Classical Music and China

[papeetepatrick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/arts/mus...&hp&oref=slogin

This is bound to be interesting. I'll get around to it later tonight.

[dirac]

Very interesting article, and thank you for posting it. About the only thing that can be said for a regime like China’s is that for good and ill, they take the arts very seriously indeed. As the article notes, the situation could turn into a bit of a rat race, with an emphasis on empty virtuosity, but we’ll see.

Fewer young American listeners find their way to classical music, largely because of the lack of the music education that was widespread in public schools two generations ago. As a result many orchestras and opera houses struggle to fill halls.

I’d also add that there is a lot more competition for attention now. I do know young people who aren’t listening to the obvious forms of pop, but rather to international music – it wasn’t so long ago that if you wanted to hear Balinese music, for example, you had to go to Bali. The internet has made access to world music even easier.

[papeetepatrick]

dirac, I'm so glad you read that so I could be prodded to finally get to it. I was a little bit dreading it, and I can see why, given my curmudgeonly personality, even though it's obviously supposed to be this very positive thing. I'm probably just scared of China in general, there's no limit to what they can do. Of course, this is undeniably admirable, but I can't say I love it when they are so obviously getting ahead of us.

For example, I hated hearing this: 'The Chinese enthusiasm suggests the potential for a growing market for recorded music and live performances just as an aging fan base and declining record sales worry many professionals in Europe and the United States. Sales for a top-selling classical recording in the West number merely in the thousands instead of the tens of thousands 25 years ago. '

Well, I didn't really want to know that, even though I knew that.

'More profoundly, classical music executives say that the art form is being increasingly marginalized in a sea of popular culture and new media.'

Oh, I really didn't want to know that, and I also knew that, but since I think about that all the time, I was most unhappy to read that I was right.

'Fewer young American listeners find their way to classical music, largely because of the lack of the music education that was widespread in public schools two generations ago. As a result many orchestras and opera houses struggle to fill halls.'

And, of course, how is this not going to apply to ballet down the line? No matter what kind of excellent developments are happening with regional companies, there's no way that ballet can be anything but subject to exactly the same statistics (probably already, they may just not have gotten round to telling us in this piece.)

“There’s no question the talent is there,” said Joseph W. Polisi, president of the Juilliard School. “The commitment to Western art music is definitely there. But is that talent prepared to absorb what we have here?”

Is he kidding? He's suffering from the same kind of wishful thinking and denial I'm striving for (and failing at). Of course, 'that talent is prepared to absorb...'--because they can afford an endless number of casualties who would be subject to our 'Is Ballet a Sport or an Art' thread or Music and Opera ones that are related, given all those numbers that are moving in that direction, and still come out ahead in terms of enough who are really sensitive and musical (if that continues to be possible in a meaningful sense elsewhere, that is. Attitudes about art are changing pretty fast). There are going to still be, within less than a decade, I imagine, a glittering array of Chinese musical stars who match Lang Lang. This doesn't mean we've gotten, then, Chinese replacements for Franz Liszt, because the day of pianists being treated as rock stars is lost in the 19th century, but it does mean they'll turn out the majority of virtuosos who are also musical within a few years.

[artist]

Yes, thanks, that is a great article.

If you click on 'more articles in the arts', you can find Increasingly in the West, the Players Are From the East http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/arts/mus...nted=1&ref=arts

or just scroll down and click it here http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html :

“I honestly think that in some real sense the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years,” said Robert Sirota, the president of the Manhattan School of Music. “They represent a vast new audience as well as a classical-music-performing population that is much larger than anything we’ve had so far. You’re looking at a time when, maybe 20 to 40 years from now, Shanghai and Beijing are really going to be considered centers of world art music.”

For several decades Japanese and Korean musicians have formed a major presence in the West. In particular they have long populated the string sections of professional orchestras. Chinese musicians have now joined them in force and are winning high-profile positions.

But the West is where careers are made

As Lang Lang put it: “Two hundred years ago it was Europe. A hundred years ago it was America. Fifty years ago it was Japan. And now it’s China.”

They stress on how, for them, it is all about the prizes and the teachers have to teach their students to 'tone it down a bit' and learn some 'dignity.' It is becoming, how dirac put it, like a rat race.

artist

[dirac]

papeetepatrick writes:

'More profoundly, classical music executives say that the art form is being increasingly marginalized in a sea of popular culture and new media.'

Oh, I really didn't want to know that, and I also knew that, but since I think about that all the time, I was most unhappy to read that I was right.

But Western art music presumably has to compete with the same elements in China, as well. I wonder if part of the difference isn't support from the public sector, however misguided in some respects, in the form of education and exposure?

[papeetepatrick]

But Western art music presumably has to compete with the same elements in China, as well. I wonder if part of the difference isn't support from the public sector, however misguided in some respects, in the form of education and exposure?

That's probably part of it, but the place is so full of energy right now, that they are finding all ways to do everything. I've corresponded on a blog with a frightful British neocon who lives in Shanghai for about a year (or rather I did as long as I could stand it--type that swears the New York Times is 100% hard-leftist), and you pick up the incredible rapidity with which things are moving. Shanghai is probably the most extreme example even for China--future-future-future at all costs, but they are just becoming very successful in all markets. By comparison, we go back and forth and have some energy again from time to time, but it seems torpid compared to what they're doing in leaps and bounds. We're actually possibly at a stage ahead of them, in which so much in education has gotten such a more practical focus than it did in the past--but this can include decadent as well as practical elements and much of the popular culture proves that day in day out, with no Chinese equivalent to Donald Trump/Rosie O'Donnell absurdities on the horizon yet, it just doesn't play. There may be simply enough markets due to that many people plus booming markets that all the pop, all the classical, and even the traditional Shanghai and Peking Opera are still there, too, I'm sure. I can't say I know quite what to make of it or that I can imagine outcomes.

Another thing I noticed was this: “Much of what people talk about as being identifiable as the Chinese accent in music is really just not measuring up to the international standard,” he [Zhenyang] said. “It’s subtle, but you can hear the same flaws in the performances of people trained in China. That’s what I want to overcome.”

I'd agree that that is much of it, but not all of it. You can even hear a different approach to the Romantic traditions, say, in Rachmaninoff, in Lang Lang's playing: It's gorgeous, but there's still a slightly different relationship to what the music is doing, where it came from. That's normal, and is always the case. We've been into related areas with race in ballet, origins and authenticity of ballet, etc., i. e., there still has been no surpassing of Russians in any ultimate sense yet.