Publikation China sounds across borders - migration, mobility and modernity

Whose Classical Music? Chinese Musicians and the World
By Barbara Mittler, Inga Mai Groote und Dorothea Redepenning

A recent novel by French author Etienne Barilier entitled Piano chinois (Chinese Piano) features two French music critics debating the performance of a Chinese pianist (clearly, the avatar of Yuja Wang) who plays a concert of Scarlatti, Brahms and Chopin. While one of them declares her the “greatest pianist of all days,” the other denounces her play as “lacking in spirit,” calling it “artificial and imitative.” Their “blog exchange” offers important reflections on the question of universality in art and culture more generally and—more specifically—the meaning of musicmaking in a transcultural context: why does this music, the emblematic product “of the West” play such an important role “in the East”? Does Europe “lose its soul” or can it actually find it again on the “Chinese piano”?  

In this discussion, we consider debates over “authenticity” and “creativity” in Chinese music which champion essentialisms about China’s loss of her “own” musical traditions and “Chineseness” as well as China’s inability to fully grasp those musical traditions “originating” with “others.” The chapter questions why, in this rhetoric, even the best Chinese musicians “must still depend on Western mentors,” why classical music would be considered the “least Chinese, and most explicitly Western of all art forms” and why, “in spite of the enormous outward success of China’s music students,” people should continue to have doubts that “the spirit of ‘Western Classical Music’ has sunk deep roots into China’s society.“ 

The chapter shows that  classical music has become the new face as well as a new phase of Chinese music-making. To practice classical music has become a stand-in for cultivation, a significant sign of an individual’s cultural capital, a critical element to effective self-fashioning in China. To successfully practice a classical instrument can gain a Chinese teenager entrance to one of the key high schools even without a perfect score and accordingly, the practice of classical music is much more common especially among the younger generation in China than anywhere else in the world (which is why Lang Lang is now organizing special music schools for kids in the US and Europe who are not as well provided with as their Chinese counterparts).