Pipa master Liu Dehai performs at the “The Soul and Charm of Chinese Music” event, one of the only two traditional Chinese music concerts at this year’s Shanghai International Arts Festival.

 Hou Yanqiu (left) performs on the suona at the concert.

Shanghai Daily news

As the old Chinese saying goes: ``An elder at home is like having a treasure.'' Old people are more knowledgeable about what it takes when one is going through different life stages and if they ever manage to shake off their conservativeness -- a conventional label -- they can be strikingly innovative.
This is illustrated by the story of five veteran traditional Chinese musicians -- Liu Dehai, 67, Dai Shuhong, 68 and Gong Yi, Li Xiangting and Yan Shouping, all 64 -- who performed at last week's ``The Soul and Charm of Chinese Music,'' part of the Sixth Shanghai International Arts Festival. The grand get-together featured them as an all-star soloist line-up -- a ``Who's Who'' of expert exponents of traditional Chinese music. Each is reputed to be the best in China on his instrument and the veteran musicians, playing before a backdrop of Chinese calligraphy and videos of the countryside of Jiangnan (the region to the south of the Yangtze River), presented a representative collection of the masterpieces of traditional Chinese music.
``All these melodies are very familiar to me. In fact I have grown up with them but it's still a refreshing experience to hear them performed by these maestros,'' says local poet Zhao Lan, 30. ``I could really feel the spirit of what they wanted to convey. It was sincere and complex rather than just a playing of the notes from the original scores.'' But Zhao, along with most others in the audience, did not know when the curtain went up that there had been no complete rehearsals for the concert and that most of the veteran soloists had had to squeeze the time from their busy schedules to play that night at one of the only two Chinese music concerts on this year's festival program. ``As a Chinese international arts festival, it's the festival's obligation to provide a platform for more Chinese musicians to present their artistry but now this embarrassing imbalance is a shame and it somehow reflects a blind faith in foreign things,'' says an indignant Liu, unarguably the most influential ``pipa'' (a plucked string instrument similar to the Western lute) master of the modern era.
A Shanghai native, Liu has devoted some 50 years to perfecting his ``pipa'' performance skills and in maintaining the popularity of Chinese music. He is also widely recognized as the most authoritative interpreter of the ``pipa'' classic, ``Ambuscade from Ten Sides,'' which he played at the festival concert, giving the piece a remarkable jazzy style and demonstrating his dazzling plucking skills that would have made a top rock bassist open his eyes wide. After the signature piece, Liu did a bold rendition of ``Liuyang River,'' a famous Hunan folk song dedicated to the late Chairman Mao Zedong and the whole theater applauded Liu's singing and playing.
``Traditional Chinese music is part of a refined grassroots culture. As professional musicians who are the mainstays of the art form, we must protect its raw beauty by rediscovering it and going back to its origins,'' Liu says.
In 2000, Liu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Music in Beijing, launched the culture-preservation program, ``One.'' It is a project in which Liu leads conservatory teachers and students in learning and mastering one type of China's regional music every year. Within the next decade he hopes to build up a ``gene bank'' of Chinese folk music. The idea behind the project proved to be practical from the first step which involved Chaozhou music from southern Guangdong Province and at the Fifth Beijing International Music Festival two years ago, Liu and his team of folk music collectors revived ancient Chaozhou music in a concert which included all the major regional instruments and folk works.
``I am doing this job for the sake of our young generation who seem to have no awareness of the crisis caused by the decline of traditional culture,'' Liu says -- and he pauses a while to let this sink in. ``They should not be blamed for it as the problem is bound up in the way they have been educated. Moral lessons are not enough for young people who are just opening their eyes to the world -- they should also be taught more of the humanities, to have a respect for art and music and a desire to explore.'' The Shanghai ``guqin'' (seven stringed zither) master Gong Yi, like the nature of his instrument, is scholarly and refined even when talking about the hardships involved in popularizing one of the most ancient of all Chinese instruments.
``Some people argue that ``guqin'' music is too slow to match the pace of modern society but I think they mistake the `rhythm' of society with that of artistic development,'' says Gong. ``It's just like when you are driving along the highway -- play music that is too wild and you can run the risk of having an accident.'' Gong has seen more and more young people in Shanghai, mainly white-collar employees and college students, coming to an awareness of the importance of spiritual refreshment when they ask to become one of his students.
``As musicians, however, we should always remind ourselves not to be pleased with sudden gains and not to feel sad about being lonely. Preservation and reform are both part of the development of Chinese music and we must treat it with a standard of fairness,'' Gong says. Encouraged by the musicians' ``nobility,'' even the concert producer learned to understand the conflict between art and market forces. According to the producer, Xiao Yu, the concert ended up with a loss of more than 500,000 yuan (US$60,240) but she still feels highly rewarded. ``We've already sent out a strong signal by bringing these big names together -- that the elite generation of Chinese traditional music are strongly willing to further contribute and that's enough,'' Xiao says.
And perhaps that's what most local fans of traditional Chinese music expected to hear at the city's own arts festival.