CHINESE TRADE GOODS
SOME few years ago, when former President Nixon parted the Bamboo Curtain behind which the Chinese retired after World War II, among the first trade goods to reach this shore was a recording of a comically eclectic, thoroughly occidental piano concerto (see "'Way Down upon the Yellow River" in April 1974 STEREO RE VIEW or pick up a copy of RCA ARL 1-0415 if you can) which offered convincing evidence that China was not as completely closed to Western influences as we had been led to believe. Unfairly roasted by a few critics for having profaned Red Seal with meretricious tomfoolery, RCA evidently decided not to return to the same well, and it was left to CBS to enter into negotiations with the China Record Company last year to arrange another entente musicale.
I don't know what we've sent them, but they have sent us "Phases of the Moon" (CBS M 36705, inaccurately subtitled "Traditional Chinese Music"), a collection that considerably broadens our perspective on the Chinese recording industry. The sound is (largely) in perfectly adequate stereo, and since the music is played by a cross section of well-connected forces (the Traditional Instruments Orchestra of the Central Conservatory, the Shanghai Philharmonic Society, Peking Opera Theatre of Shanghai, etc.), it permits us to assess the performance level--impressively high--of some of China's more important ensembles.
The unifying theme of the sampler is "moonlight," but to my ears the contents break down into two mutually exclusive categories: the music of metropolitan, Western-influenced China (the Peking/Shanghai axis) and the music of some of the country's many ethnic minorities. The metropolitan music (The Moon Mirrored in the Pool, The Moon on High, Spring on a Moonlit River) is largely contemporary and of the plucked -string kind we take to be "typically" Chinese-probably because the plaintive whine of its melodic style was for years successfully imitated in the back ground music for any number of Holly wood's Shanghai gestures. There is also the martial Days of Emancipation, a piece of Socialist Realism to remind us subtly that China is one of those countries where the clever become trimmers and the principled dead or silent, where prize-winning concert pianists have their arms broken for entertaining Bad Thoughts.
The ethnic music, however, is quite an other bowl of rice. Like all good folk music, it reminds us of other folk, and I take that to be a measure of its authenticity, tarted up though it may be. Dance of the Yao People, which sounds like a balalaika orchestra, and Spring on the Pamir Plateau, featuring a fabulous flute solo, are highly recommended. Tashwayi sounds like a Middle Eastern belly dance, Purple Bamboo like a fiddle-led hoedown, and Axi Jump Moon is surely an unknown Copland ballet score. If there are more sounds like these available, CBS should grab them fast before such minority expressions go the way of Tibet.
The jacket notes innocently include a poem written in 816 (yes) by Bo Juyi, one of China's greatest poets. It contains this astonishing passage: "I came, a year ago, away from the capital/And am now a sick exile here in Kiu-kiang/And so remote is Kiu-kiang that I have heard no music/ Neither string nor bamboo, for a whole year." That might have been written by some rusticated Chinese intellectual only yesterday. China is still China.
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Also see:
Editorially Speaking [May 1978]
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)