Adapting an Ancient Tradition

Somewhere within the world’s musical traditions lies an emendation to Kipling: The East and West may not actually meet, but they do keep tabs on each other.

Consider the National Traditional Orchestra of China, which appears this week at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. It’s a musical hybrid, a collection of Chinese instruments, some thousands of years old, fashioned to resemble a Western orchestra. The resulting musical marriage at times resembles a shotgun wedding.

“Most Chinese folk music consists of a single melody,” explains the orchestra’s director, Yu Song Lin, speaking through an interpreter. “But Western audiences are used to the sound of a full orchestra. We want to present our songs in a manner they find comfortable.”

Embedded in that description is the inherent difference between Western orchestras and the recent Chinese model. The former grew out of a developing repertory, the latter out of a concept.

Founded in 1960 by the Chinese Central Ensemble of National Music, the NTOC was the prominent ensemble in a nationwide movement to merge the two traditions. Nearly every city in every Chinese province has a similar orchestra, says Yu, but the NTOC has its pick of the best musicians from conservatories around the country.

For its current tour, the NTOC’s debut appearance in the United States, the orchestra also drafted one of China’s most eminent emigre musicians--composer Bright Sheng. Sheng’s contribution, a new cello concerto called “Spring Dreams,” fashions the Chinese orchestra around a Western solo instrument, but more importantly, its hybrid of traditions is neither late Romantic Western music nor Chinese music reconfigured to fit a Western format. It’s something completely different.

Orchestras per se are not exactly new to China. Several centuries ago, European visitors, who at that time had no orchestral tradition of their own, were dazzled by the large instrumental ensembles in Confucian temples, and recorded their stunned reactions for posterity. The music itself, however, has been lost, and most of the NTOC’s repertory focuses on folk music. Still, the tradition of the Chinese professional musician lives on. Its recent configuration is of a piece with other Western influences seeping into Chinese music, according to orchestra members, who also spoke through an interpreter. “The teaching of traditional music was always a matter of tutoring, from the master to the pupil,” says Song Fei, who plays the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin. “Now it is taught through the conservatory, just like Western music.”

The Westernization even extends somewhat to the instruments themselves. Chinese instruments fall into categories based on their traditional source of sound, including metal (bells and gongs), skin (drums), silk (the pipa, a pear-shaped plucked lute), gourd (the sheng, a multi-piped mouth organ) and bamboo (the di, a Chinese flute). Lately, however, the same production techniques that have mass-produced pianos and violins have brought higher production standards and new materials to Chinese instruments, says Yu, separating them from their original materials.

The role of conductor is another Western addition. Hu Bingxhu, who has led Western-style orchestras in China and Chinese and Western opera ensembles, leads the NTOC on its U.S. tour. Traditionally, he says, the leader of a Chinese ensemble was also a performer. “The skill of a conductor, in Western terms, was not needed. We do not have a long tradition here--maybe 40 or 50 years--of a Western conductor with a stick.”

Now, conductors are encouraged to study both Chinese and Western music, he adds, in order to broaden their professional skill. Also, the nature of the NTOC’s music, he says, tends to demand the combination.

The Chinese Traditional Orchestra is at once a romanticized view of the past and a new direction for the future, says Yu--a sentiment echoed by the Boston Globe’s Richard Dyer after the premiere of Sheng’s “Spring Dreams.” The work, Dyer found, is “an eloquent tribute to the truest musical culture of his native country. . . . a first step in creating a new musical literature for China.”

Commissioned for Yo-Yo Ma, who premiered the work with the orchestra in Worcester, Ma., and the next night at Carnegie Hall (cellist Hai Ye Ni assumes the solo for the rest of the tour), “Spring Dreams” did become a bit of a “Roots” piece, the composer says.

By his own admission, Sheng was an unlikely choice for the project. Not only had he never written for a Chinese orchestra but, unlike many Chinese American composers, he’d never even written for a Chinese instrument. As a longtime scholar of traditional music, though, he wasn’t starting from scratch. Also, the orchestra complement includes cellos and double basses.

“There are hardly any low-pitched traditional instruments in China,” Sheng explains. “Recent attempts to build Chinese instruments in a low register were not entirely successful--either they had pitch problems or they lost the flavor of the original--so many contemporary orchestras fill out their bass line simply by adding Western instruments.”

As part of his preparation, Sheng traveled to China last June to meet with members of the orchestra and become acquainted with each instrument’s range, character and physical limitations. “Modulations--moving from key to key--are a problem for most Chinese instruments,” he says, “so you will see flute players, for example, with several instruments at their feet so they can change instruments with a change in key.”

More important, he adds, was learning how differently Chinese musicians think. “Half of the orchestra does not read, or prefers not to read, Western notation,” he says. “The younger musicians were trained in conservatories, so they have no problem, but I made sure that there was enough space between the lines for some players to transcribe their part.

“Also, they rehearse quite differently from Western musicians. If you’re working with, say, the New York Philharmonic, you take notes and talk to them afterward. With the Chinese musicians, you have to correct them [on the spot] and have them do it correctly. They were not used to having dynamics carefully notated, for example, but once they understood, they did it every time.”

Chinese musical thinking also played a crucial part in shaping the texture of the piece. Because harmony and polyphony are practically nonexistent in Chinese music, Sheng adapted his own approach. “Instead of thinking ‘melody and counterpoint,’ I thought ‘melody, melody and more melody,’ ” he says. The harmonic texture unfolds from weaving several melodies together.

“I asked several of the musicians after the [Carnegie Hall] concert what they thought of the piece,” Sheng says. “It’s over, you know, you can say what you want. . . . They said, ‘None of the individual parts are hard, but nobody can help you [put it together], not even the conductor. You have to be on your own.’ ”

“None of the individual parts were very difficult, except for some of the modulations,” agrees Song, the erhu player. “We could all relate to it, because it comes from a much deeper tradition.”

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NATIONAL TRADITIONAL ORCHESTRA OF CHINA, Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Cal State Long Beach. Dates: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $15, $18. Phone: (310) 985-7000.