jwilzewske: individuality

Showing posts with label individuality. Show all posts

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Gao Hong: Nomadic Pipa Master/Mom

Have you attended a concert or heard a recording by Gao Hong, nicknamed ‘Flying Dragon’?

Chinese pipa artist and composer Gao Hong is featured in this month’s issue of Sounding Board, the newsletter of American Composers Forum. When she was 22, she was one of just two pipa players who were selected to train at China’s premier school of music, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she studied with Lin Shicheng, the great master of Pudong style pipa. Currently, Gao is Adjunct Instructor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

The pipa is essentially a ‘bowl lute’. In Chinese, ‘Pi’ means ‘to play forward’ and ‘Pa’ means ‘to play backward’. In China the instrument dates to at least the 4th century C.E., but it had its origins more than 2000 years ago in Central Asia and the Middle East. The pipa has normally either 4 or 5 strings. The number of frets has gradually been increased over the centuries (now with 23 to 30 frets), giving the modern pipa greater chromatic possibilities over a three-and-a-half octave range. The pipa player tapes picks (fake fingernails) to all fingers and, optionally, to the thumb. (Do a mouse roll-over Chinese images to see translations of the texts below.)

Road to happiness is strewn with difficulties

Gao Hong has lived in the U.S. since 1993. Her playing and composing have won her much recognition, including:

Meet The Composer Fund New York, 2005-6
Subito award from the American Composers Forum, 2005
Emerging Composer Commission from the Jerome Foundation, 2002
American Composers Forum’s Performance Incentive Fund, 1998
McKnight Artist Fellowship for Performing Musicians, 1997
Fellowship from Minnesota State Arts Board, 1997
Walker Art Center Community Partnership Fund, 1996
First Prize in Hebei Young Music Performers’ Competition, 1984.

Gao continues to travel a great deal. So much so that I am reminded of Jacques Attali, who talks about ‘hypernomads’ in his work, L’homme nomade. Hypernomads are voluntary nomads, as distinct from involuntary nomads (infranomads), whom Attali separates into ‘nomads by custom’ and ‘nomads by constraint’. The latter includes refugees, migrant workers, homeless people, exiles. For Attali, hypernomads are a constitutionally peripatetic class of creative individuals, whose discoveries and art works influence the sedentary non-nomads. Gao Hong must, by all reckoning, be a hypernomad. Look up ‘hypernomad’ in the dictionary, and we imagine to see a picture of Gao—successful diaspora of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Flying Dragon!

When you are with two other people, one is always your master, someone you can learn from

Gao expresses her admiration and gratitude for her experiences learning from pipa master, Lin Shicheng, who died two years ago. Gao is by nature modest and makes special effort to attribute her own accomplishments to the teaching and generosity of Lin Shicheng. It is a striking and characteristic feature of her personality, for her to so consistently and earnestly do this. She does Lin Shicheng great honor.

Speak of Cao-Cao, Cao-Cao shows up (speak of the devil)

[ Lin Shicheng and Gao Hong, pipa; video 1996 ]

Sonic signs of Spring include birds singing at dawn, chipmunks emerging from hibernation chirping to each other from rocky outcrops. We hear this in Gao Hong’s playing, on YouTube here and here.

Aphorisms are an oblique acknowledgement of difference—of crisis—and opposing nomadism and passivity by acting to redeem or recover culture from fragmentation and nihilism. Is this part of Gao Hong’s intention?

If you haven’t lived in many places, you may not be able to identify an association between sound and place.

Today we have wine [tomorrow, maybe not], so let’s drink today

Listeners make of music what they will, based on their prior experiences and contexts that they’ve known. From all possible interpretations, they select ones to which their own experiences give priority. Gao Hong offers a wider range of experiences than most of us will ever know…

People who haven’t ever been displaced—who haven’t moved around a lot, who haven’t experienced periods of separation from family and place—think of this music as ‘fantastic’ or ‘alien’. To Gao Hong, it’s utterly concrete. The timbral and rhythmic textures are concrete. Except for echo, except for reverberation. Hear it on her recordings. It is the abstraction of distance in the Chinese landscape, of mountains in the distance.

Epic migrations over long distances—marking the chapters of one individual’s life; marking the chapters of a people’s existence as a society.

Indigo [student] is bluer than the plant it comes from [master]

It is by now evident that Gao Hong is very blue, probably bluer than her master, Lin Shicheng—even though Gao is too modest to even contemplate that possibility. Lin Shicheng’s blues were, admittedly, of a different hue—of a different generation.

Gao permits herself and her music to become ‘inscribed’ by the culture within which she lives. Minnesota and North America have been hospitable, for some 15 years now. But Nature is not ‘kind’ or ‘hospitable’. Her 7 year-old daughter’s leukemia is a case-in-point. How can a parent not be ‘inscribed’ by the life-threatening illness of her child. Where water flows, a channel is formed. Yes, a channel. An indelible gash is eroded. No one’s fault. How to cope?

A cornered dog will leap over a high wall [do seemingly impossible things in extremis]

And life goes on. Hardship and suffering are the human condition, as well as joy and treasured remembrance. It makes us become extraordinary things, leap unleapable barriers, makes us do unbelievable deeds. Things that ought to be impossible, and that one should never wish to befall any of one’s enemies. You think pipa is ‘alien’? Think again! Listen to Gao Hong’s music.

It takes a long time to make a great instrument

What does not kill us makes us stronger?

She is worthy of the reputation she enjoys

Gao Hong, fine ambassador for the human species.

Gao, cheerful and friendly, makes everyone feel welcome. Given the challenges she has faced, how can we not be inspired by her example?

Three feet of ice does not come from one day’s freezing weather

Layer upon layer in her instrumental and choral writing, reflecting the classical influences of her conservatory training and regard for traditional Chinese forms—and yet bearing the marks of her own sense of what is happening now and what lies ahead.

Words escape from the lips [in a Freudian-slip way]

The spontaneity of Gao Hong’s playing sometimes astonishes us. She seems fearless. She lets the ‘chips’ fall, even if what they contain is an inconvenient truth.

One hand cannot [without help from others] clap to make a sound

Collaboration with Shubhendra Rao and other Asian chamber musicians is a hallmark of recent Gao projects.

Feeling like old friends from the moment of first meeting

When she was young, her mother told her “that I had a terrible singing voice. When I sang she said it sounded like someone stepping on a rooster’s neck… Writing a choral work now has made me the happiest person in the world. Even if I don’t sing it, I enjoy hearing others perform it. I’m so happy … with the incredible luck of having my piece as one of five selected to be premiered with VocalEssence.” [interview with Amy Boxrud, ACF, SoundingBoard, MAR-2008]

What is most important is to keep going, to never give up.

Choose the medicine according to the diagnosis

And to use compositional materials and instruments that are best-suited to the expressive goals at hand.

C ontrary to the objective evidence, it is the ‘we’ of all people who feel more insecure and more passionate about everything related to security than people of most other societies on record. This is the puzzle that needs a resolution if the twists and turns of the popular sensitivity to danger ... are to be comprehended.”
— Zygmunt Bauman, Uncertainty and Other Liquid-Modern Fears, in Priban, p. 17.

Gao will perform at Ted Mann Concert Hall, Univ Minnesota, 2128 Fourth St South, Minneapolis at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, 19 April.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Mentoring the Inner Chamber Musician

I t just doesn’t seem that long since those days of not knowing what young musicians should or shouldn’t be able to do. Having had a ‘little more’ experience now, I am amazed that you and your classmates were able to play, pretty well, charts that were written for pros.”

— Bruce Pearson, reminiscing in 2007 about his early teaching in the late Sixties

CMT: It’s hard to know what someone should or shouldn’t be able to do at a particular point in her/his artistic development!

Angela Myles Beeching, New England Conservatory

DSM: Well, the fact is that you never know until you try. The brave thing involves enthusiastically “pushing the envelope” —both the teacher and the student are ideally doing this. Is there ever a teacher so wizened and hoary that the process with this student is not throwing off sparks of new pedagogy? I don’t think so. Every person is so open-ended and so different from every other person that the teaching or mentoring process is perpetually new and unique.

Danel Kvartetti, in sauna, in Kuhmo Finland, 2006

CMT: Unless burn-out or hubris sets in. With music especially—which, like mathematics and a few other virtuosic pursuits, is to a large degree a young person’s realm—there really ought not to be preconceptions as to what a person ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be able to do. No, you don’t want to put together young ensembles whose members’ abilities are light-years apart and frustrate them by putting literature in front of them that is at the level of the least-able lowest-common-denominator member. Nor do you want to frustrate them by giving them literature that’s at the level of the one prodigy in the ensemble. It’s truly an art: finding literature that adequately stretches the capabilities of each member, and then evolving that literature as the complexion of their abilities changes over the passing months together.

DSM: If there’re one or two reallly gifted players in the group, the lessons to be learned are a bit different for them than they are for the others, aren’t they! The issue becomes more one of balance and adaptation, accommodating one’s own playing to the realities of the notes around you. The elements of musicianship then have more to do with interpersonal communication. The stronger players, ideally, become sub-mentors—in some ways like the principal chairs in an orchestra. It’s very like the idea of ‘induction’, which has some cachet lately in the scholarly teaching/pedagogy journal literature.

CMT: Well, as Bruce Pearson says, there’s the [population epidemiology] of technic—an empirical distribution of abilities that one can reasonably expect in a given class. You’re delighted when you encounter abilities and synergies that are above the median. But you have no right to feel disappointed when you encounter deficiencies and dissension that are below it.

DSM: And, of course, it’s a matter not only for members of ensembles who are experiencing personnel changes, or for teachers or leaders of ensembles in an education setting, but also for the composers who are composing or arranging pieces. Music, like any other kind of literature, either finds its natural readership or else it doesn’t. The practical composer has, just as much as any good author, a clear sense of the epidemiology of technic—a clear sense of who is going to be able to play what she/he is writing; a clear sense of who is going to want to perform it, given the difficulties and risks that the composer builds into the piece. If you’re composing and are oblivious to this, you’ll be composing for a very small market—maybe a market of zero.

CMT: Regardless of the ages of the ensemble’s members—and regardless of the natural norms for what middle school, or high school, or college students may generally be expected to do—I think chamber music is, like jazz, one of the genres most congenial to exploration. There are social supports and incentives in a string quartet, say—supports that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a one-on-one mentoring relationship with a viol master. Your failures are very visible, yes, but you are bathed in the empathy of the other members. And your successes have a tremendous immediacy and are shared in a way that is far more nourishing than the drier, more abstract appreciations that come in solo work or in larger orchestras. That was one of the lessons I learned from Bruce Pearson, back in the late Sixties.