The main reason I say programming decisions are made by the financial office here is a new piece about which I refused to write at first, simply because I did not want to write a piece based on nothing but supposition and inspired by frustration and disbelief. Actually two pieces, both of them written for orchestra, soloists and mixed chorus, drawing primarily on Chinese ideas and themes for their musical material. This is where the similarities end.
The first piece was written by a local Shenzhen composer. It took approximately 10 minutes for the entire orchestra to hate the work. This “symphony” is not atonal, aleatoric, difficult to play or read. In fact, it doesn’t have any of the characteristics that frequently make musicians (and audiences) in the US squirm when they hear the dreaded phrase “contemporary composition”.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the piece is tonal. I mean, sure, the composer tried Western tonality, but it was obviously a costume that fit very uncomfortably given that most harmonic progressions make no tonal sense. In fact, most chords taken individually make no sense because there are so many mistakes in the score (adjacent minor seconds spread far apart in the score but at similar octave ranges, such as an E-natural in the trombones resolving up to F, with simultaneous E-flats in the cellos, in the same octave, moving down to C). The overall effect is cacophonous in a piece that is not trying to be. It is cacophony bred from carelessness, or worse, ignorance of basic harmony. (I have another favorite moment; in a movement that is almost entirely in B-flat major, the music inexplicably shifts to B major in the last three measures, making one of the fastest, most awkward modulations I have ever heard!) Aside from these severe technical problems, the piece is based on stock Chinese melodies (I say “stock” because so many pieces we play are based on the same 5 melodies), which of itself is not bad, just more of the same.
In the past week and a half we “rehearsed” this piece for about 15 hours (meaning the conductor would start the piece, encounter a problem, stop the orchestra, say something in Chinese, and start from the very beginning, never actually rehearsing, or telling us how to fix things; sadly this has been the norm among most mainland-Chinese conductors I’ve seen). Gaging from what people were saying in the first break, we were all ready to send the composer to a better place, or ourselves if the management continued to subject us to this torture. I don’t think one of our violists was too harsh in saying an 8-year old could have written the piece much better than this man. By the last day of rehearsal, people were openly hostile to the conductor about both the piece and his “rehearsal technique”.
My first impression was that the only way this piece could have possibly merited our rehearsal time and eventual performance was that a great deal of money was involved. Either that or the composer had important connections, both of which can move mountains in China. Since this was just an impression, however, I decided to keep my thoughts to myself, but I later had a conversation with the Artistic Director of SSO, me in my broken Chinese, he in his very broken English/German, that largely confirmed my suspicions. It seems the composer used both his connections and his resources to funnel a substantial sum of money to the SSO (the management, not its musicians) through the Shenzhen government. In the words of the Director, “Government give us lot of money to play this piece.”
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Technorati Tags: Classical Music, China, Symphony Orchestras, Shenzhen, Expats in China
