Chou Wen-chung
My Early Years in China
By Professor Chou Wen-chung (continued)
5. Search for Classical Chinese Music
Around 1930, barely 20 years after the Revolution, when much of the imperial Chinese social conditions still prevailed, and only a few years after the first western music school — the National Conservatory of Music in Shanghai — was established, the initial introduction of western music in education caused traditional musicians to react with a reform movement of their own. Unfortunately, this only contributed to the further decline of Chinese musical heritage because of a lack of understanding of the crucial difference between “learning” and “adopting” Western concepts and practice — from performance techniques to tuning, re-design of instruments, and even adding ’harmony,’ etc. These experimental steps also unwittingly encouraged the abandonment of true knowledge of the theory and esthetics of Chinese musical heritage. The so-called “national music” (guoyue), now known as minzu yinyue, was often, and progressively so, mixed with Western practices and even “chinoiserie” of Western origin.
As I gradually became more serious in gaining knowledge of traditional music (not just folk, minority or the traditional “popular” music (minjian yinyue), I turned to searching scholarly books wherever I could find them. I was initially inspired by the numerous publications of the 1920s and 30s, but there was another source for me: my father’s library. By 1934, my father had an excellent library installed in his study, including numerous volumes of sikubeiyao (concise edition of the Imperial Encyclopedia) which filled three walls of his roomy study. At the age of 11, I was already dissatisfied with merely reading all the famous historical novels. Instead, I discovered the “real stuff” in my father’s library! I sneaked into his study regularly and smuggled out volumes without his knowledge. This unauthorized action on my part was actually a result of his habit of giving me books he found on trips to Shanghai or Beijing, instead of toys, which started in Wuhan when I was between seven and nine years old. I imagined what I read in those books which were often about Western culture and early mythology from around the world. He also brought me translations of European novels, especially those rendered in classical Chinese by Lin Qinnan, initially published by my grandfather.
My discovery of father’s library eventually led me to discover the library on Western publications at Guangxi University (see Section 8) and much later, the fantastic library of Chinese books at, [sic] what was then known as, [sic] the Far Eastern Library in the underground floors of Low Library at Columbia!
These early ventures into history and searches for valuable books eventually led me to the study of classical Chinese music, and prepared me well for research in the U.S. in the 1950s. Once I found the Far Eastern Library and qualified to go to the restricted stacks freely, I began to spend most of my time at Columbia in the stacks (c. 1952-1958) as a graduate student and during the years of my Rockefeller Foundation grant.
6. Shanghai in World War II: Environment for Music and Musical Education
After the breakout of the Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937, my father moved the family to Shanghai and retreated with the government gradually to the west. In Shanghai, I found myself directly in the path of war, even though we were living in the International Concession. I was forced to observe at close range death and destruction for almost four years. Three members of my family contracted typhoid as a result of Japanese biological warfare (according to recent research): Wen-ho died, I had a severe case but survived, and my younger brother, Wen-zheng who was the cellist in the family, had only a mild case. I then became ill with a heart ailment and was bedridden for another year. It took me four years to complete my high school curriculum, graduating in 1941.
I studied music on the side throughout this period — actually spending more time on it than my schoolwork. Part of the time, I was enrolled in the Shanghai Music School (Shanghai Yinyue Guan) established by Ding Sande and Chen Yuxin, professors of the National Shanghai Conservatory. This school was established because the conservatory itself was taken over by the puppet government. Today, this school is regarded as a legitimate part of the Shanghai Conservatory’s history. I later studied violin with Xu Weiling who had just returned from seven years of study at the Brussels Conservatory. Shanghai then was full of refugee musicians from Europe as well as White Russians and Italians. As a result, music making was very advanced, diverse, and of superior quality. Aside from operas, ballets and chamber music, the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, established in 1879, presented a surprising number of contemporary works of that time. I remember mourning the death of Maurice Ravel shortly after arriving in Shanghai. And, I was able to develop an excellent record library. Later, I studied theory including modal counterpoint, harmony, form, and orchestration in Shanghai with an Italian cellist, E. Pellegatti (if I remember correctly), a member of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.
Although, I became more and more serious with the violin, partly because of the congregation of expatriate musicians — some very well known, including a number of good teachers, I was not thinking of a violin career at all. Instead, I was merely mesmerized by music and began to feel the urge to compose.
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