new sounds

The Xi'an Conservatory of Music just ended their three performances here. Despite warning from some quarters that the new musical invention was yet just another fad, I attended two out of their three shows here.

The debut night, which I attended, featured vocal works, instrumental solos, and ensemble works. I was deciding between attending this and the second night as I was getting my tickets, and eventually settled for this one because there was a qinhu solo in the program.

The concert left me with a single question: how would one describe the sound of the qinhu? The major modification is in the replacement of the soundpiece with wood, rather than snake-skin. The result is an instrument that sounds more like the banhu and the violin especially at higher registers. Indeed, unlike in an erhu, it sounds cleaner and crisper at the higher notes. The orchestration for the qinhu ensemble took advantage of this by tending score qinhu parts higher than one would for erhu parts --- something I observed from the finger positions of the string players.

The orchestra was basically a western orchestra, complete with the brasses, woodwinds and all, with the string section replaced with their qinhu counterparts. Even with about 40 qinhu players in all, I found the sound somewhat thin. Naturally, I felt compelled to compare them with the erhu and violin string families. The claimed improvement of the qinhu over the erhu at higher registers was achieved --- the qinhus were clear and loud at higher registers. But it seemed to have lost some of the mellowness of the erhu, and the full bodied tone of a violin. When the performance of the erhu concerto Lan Hua Hua came on, I felt soothed by the sounds of the erhu.

The concerts had their shares of classical transcriptions. There was Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, there was Bizet, Mozart and all, but nothing really avant garde, unlike what one of the member of the consultancy group wrote in the program book. There were some recently composed work too, but that and transcriptions of the Western classical music are already commonplace in the concert scene. How was there "symphonised Chinese music"? I went expecting a Chinese orchestra with erhus substituted by qinhus, but saw instead a western orchestra with its entire string section replaced by qinhus. How did that achieve a "symphonised Chinese sound"?

In the end, I was rather unconvinced. It was not a sound I take a liking to, even after hearing the qinhu solo on the first night. Still, there were some memorable pieces, such as the Meng Yu Hua Qing (梦浴华清) by composer Han Lan Kui (韩兰魁), and the other infrequently heard vocal works.

There's some wisdom in one of my friend's opinion of musical experimentations from China. On an invention named the laruan, which was meant to play the role of a cello in a Chinese orchestra, he said in a rather exasperated way: "Why don't they just use the cello?". After both night's concert, I'd say the same: "Why don't they just use the violin?"