Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music

317 Pages·1989·18.32 MB·English

by  Richard Curt Kraus

Pianos and Politics in China
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Pianos and Politics
in China
Middle-Class Ambitions
and the Struggle
over Western Music
Richard Curt Kraus
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1989
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kraus, Richard Curl.
Pianos and politics in China.
Includes index.
1. Music—20th century-—China—Political aspects.
2. Music and state—China. 3. China—Cultural policy.
4. Musicians-—China-—Bibliography. I. Title.
ML336.5.K72 1989 780'.951 88-25251
ISBN 0-19-505836-4
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
This song is dedicated to my parents,
Joe W. and Betsy C. Kraus
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Preface
During China's Cultural Revolution, the piano was likened to a coffin,
in which notes rattled about like the bones of the bourgeoisie. This
harsh assessment of an instrument which has been one of the proud
carriers of Western musical culture has been attributed to Mao Ze-
dong's widow, Jiang Qing. In fact, Jiang had a soft spot in her heart
for pianos, which she helped save from Red Guard destruction, al-
though she felt no affection for the music written for the piano by
European composers. The piano became the object of hostile attention
because it is the Western musical instrument, only tentatively rooted
in a society busily rejecting Western influence. Moreover, the piano
makes a poor fit with Chinese culture, even compared to, say, the
violin, oil painting, or ball-room dancing. The piano is industrial; it
rose to prominence with Europe's bourgeoisie. Possessing a remark-
able facility for harmony, and with its tonal intervals permanently fixed
to the Western twelve-note chromatic scale, it incorporates a non-Chinese
aesthetic. But most important, the piano's social base in China was
weak and vulnerable. Those who owned and played the piano were
urban, prosperous, intellectual, and removed from China's traditional
culture.
Two decades later, many of these same factors have turned the piano
and other Western musical instruments into emblems of moderniza-
tion. Western music is flourishing; Beijing has opened China's first
modern concert hall, and winners of international music prizes are
hailed for contributing to China's international prestige. A 1986 film,
The Fascinating Village Band, featured peasants who purchase trum-
pets and trombones; newly prosperous from Deng Xiaoping's eco-
nomic reforms, they use European music to demonstrate their acqui-
sition of modern culture.
viii PREFACE
This book is not just about pianos, but about the Chinese people
who enjoy playing and listening to pianos, clarinets, violas, accor-
dions, and all the other instruments that make up Western musical
culture. Because China's reception of European culture has been vol-
atile, the minority community of lovers of Western music often has
been embattled. This book explores not only their story, but also the
broader issue of China's participation in an international culture born
in Europe, the home of its former oppressors.
Western music's first point of vulnerability is its foreignness in a
century of China's rebellion against foreign domination. The vigorous
broom of Chinese nationalism has swept roughly over the music of
Beethoven and Debussy; many have viewed these examples of West-
ern art as dirt left behind by cultural imperialism, to be cleansed for
the sake of China's autonomy and dignity. The ways in which Chinese
enthusiasts for European music have responded to this challenge and
survived is an important part of the story which follows.
The second weight bearing against the West's music is social. The
sounds of Chopin and Tchaikovsky are alien to the peasant majority
of China's population, while the minority which embraces such music
has often been object of suspicion and hostility in China's revolution-
ary century. Our Western music does not simply float acrosss China
to all ears alike, but instead is especially beloved by the members of
the urban middle class. By examining the music of that class, we can
better understand the ambiguities of middle-class China. Alien yet pa-
triotic, revolutionary yet elitist, this class continues to be alternately
admired and resented in China today.
Western music is marginal to Chinese culture, yet it is closely con-
nected to the center of China's politics by the issues it raises, and by
the personal and institutional connections on which it rests. These
complex relationships have varied with the changing power of the ur-
ban middle class. Because the status of its urban and middle-class
patrons has varied so greatly, Western culture has had a highly un-
stable reception in China. The careers of individual artists are inevi-
tably buffeted by these political waves, but offer a vantage from which
to view the complex interaction of culture and politics in modern China.
I have made the abstractions of cultural conflict more concrete by
organizing this book around the lives of four important Chinese mu-
sicians whose careers embody the contradictions of Western culture
and Chinese politics. First is the composer Xian Xinghai. Before his
PREFACE iX
death in Moscow in 1945, he studied at the Paris Conservatory, wrote
movie music in Shanghai, and joined the Communist Party in Yan'an.
His short but eventful career provides a useful starting point for dis-
cussing the place of Western music in China before the Communist
victory in 1949.
The other three, Fou Ts'ong, Yin Chengzong, and Liu Shikun, are
the great virtuoso pianists to emerge in the People's Republic of China.
They are contemporaries, each winning international fame between 1955
and 1962, whose careers have intersected at many points. The Chinese
value international prizes as evidence that Asia's musicians can master
the art of the West. Each of these pianists has enjoyed eminence in
China for his European successes, but each has also endured political
opprobrium. While their musical successes have been similar, their
notorieties have been distinctive, reflecting their different ways of re-
lating to China's politics. Fou Ts'ong defected in 1959, then returned
to China after a twenty-year exile in Europe. Yin Chengzong em-
braced the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution, only to be purged
after the death of Mao Zedong and then to renew his career in the
United States. Liu Shikun married the daughter of Ye Jianying, one
of the founders of the Red Army, and China's head of state after the
Cultural Revolution. His musical career rose and fell along with Ye's
political fate. Ye is now dead, and Liu recently languished in jail,
charged with corruption.
These four biographies are set amidst topical chapters in which I
develop three major themes. First, I place China's cultural conflicts in
an international perspective; disputes over Third World pianos cannot
be understood without reference to China's place at the farthest edge
of an expanding Western international order. What is the political sig-
nificance of Chinese speaking the so-called "international language"
of European music? Europe's nineteenth century bourgeoisie enjoyed
music as an art, but also used its symbols for social and political pur-
poses. China's weaker middle class attempted to repeat this process,
but with very different effects. China's experience forces a reconsider-
ation of the comfortable old saw that music is the international lan-
guage. On the contrary, music typically is a highly national form of
expression. The international-language myth arises only from the per-
spective of powerful nations, whose often well-intentioned citizens need
to prettify their cultural influence over weaker peoples. If music were
indeed so international, Americans should be able to hear Chinese op-