L.A. Violinist Learns a Lesson in Strife-Torn China

When violinist Stuart Canin left his Los Angeles home for China only two days before the bloody June 4 massacre in Beijing, he was prepared to teach Chinese music students to interpret such Western masters as Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Mozart.

But Canin, who is the concertmaster of the Glendale Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Sinfonia Orchestra and the Long Beach Opera, also found himself receiving a lesson on the meaning of the word discipline --a lesson taught to him by those very same students he had gone to teach.

“They all are so industrious,” said Canin, who was enmeshed in the midst of the country’s greatest unrest since the Cultural Revolution but still fulfilled his 17-day contract to teach at Shanghai Conservatory of Music. “They are working so hard and they have one aim--and that is to get out of China.”

While most of Canin’s students were too young--between 14 and 18--to be deeply involved in the politics of the student demonstrations for more democracy, Canin’s quarters on the conservatory grounds gave him the perfect vantage point to relay the story of the older music students’ involvement.

At 3 a.m. on June 4, Canin said, he and his wife were awakened by a “bullhorn-like” loudspeaker that had been taken over by the conservatory’s students. Although Canin, who speaks no Chinese, didn’t understand what the students were saying, he said he heard speeches, applause and a repeatedly played tape of “a rallying song” that the conservatory’s students had written in support of the students in Beijing.

Still unaware of the seriousness of the situation, Canin and his wife then saw a large group of students march into the courtyard, and, carrying a big red banner, form a type of parade.

The next morning, they were told the sad cause of the early- morning activities.

But despite Voice of America bulletins urging all Americans to leave China immediately, Canin, who is a senior lecturer at UC Santa Barbara and teaches summer courses at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West, remained in Shanghai. He stayed for another two weeks because he couldn’t abandon the people at the conservatory “who were so wonderful, so desirous of us staying.”

Determined to keep all his commitments, Canin, a former San Francisco Symphony concertmaster, performed with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra nearly a week after the bloody events of June 4.

“We played to a wonderful house,” said Canin, who played the Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D. “I found them to be a very capable orchestra. Very few spoke any English, but yet we were able to communicate. Music really is a universal communicating device.”