B R I G H T   S H E N G

'PEOPLE ACKNOWLEDGE ARTISTIC LICENSE; I EMBRACE CULTURAL LICENSE.'

Since moving to the United States from China in 1982, the composer Bright Sheng has steadily built a world reputation for his fusion of Eastern and Western musical styles. Sheng's gifts of adaptability and openness were nurtured and steeled in his youth, as he struggled to maintain his passion for music in the anti-cultural climate of the Cultural Revolution. At Queens College, the City University and Columbia, his main teachers were Leonard Bernstein, Chou WenChung and George Perie. Sheng's one-act opera The Song of Majnun with librettist Andrew Porter was recorded on the Delos label by the Houston Grand Opera. His discography also includes a first runner-up for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, H'UN (Laceration): In Memoriam 1966-1976, an orchestral portrait depicting the crimes and losses inflicted by the Cultural Revolution (New World label), and Two Folk Songs From Qinghai (Kock International). He was again first runner-up for the Pulitzer in 1991 for Four Movements for Piano Trio. Michigan Today's John Woodford interviewed Professor Sheng in Sheng's office at the School of Music.

Michigan Today: How did you become a musician?
Bright Sheng: It began with lessons from my mother when I was four. It was a luxury to have a piano at home. It's not like here where middle-class people have pianos in their homes. Later, I got a private teacher. I wasn't thinking of becoming a musician. I was studying the classical repertoire. When I was 11, the Cultural Revolution came, and our piano was taken away. I didn't miss it, though. I thought, well, now I don't have to practice.

But one day I heard a piano playing on the radio, and I got music-sick. I sneaked into the junior high classroom one day to play the school piano. The teacher locked it up every day, so I would break it open.

Only professional pianists were permitted to play the classical repertoire, however, and I wasn't a professional. That meant you could get into trouble if you played something besides Chinese traditional melodies. Madame Mao [the wife of China's leader Mao Tse-tung--MT] began to cultivate a pianist who accompanied the Peking Opera. As a result of her influence, it became permissible to use Western romantic harmonies with Chinese melodies.

Junior high was the highest level of education permitted under the Cultural Revolution. Mao feared people who knew too much. When we kids reached 16, we had no educational prospects and no jobs. Obviously we were becoming a social problem, so Mao said, Go to the country to be re-educated by the peasants. Only professional artists who were protected by Mao's wife could escape working as a peasant, so I decided to audition on piano, and my piano kept me from becoming a farmer.

Did that allow you to remain home in Shanghai?
No, I still had to move far away--to Qinghai Province near Tibet. I joined a folk song and dance troupe controlled by the provincial government. They gave me a three-year contract and the use of the province's best piano. I quickly found out I was the best pianist in the province--and I wasn't good.

Looking back, I see I learned a lot in the seven-and-a-half years I spent there. In addition to "regular" Chinese, the province is home to Tibetans, Chinese Muslims, Mongolians and even some Russian Cossacks. I found that I had not received a proper musical education, so I learned to "steal," to be self-taught. I'd watch others play, imitate them, ask questions.

The ethnic backgrounds of the people were rich, but the people were poor. Life was tough. Their only entertainment was singing folk songs. One of the categories of folk song in Qinghai is called the hua'er, or flower, song. I got a chance to study them very well. Each group there has its own folk songs in its own language, but everyone sang the flower songs in the provincial dialect of Chinese. These songs had a distinctive melodic structure, and the songs were a jelling point for the different ethnic groups. They all lived close to each other; there was no ethnic tension or fighting at all before the recent Tibet conflict.

In some of my compositions I use the melodic style of the flower songs. In my opera Song of Majnun, two of the main themes are based on Qinghai Tibetan motifs. Since the story is set in ancient Persia, I wanted an Asian sound, I don't know Persian music, so I used Tibetan. I didn't want to listen to Persian folk music tapes when I was composing Majnun. I knew there was no way I could do an authentic job of it.

Is there a generic "Asian sound"? And if so, what are its elements?
It's interesting to listen to the ways various composers try to sound Asian. In Turandot, Puccini uses the five-tone, or pentatonic, scale to sound Chinese--it would be CDEGA on the piano white keys, or play the black keys starting with the set of three. Actually, the Chinese scale is not pentatonic. The pentatonic is its basic background, but there is no central tone in a Chinese scale. It's like jazz--there are notes between the cracks of the Western notes. One can use the 12 tones of the Western chromatic scale to analyze and notate the Chinese scale, but the Chinese loses some of its flavor when you do that. In Chinese music, each of the five tones has several variants; they aren't half-steps away as in the West. There are names for the central note and for each of the variants. Each of the several tones you play vary with factors such as the mood of the day, the style of the school of the composer. I didn't learn things like that growing up. But in Tibet no one explained them either. I had to pick it up myself.

Chinese theory is hard to explain. You can't apply Western theory to Chinese music; each has its own logic and theory. Each is animated by a different aesthetic idea. Bernstein said that what is called classical music should be called "exact music," since a primary objective is to compose it so that ideally it can be repeated 'in essentially the same way in all performances. You can apply Western theory in an attempt to explain Chinese music, but in applying it, you are limiting the Chinese music.

Western music emphasizes harmonies, it combines many sounds, is polyphonic, and it looks for a purity of pitch, for being properly in tune. Chinese music is mostly in unison, and purity of pitch does not matter. In my composition Spring Dreams [premiered last year with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the National Traditional Orchestra of China in Carnegie Hall--MT.] I use Chinese musicians, and in learning the piece they initially played according to their own style. They didn't pay attention to pitch, didn't count. Each feels himself a solo instrument.

What did you do when the Cultural Revolution ended in the mid-1970s?
After the Cultural Revolution, I returned to Shanghai. I assumed my musical education would be better there, but it was worse, I thought, because they didn't know anything about Chinese music. They were writing Western 12-tone avant-garde style of the 1960s. They were surprised that I said you could express your own emotions in music. Chinese music is meant for the performer's self-indulgence, not for entertainment. It's like Chinese painting. You see a little pagoda, the sky, a mountain; there is no audience. The main philosophy behind the music, or the painting, is that it is a way to cultivate yourself, a way to soothe your mind and spirit. In traditional Chinese music the rhythm is not notated. The beat or meter in Western music evolved from the dance. Traditional Chinese music is not meant to be danced, so its rhythms were to be imposed by the feelings of the performer. The rhythms are not meant to be reduplicated at other performances.

This tradition changed after 1000 AD, after the Tang dynasty conquered all of Asia and part of Russia. They accepted and encouraged exchange with other nations. Two important instruments are the pipa, which is similar to the mandolin, and a double-reed wind instrument that is a counterpart of the oboe. People speak about fusion as if it's a 20th-century thing. It was always there. When China was closed to the world, it was not because of geography or tradition, but because the emperor was afraid.

How had you changed in the 14 years between your leaving China and your return to work on Spring Dreams?
In working with the traditional instruments and Chinese musicians, I found that my hearing had changed. I hear more conceptually and linearly now. I needed to reconnect with Chinese culture. I spent every day with the traditional musicians for one week. What I wanted to do gradually dawned on me, but I had never written anything for Chinese instruments before and had to look up the register for each instrument, so I could write the music for it accurately.

I am going to restate what I said in an interview with the music publication Full Score: I am a mixture not only of Eastern and Western influences but of Tibetan and Chinese within the Eastern. Why shouldn't my music reflect that? People acknowledge "artistic license"; I embrace "cultural license"--the right to reflect my appreciation and understanding of both cultures in my work. You can either struggle with cultural identity or make good advantage of it. I do not know what my music will be like in five or ten years, or even in which direction it is going. But I think less and less about whether some element I am using is Chinese or Western. I write whatever excites me while continuing to study both cultures. It is crucial that one knows both sides truly well and in depth, therefore Western audiences don't feel they need to understand Chinese music in order to appreciate you, and Chinese audiences that they need to understand Western contemporary music. In my opinion, what makes Bartok's music great is not only that he used Hungarian folk tunes (many composers had done that already), but that he managed to keep the beauty and savageness of these folk elements while blending them to the "fine art" Western classical music. So the listener realizes that both are equally great, one doesn't borrow from the other. The result enriches both.

What is the story behind your unusual first name?
My name in Chinese is Sheng Zong-Liang, with the family name first. My first name means something like "bright lights." I once read a book that referred to an Englishman named Mr. Bright, so I thought it might be good to be known as Bright Sheng where people speak English. I did not know the connotation of smartness at the time.