The Percussions Claviers de Lyon will perform in Shanghai next Tuesday with the Shanghai Percussion Ensemble of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Shanghai Daily news

The irreversible trend of cultural globalization is a double-edged sword for contemporary composers: In one way it can serve as a shortcut to overnight wealth and fame and the chance to put across their own culture to the world, but they also run the risk of crashing if they fail to seize the right moment.

The France-based Chinese composer Xu Yi has managed to find the right balance despite some ups-and-downs in achieving her self-appointed goal of defending the artistic purity of Chinese traditional music. Her success can be seen and heard in an upcoming joint concert by the Percussions Claviers de Lyon and the Shanghai Percussion Ensemble of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

As a local conservatory graduate, Xu went to France in 1998 for further study and she gradually gained public attention because of her innovative approach to interpreting the philosophy of Taoism using modern Chinese instruments.

A frequent participant in major European music festivals, Xu has collaborated with many first-class French musicians and ensembles including the renowned Percussions laviers de Lyon and this has enabled her to open the door for a cross-cultural dialogue. The result of the collaboration will be a highlight for the ongoing Sixth Shanghai International Arts Festival.

Her concert will feature the premiere of “1+1=3,” a percussion piece Xu has created for the two groups. Along the Silk Road,percussion was used to convey musical emotion and it carried the aesthetics of Europe to Asia and back again. The percussive encounter between ensembles from China and France will enliven both cultures.

“Blending the East with the West should mean more than the superficial fusion of having a Western symphony played on Chinese instruments — it can only thrill Western audiences rather than move them with the quintessence of our ethnic spirituality,” the 41-year-old softly-spoken composer says. Xu is now teaching as a guest professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and her concerns have struck a chord among composers from home and abroad including Qu Xiaosong, whose “Xi” (“Morning Sunlight”) will be performed by the conservatory percussion troupe at the joint concert.

Early in 2000, Qu was in Shanghai for a couple of concerts with fellow composers from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.Inspired by “Query in Heaven” by Chinese poet Qu Yuan of the Warring States Period (476-221 BC), all of the works presented then had a Chinese cultural background.

“Some Chinese composers never write Chinese works — they just have classical and traditional Chinese music bluntly ‘Westernized’to cater to the so-called ‘modern taste’,” Qu says.

Qu says he believed in today China, in a cultural environment full of rough, rash and superficial “modern taste,” the first step needed to ensure a Chinese musical renaissance was to show the original purity of classical Chinese music.

The concert will also see the French ensemble defend its own cultural identity by staging two works by Claude Debussy who is considered to be the first exponent of musical impressionism. The Lyon quintet was formed in 1983 with the objective of providing a repertoire of keyboard percussion.

The concert will also be staged in France next month.

Date: October 19, 7:15pm
Venue: He Luting Concert Hall,Shanghai Conservatory of Music,20 Fenyang Rd
Tickets: 60-240 yuan
Tel: 6272-0455, 6272-0702