animal I was eating, I took a bite and ate the rest. My conclusion is that intestines are the tofu of animal parts, they really don’t have much flavor other than “meat” and they become distinctive only because the sauce they are in. The sauce was good. (Sorry, no picture even if I could get it to upload, I thought the situation would have made photography an indelicate activity.)
After dinner, we walked over to the theatre in a western-style building. The hall itself had an early 20th century modern look to it inside a 19th century looking building. It had elements of Prairie Style in it, or perhaps I was seeing the roots of Prairie Style in that Frank Lloyd Wright used Asian aesthetics to inform his work.
The musical that we had come to see (which we learned upon receiving our programs) was a Broadway show called on the program, “In the Heights” but displayed on the electronic marquis above the stage as “Throughly Modern Mille>” The students would be performing with minimal sets and (I think) only the dialog that set up the premise to each song. The dialog was in Chinese, but the songs were in English. That is to say, they were trying to sing in English. Some were better than others. Most of them were excellent singers and a few of them even got them swing and the vocal stylistics required by a song sung by a small town girl from the Midwest who has moved to New York City in the late 1920s during prohibition to find a job, a glamorous life and (of course) love. I was all slightly surreal really. First of all, imagine for a moment that you are a visitor to the United States and someone takes to you a student production at Julliard and the play turns out to be a Chinese opera in which the dialog between the songs is in English. How weird is that?? Add to it that you as a fluent Chinese speaker have to struggle to understand what is supposed to be your language. Add to it a certain sense of unreality due to the last remnants of jet lag. It was strange. Meng was underwhelmed as well and suggested that we leave at intermission and go to the Bund, which we did.