Pipa Score
I was looking for it (to compliment my article on the pipa player, see previous) and I found it in the Chaoyang Book Market: an oriental score for pipa(chinese lute) compositions:
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Chinese classical painting and Beijing hood attitude
After nine months of absence, the duo is back: Aventurina and her faithful steed: pink bicycle junior (for information on adventures with senior, please see last summer in
Beijing’s blog).
Mr. J, as usual was elemental in my acquiring of this Beijing hood attitude’s required ornamentation. The bicycle scout was patrolling the nearby hutongs in search of potential buyers. She wore a ponytail and her sun-beaten face framed her accented mandarin (she was from outside the city I concluded). She hopped in the car and lead us to a different hutong, rife with salient garbage, flies and arrays of stolen TV sets. After a few moments of absence, she materialized with my companion, it performed well. I rolled in the usual frowns and fibs but it was though she had cut the price in stone (and Mr. J’s verbal honoring of the dividend he would get off the deal behind my back did not make things easier, God bless you Mr.J). The first bicycle stop of the day(after carefully paying due to the lady that guards the bicycles): the Chaoyang Book Market. It is a two-floored lego puzzle in which the assembled pieces are separate book companies. It is dusty and busy, cart full of books and sitting personnel race through the small alleys between the glass boxes of the companies.
Number 103 was the arts box. I purchased A Complete Collection of Famous Chinese Paintings. I have eternally been confused about Chinese painting, yes they are beautiful, graceful, elegant additions in newly furnished New York apartments, but what more? This book may have started to shed some light onto my desperate situation. I have translated the following excerpt from mandarin(there being no English edition or equivalent on the www)(if there are any mandarin speakers that wish to make amendments, don’t hesitate to comment):
Modes of Expression of Chinese paintings:
The six canons of painting:The six canons of painting represent the six goals of the classical painter: 1)The subject must be life-like 2)Outlined paintings must be drawn with a pen. 3)the objects of the painting must imitate shapes, or must be arranged along shapes 4)the chosen colors depend on the type of object, the season and the weather surrounding what is depicted 5)the painting must be composed 6)the painting must be true to its subject. Boneless Painting: Painting without a pen, with only color.
The Five Faces of Ink:
In Chinese painting, ink is not only considered as a monochrome parcel. It can complete the painting on its own and therefore can change appearance. These appearances belong to five categories:anxious, strong, heavy, thin and clear.
The Eighteen Outlines: There are eighteen ways to outline the folds of the ancient characters’ robes: the iron line, the olive line, the smooth and natural line, the date stone line, the line of the battling pen and aqueous fold, the reduced pen line, the willow leaf line, the bamboo leaf line, the confused line, the pin-head line, the dry bramble line, the earthworm line, the hairpin line, the lute’s string line, the horse leech line, the nail head and rat’s tail line, the cao clothing line, and the snapped line. (to be cont.)
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Bottoms up or the iridescent drizzle
The taxi pulled up in front of the wall of stairs at about half past seven. I awkwardly wriggled out of its belly after paying the fare and hurried up under the iridescent drizzle. The doors opened before me, I took a reticent breath and silently rolled in.
This is where I cut the narrative off and eloquently leap backwards in time for a few paragraphs (eloquently enough to prevent the reader from skipping down a few lines) . This apparently cuts the narrative with suspense.
Relevant flashback information in this case would be the development of my distrust in the concept: “alcohol as a social lubricant”.
Camera action: Aventurina’s first night in her freshman dorm room at Columbia University. Light that pushes through the windows onto illuminated crescents of carpet, the plastic of the bare mattress against her pyjamas and her life-long companion–the faithful stuffed goose–folded within her clutch. Neither the barrier of the door’s fake wood or of her jetlagged sleep can keep out the sound of fellow freshmen reveling on a five dollar gallon of Californian wine outside in the common area. She opens her eyes, and hops off of the bed (Columbia students are like frightened cats, they like to perch up high or hide down below which translates in raised beds or bare mattresses on the floor). The acrid bleached light radiates out of the ceiling. She tries to concentrate on Homer.
Camera action: Aventurina’s first college party. An elegant flat opposite the school, polished wooden floors that feel whole under a sandled foot, T-shirts and hands brandishing plastic cocktail cups everywhere, the unsettling sounds of human society in action, couches brimming with legs. Even she has a plastic cocktail cup in her hand, the sip of sugared alcohol hangs on her tongue like a wart, her drunk conversation partner sways precariously, like the Eiffel tower seen against a sky poka-dotted with racing clouds. His words are redundant, she still doesn’t understand what drunk is.
Which brings me at last to the final camera action, what I eloquently backed up and drove around to come at from the informed side angle.
The final camera action takes place in Beijing, it isn’t one weighed down by an exasperated nostalgia, but a realistic description of the drinking culture in China. Dinners are made for drinking, the heavy drinker is the dinner’s king. It doesn’t take much to imagine why I don’t fare well at these events.
As I was writing before I was cut off by the imperatives of suspense: I silently rolled in through the doors of the restaurant. More fancy than Beijing’s usual side of the road establishment, it had red gauze curtains suspended from the ceilings and black-costumed waiters wading through the sea of tables.
The guests seated at large round tables, their positions, a subtle nudge at their relationship with the host. After tea, the first round of cold dishes were wheeled in and deposited in a ring on the tables. The guests play timidly with their chopsticks, stomachs are growling. But wait! The first round of toasts. Gan Bei, bottoms up. “How come Aventurina is only drinking tea?” “Aventurina’s not old enough to drink.”
Twenty minutes for food and superfluous conversation. Silence. Small speech, everyone bottoms up. The substance in the shot glasses is crystalline, stronger than vodka.
Gradually the collective ‘bottoms up’ disperse. Groups of young ginger girls clack clack with their high heels over to the neighboring tables to toast. Groups from other tables, come over to ours with increasing boldness. I start wondering whether the food is only a very temporary exhibit. The volume escalates as taunts become more vehement “drink with me” “drink with these girls, if you don’t drink with them, shame on you”. Sometimes taunts are insidiously quiet, whispered suppliantly into one of the girl’s ears “why won’t you drink with me?” “promise you’ll drink with me.”
Eyes glaze over, cheeks fill with blood and hands grasp for bottles with a giggled-off feverishness. I’m already outside in the drizzle, wriggling into one of those metallic bellies.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Il pleut_______ (fill in the blanks)
Il pleut des chats et des chiens, il pleut des cordes…
Well I never thought that it could rain dust, but as I ran out of my apartment complex this morning (late for work as usual) the whole of Beijing was covered with dust. It almost looked like one of those forlorn desert towns in Westerns except there were cars and newspaper vendors.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Do you travel black? (Private Transportation in Beijing)
Taxi drivers in
Beijing don’t like me. And I can’t blame them. When you pick up a foreigner from the side of the road, I imagine, as a Chinese cab driver, you would expect a silent, eventless snail-crawl through the suffocating Beijing parking-lot traffic. Unfortunately, not so with me.
I am a very impatient person and have been since childhood(I often rooted around in the freezer right before dinner). Trapped in the general immobility on the third ring road, or desperately trying to distract myself by looking at misspelled English on advertisements during those long minutes in front of the dreaded Chao Yang park bridge red-light are forms of mental torture. Polite as I am, I only voiced my desperate condition to the driver with the phrase that replaces “how are you do” at Beijing cocktail parties: “Jintian Beijing tai du le” (There’s so much traffic today in Beijing!).
This changed when I met Mr. J though. Mr. J is a black car driver or hei che siji, slang for an unregistered Taxi. He is a jovial, round-faced Beijinger who enjoys himself much as the rest of the city’s native population–late nights of Majiang accompanied with shots of Erguotou (the taste is a cross between vodka and sweaty feet), a few healthy ups-and-downs the mountain on the week-end. The rest of his life, he drives around a fluctuating list of customers and sits by the road waiting for someone who looks as though he’s in search of a cab.
Like most Beijingers, he is a hard bargainer, but a faithful business partner once trust has been established. If handled well, Black cab prices tend to be 10% lower than cab fares and traveling time is multiplied by two thirds. The secret to their speed is creativity and location. In Beijing, unlike other world-wide capitals, traffic regulations have not been quite sorted out yet. Very infrequently do policemen patrol the streets, and when they do, they are generally the first to violate the regulations. This leaves space for creative driving. Beijing’s outrageous traffic situation makes creative driving a necessity.
Mr. J likes to sing and laugh as he drives. He always tells me he likes old Chinese songs but I frequently catch him playing techno versions of them. Driving seems as breezy as listening to Teresa Teng for him, the chorus has just started and he is already off the side of the road skipping the reptilian tail of cars, the second chorus is on and he is in the bicycle lane (“I can’t run over them though” he reminds me), by the end of the song, we are taking the usual short-cut through the car park.
I have been spoilt by Mr. J in terms of Beijing driving and this brings me back to the first point I wanted to make. Since Mr. J’s driving, there has not been one cab-driver who I haven’t chided for “uncreative driving and unviolent driving.” They laugh off my demands for them to ignore red lights or enter the bicycle lane, but gradually, my persistency annoys them and they fall silent, probably wondering whether capitulation will silence me.
Sunday, April 2, 2006
Houellebecq and other redeeming readings in the world’s marginalia
As much as I miss Columbia University with its tanning lawns, drunken fraternity party lineup and early-bird competitions at the library; I can say with relief that I have regained the one precious thing undergraduate education had stolen from me: my love of reading.
When reading is cauterized by pedantic academic articles, even leisurely reading, by association, becomes boring. The cure (that worked miracles in my case): a 10 to 6 white collar job and a couch of my own. The white collar job creates a starvation for entertainment, and the 8 hours of computer screen eye strain cross out TV from the list of possible options. The couch offers a comfortable bouncing point from which the mind can drift off into other spheres.
I have been seeking refuge from my first steady job opportunity in works of French writers Houellebecq, Philippe Delerm and English language magicians Tony Morrison and Ian McEwan (a parentheses devoted to Wilkie Collins: a pioneer well confined within the boundaries of time-snobbing; yet, I must confess, boring classics of literature).
I read the last three books of Michel Houellebecq in disorder: Platforme, La possibilite d’une ile and Les Particules Elementaires. Prior to this endeavor, the general opinion floating among my french connaissances etait “Houellebecq, mais c’est toujours la meme chose”, a quoi je réponds, oui et non.
Oui, Houellebecq, c’est toujours des paragraphes un peu trop analytiques au sein desquelles se dispersent des debris d’action et des descriptions minutieuses de scenes pornographiques, en faite, c’est un peu comme ces magazines allemands qui offrent l’actualite du football flanque par des photos de femmes nues. (English translation of my impulsive gallop into French: French connaissances is “Houillebecq’s novels are all the same thing”, to which I answer yes and no. Yes, Houellebecq’s work is always composed of over analytical paragraphs within which plot debris and minute descriptions of pornographic scenes are dispersed. In fact, Houellebecq’s novels are comparable to those German magazines which offer football news flanked by pictures of naked women.)
The theme of those over-intelligent paragraphs is invariably old-age from every point of view as long as it’s negative: _how the concept of old-age has evolved from kotow-imposing wisdom to walled-in deformity. _how old-age’s rot spreads into every crevass of your life and makes it gradually more and more unbearable.
Old-age lurks under the surface of his pornographic paragraphs as well: _how old-age makes a woman’s breasts and genetalia sag. _how-old age makes erection less and less instantaneous for men, especially when they are faced with aging wives.
I can enjoy reading Houellebecq, as long as I keep the reality of my biological clock at bay of my thoughts. He covers his expert mastery and juggling of science, sociology, history and biology with a sadistic, humoristic gauze. This perversly enjoyable and informative writing style is another constant within his novels.
Non. What has changed within the span of my reading is the novels’ surface… (to be continued)
Another hurrah for the NY Times
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Music
The Pipa Player Wu Man Discovers World Music in America
IN 1990, at 25, Wu Man was ushered onto a plane in Beijing as China’s leading player of the pipa, or Chinese lute. Sixteen hours later, she arrived in New Haven, an unknown adrift in the United States with scant English.
Now Ms. Wu has risen to prominence again, as one of the foremost Asian musicians in North America, one of the handful who can live off their art. Far from tethering herself to Chinese traditional music, she has plucked her way through classical, experimental and world music, even jazz, in the process introducing the pipa’s twang to any number of concertgoers. She has also performed on 29 albums, often with eminent musicians, like the New York Philharmonic and Yo-Yo Ma.
On Thursday, Ms. Wu will present an evening of ancient and modern Chinese and world music at Zankel Hall. And on Friday and Saturday she will return to Zankel with the Kronos Quartet.
On a rainy Saturday last fall, between appearances in Philip Glass’s world music extravaganza “Orion” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ms. Wu sipped chicken soup in a cramped cafe near the Metropolitan Museum. Speaking in Mandarin and English, she described her move to the West and her immersion in its culture.
Ms. Wu is one of a long line of Chinese virtuosos who streamed into the United States after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Having earned a master’s degree from the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and having won the first prize in the 1989 National Music Performance Competition, she had become a revered concert performer in China.
Some might have found her situation ideal. She did not.
“In China, life as a pipa player is very limited,” she said. “The road is straight and predefined. You can’t stray from it. There is a specific repertoire progression. I was supposed to become a faculty member. Everything was too easy.”
Ms. Wu came to the United States ostensibly to study English as a second language at the New Haven Adult Education Center. She took all the courses offered, she said, “even the typewriting course.” Shortly after her arrival, she contacted two former faculty members at the Beijing conservatory, the composers Chen Yi and Zhou Long. Over lunch in Manhattan, they introduced her to Susan Cheng, the founder of the ensemble Music From China.
The next weekend, Ms. Wu took the first of many trips to Manhattan to perform with the group. During those weekends, Ms. Wu stayed with Ms. Cheng.
“Because she didn’t have a home to go back to right away when the performance was over,” Ms. Cheng said, “she would help us with stuff, type out our newsletter, copy the parts for the score. She was very helpful.”
The Kronos Quartet discovered Ms. Wu in 1992 at Music Lives!, an international festival in Pittsburgh. In 1996 she gave a recital with Mr. Ma and began her involvement with his Silk Road Project, which combines music from cultures along the ancient trade route between West and East. And in 1999, again with Mr. Ma, she became the first Chinese artist to play in the White House, at a state dinner given by President Clinton in honor of China’s prime minister, Zhu Rongji.
“She’s a 21st-century musician,” Mr. Ma said, “meaning she knows something deeply, and not only playing the instrument. She can work with anybody in a short time. She can figure out what somebody knows, what they don’t know. People say she’s put the pipa on the contemporary page.”
This after wondering whether she would be able to keep up her career in the United States. “I had initially been prepared to give up music,” Ms. Wu said. “I thought I was going to end up studying computers like my friends.”
Ms. Wu was born in Hangzhou, an industrial center on the east coast of China. Her family and others lived in a square of houses sharing a courtyard, washing facilities and a nosy communal life.
“As neighbors, we would be very close,” she said. “Everyone knew what everybody else was up to. We used to chat while we washed clothes.”
During one of those laundry sessions, when she was 9, a friend of Ms. Wu’s father heard her sing. He noticed that her pitch was true and promptly volunteered to teach her to play an instrument. Her father decided she should play the pipa, Ms. Wu said, because “a girl that held the pipa is very elegant.”
In China, the pipa has a popularity comparable to that of the guitar in the West. It is plucked with the fingernails, and its sound somewhat resembles that of the harpsichord. It looks a bit like a pear-shaped guitar, but it is played held upright on the lap.
The strumming also differs from that of the guitar, with the right hand rotating its fingers one by one on the strings. This motion is called a wheel, and it sets off a shower of notes described in the famous Tang dynasty poem, “The Pipa Song”: “Suddenly a strain of notes burst out/ Like water splattering out of a fallen vase/ Or horsemen riding among a forest of spears.”
Ms. Wu practiced the basic hand techniques for about two years. Then, when she was 12, her parents decided that she should study pipa at the Beijing conservatory. She took the train alone to Shanghai, where one of the school’s national auditions takes place, to compete for one of the eight places available.
“I remember the first day,” she said. “The audition space was in the academy of music. The line of little kids went all around the whole building and overflowed into the boulevard. There were more than 1,000 contestants for all instruments, 500 competing for pipa student positions. When I finished playing, the examiners said, ‘You’ll see if your name is on the list in two days, and if it is, then you’re into the second round.’ “
Ms. Wu’s name was on the list of the 20 remaining contestants. When her turn came to perform, a jury of 20 teachers awaited her. She announced her piece, “The Dance of the Yi People,” and played it.
“One of the judges looked at my hands,” she said, “noticed that my two pinkie fingers were very long, and said, ‘Very good.’ Then they asked me to play another song. No other student was asked to play two songs. For me it was like ‘Encore, please.’ ” The next summer, she received notification that she had come in first in the nation, and she was accepted into the Beijing conservatory.
Once arrived in the United States, Ms. Wu fed hungrily on whatever music was available.
“Before the United States, there was so much I hadn’t heard,” she said. “I had never heard jazz. I never heard John Cage, Philip Glass, all those American composers. Never heard Indian music. I had heard Bollywood music, but the sitar, that sort of stuff, really very new.”
Her CD collection, like her performance repertory, embraces a wide variety of world music: Ravi Shankar; Ethiopian, Japanese and Korean music; and much more. She cites Norah Jones and the Fugees as her popular music favorites.
The United States has opened horizons unimagined in China, she said, allowing her to work with musicians worldwide and learn from them.
“You get used to it,” she added. “Like you never heard the instrument before, and then you hear it again and again. It’s more and more familiar. You chat with the musician. You can play with them, study their interpretation. Everyday I learn.”
In addition, she said, “my music has been changed by the culture as a whole, by the food, the art in the museums, the films.”
Ms. Wu’s cultural interests extend well beyond music. Her favorite activities include reading literary and fashion magazines, watching black-and-white Hollywood movies and studying paintings. Her father is a painter, and she has named her 9-year-old son after her favorite, Vincent van Gogh.
She lives in San Diego with her husband and son, and her crowded schedule and frequent travel barely leave the four hours a day she sets aside for pipa practice.
Still, she makes time for what she calls her most important goal: “that the next generation may grow up knowing different cultures.” She tries to give American children this opportunity by introducing them to Chinese culture via pipa music. She gave a performance for children last November, seated between vertical screen projections of Chinese calligraphy and painting. She will repeat that production on Thursday.
She has also begun to attract students: notably, an 8-year-old named Henry, who lives in Connecticut and whom she teaches whenever she tours on the East Coast.
“After one of my performances,” she said, “his parents came to see me backstage. They said he wanted to learn to play the pipa. At first, I hesitated, but then I gave in. He was just too cute.”
What time is it in Hong Kong?
Whereas I would place Shanghai in the futuristic-for-futurism’s-sake category (see my previous descriptions of empty Martian edifices–Hong Kong belongs under the label “practical futurism”. It is a city who’s modernistic debordements produce swifteness, ease and tourist’s oooooohs and aaaaaaaahs.
Let me give you a quick example before I delve into a chronological description of my one afternoon in the city: Hong Kong’s central station.
Glass doors, marble floors shiny enough for a cat-walk make up session and the airport check-in counters. That’s right you can check in for your flight right at the train station and then go and dawdle around the city instead of in the duty free zone (for once an enhancement that discourages pointless consumerism).
I arrived in Hong Kong airport last Wednesday at 12 pm. A short trip to travelex gave me my first glimpse of gang bi, Cantonese money. Among all the national currencies I’ve seen, I would place gang bi in second position (first are the euros and they’re impressionistic colors, us dollars come last: boring green green green all the way). Gang bi bank notes are freed of beautified political leaders and brandish bold lion sketches and flower watermarks.
Cantonese taxis almost rival their British companions, at last you’re talking about some decent leg space. From the airport to Hong Kong is a picturesque 45 minute drive across idyllic wilderness. Lush mountains roll upward alongside the airport highway, every corner hides a National Geographic photo opportunity: a cliff hanging over its gauze of water, a majestic suspended bridge whose cables stretch out like veins in a dragonfly’s wings.
Imagine Blade runner–come on, it’s a science fiction classic, who hasn t seen it?–after a good cleaning and bathed in citrus morning light: you get Hong Kong. Sky scrapers shoot up from every direction, hugged at the waist by off-white highways. Nestled underneath the highways, in between the buildings are small clean streets, bustling with luxury boutiques and neon labeled eateries. Unlike the big apple, there is no sighting of clear sky from inside the city, if you want to see where the rain is coming from, the only way is to crane your neck and face the downpour.
The last modernistic debordement: an animated subway map. When you are on the train to the airport, the map’s dense row of blue lights shows you exactly how far you are from the next station.
