Himalayas Are Alive With Music of China

Musician Xuan Ke spent 21 years in prison because of his love for Beethoven. And in the concrete stillness of his cell, he realized two things that would change his life: that music has the power to overcome fear, and that it must never be allowed to die.

He came home from prison in 1978 to an eerie silence here in his village, a place of poets and musicians. The people, mostly from the Naxi ethnic group, were known as the proud guardians of centuries-old ceremonial music that had once flourished throughout China but survived only in these isolated foothills of southern China. Before Mao Tse-tung tried to create a modern China, recitals had resounded in the streets.

Though the repressive decade-long Cultural Revolution had ended two years before, Lijiang’s folk musicians remained scattered, afraid to play. Many also had just emerged from prison, and most of their instruments had disappeared or been destroyed.

Music, both Western and Chinese, had sustained Xuan in prison. When he realized that his nation’s traditional melodies would soon be all but lost, he found a new mission.

“Beethoven would carry on without me,” Xuan recalls thinking. “But I could not let this music fade away. It is our cultural treasure.”

More than 20 years later, Xuan can raise his arms in front of his tiny orchestra and conjure a melody telling an ancient tale. Three rows of white-bearded musicians play songs much as they sounded in the courts of Chinese emperors who ruled centuries ago. And this mountain town in the shadow of the Himalayas may be the only place in China where the music still can be heard.

In a cavernous wooden house that has been converted into a small theater, the audience sits on rows of wooden benches, sipping cups of green tea as the musicians perform. The sound is rich and resonant, an interplay of a high-pitched bamboo flute with an array of chiming gongs, stringed instruments that are bowed or plucked, even an old Persian lute that Xuan says is now used only in Naxi music. The hay-covered floorboards reverberate with the bangs of a giant drum, and the theme unfolds like the crashing waves of the ocean, each repetition slightly different.

Xuan presides, dressed in a simple blue gown. He is a devoted musician and anthropologist, with notes of carnival barker and myth maker completing the complex chord of his personality. Between songs, Xuan describes the lyrics and their history in English and Chinese, and introduces each instrument and some of the musicians with colorful and sometimes made-up stories.

He says grandly that he is writing his autobiography, titled “Waiting for the Nobel Prize.” He chides himself for talking too much as the elderly musicians stroke their white beards and shut their eyes, but he keeps on talking. Even his age--”Almost 70, but I seem much younger, right? I have a 7-year-old daughter!”--seems like a colorful but exaggerated detail.

A Life Marked by Music and Tragedy

But the true story of his life is a dark and personal tale that entwines with the music.

The best place to start is with a picture that hangs on the wall of his home near the concert hall. It is February 1950, and he is standing in the street in Kunming conducting an orchestral welcome as Mao’s Communist army rolls into the capital of Yunnan province. His arms are raised in triumphant direction, his mouth slightly open as if he is singing along. The orchestra is playing Schubert’s “Marche Militaire.”

It turned out to herald the coming of Xuan’s own tragedy. Seven years later, Mao asked intellectuals and artists to openly criticize his party with the aim of making it better. Xuan chimed in, only to realize later, he says, that “it was a trap.” Critics and those considered contaminated by Western influence were rounded up and imprisoned.

Because of his love of Western classical music cultivated at a Roman Catholic mission school, and his outspoken opinions, Xuan was sent to prison for 21 years. He rolls up his sleeves today to show marks from torture: two stripes of scar tissue where jailers hung him from the ceiling, suspended from his wrists with arms behind his back, in a perverse reversal of a conductor’s stance in front of an orchestra. But the worst punishment of all for a musician, he says, was the absolute silence of a solitary cell.

While in isolation for seven months, he kept sane by whistling Mozart in the dark. He went through his repertoire hundreds of times in his head: Schubert, Beethoven, Handel, Liszt. But he also summoned the ethereal melodies of the Naxi musicians of his town, especially the village shaman’s song to drive off demons, and he sang it to the stillness: “Wooo ze ze!”

The song became his theme in those months, and it led to a theory: that music originated as a rite of exorcism.

“It became clear to me that music derives from fear, to chase away the evil spirits, unseen danger and disease,” he says. “Celebration and storytelling came later.”

When he was released from prison, the Cultural Revolution had ended, but music was still politicized. Xuan’s since-published theory clashed with the Communist Party’s line that music was born in the rhythms of manual labor, a concept that exalted the ideal of the worker. And so the musician was forced to remain silent a little while longer.

But quietly, Xuan rounded up the local Naxi musicians who had survived or escaped the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. The musicians cautiously retrieved their surviving instruments from hiding places--some had been buried underground, others wrapped in oilskin and placed inside large water urns. And when the time seemed right, they began to play again.

“I remember one day, we were practicing in a schoolroom, and there was noise outside,” Xuan says. “We stopped playing and looked out the window, and saw the townspeople gathered there to listen.”

The orchestra began to give recitals for the village, but the government would not permit the musicians to perform for tourists after the area opened to foreigners in 1986. “They told me: ‘This is face-losing. They are all old and ugly. They don’t have teeth!’ ”

Teeth or not, their talent and the tourist dollars won out. Now they perform for travelers who happen into Lijiang and are escorted to the small concert hall near a creek. They also have played for Norway’s King Harald V, the former British governor of Hong Kong and audiences at Oxford University. The local tourist board has organized copycat “minority orchestras,” and pirated tapes and CDs of Xuan’s group are cropping up all over town.

But the local government was right in one respect. The orchestra is old, and getting older. “We lose one or two every year,” says Xuan, pointing at a row of black-banded portraits lining the wall behind the stage.

In addition, the melodies and lyrics that had been preserved since the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty and had survived the Cultural Revolution were meeting their match in pop music, Xuan says.

Orchestra Reaches Out to Next Generation

“Young people in China are not interested in classical music,” he says. “They’re just interested in karaoke: jumping, shouting, singing, ‘My heart is broken!’ We believe music means something more than this.”

The orchestra started a school to pass on the music to the next generation. It is funded by sales of tapes, CDs and concert tickets. Xuan even has plans to market a handicraft of Naxi artisans: a small lidded ashtray worn on a necklace.

But to make the music last, the school is starting small, with a handful of students committed to carrying on the art of their ancestors. In the orchestra, four young women break the pattern of white beards, thinning hair and missing teeth. One stands to play a bamboo flute solo written 700 years ago to accompany a Taoist ritual called “washing the soul.”

As the flute’s final notes tremble in the night air, the audience is still, then begins to applaud. Xuan raises his arms in acknowledgment, and the flutist looks across the rows of faces and smiles. She has beautiful teeth.