在茱莉亞學(xué)院，聽一場“中國特色”的音樂會

What makes Chinese music Chinese? After a century of revolution and change, how do contemporary Chinese composers understand and reflect their heritage, even as they try to connect with global audiences?

是什么讓中國音樂具有中國特質(zhì)?經(jīng)歷了一個世紀(jì)的革命和巨變之后，在當(dāng)代中國作曲家試圖與全球觀眾產(chǎn)生聯(lián)系的同時，他們?nèi)绾卫斫獠⒎从匙约簜鞒械倪z產(chǎn)?

These are questions that get to the heart of a musical culture that remains largely veiled to American listeners. The Juilliard School’s annual Focus! festival of new composition is trying to pull aside that veil, to make the world of music a bit smaller. With “China Today,” a series of six free concerts from Jan. 19 to 26, the school is avoiding traditional Chinese instruments and foreign-based composers, choosing instead to concentrate on Chinese artists living and working in their own country, and using the same instrumental forces as those in the United States and Europe.

這些問題觸及到了一種音樂文化的核心，對于美國聽眾，這種文化在很大程度上依然模糊不清。茱莉亞音樂學(xué)院(The Juilliard School)的年度“聚焦!”(Focus!)新作品音樂節(jié)正在努力揭開那層面紗，把音樂的世界縮小一點。“今日中國”(China Today)主題音樂會將由1月19日至26日的六場免費音樂會組成，學(xué)校將避開傳統(tǒng)中國樂器和在國外的作曲家，集中展示在中國生活和創(chuàng)作，并且作品采用西方樂器演奏的中國藝術(shù)家。

If in the 1930s, Chinese musicians had to define themselves against the West, and in the ’60s against the state, they may now have to reckon with the hectic, globalized economy. The biographies of the Focus! composers — full of international crisscrossings, responsibilities and diverse inspirations — makes clear that their music often serves as both a grounding and a reflection of the chaos of modern life. The contemporary China of bullet trains and glass-and-steel airports — the China which will play a determinant role in the course of the 21st century — is the one on display here.

如果說，20世紀(jì)30年代的中國音樂家必須通過對抗西方，在60年代通過對抗國家來定義自己的話，他們現(xiàn)在可能不得不與狂熱的全球化經(jīng)濟角力。參加本次音樂節(jié)的作曲家的履歷——其中充滿了國際化的交叉、多種職責(zé)和多元的志向——清楚地表明，他們的音樂往往既是混亂現(xiàn)代生活的基調(diào)，也是它的反映。高鐵和玻璃與鋼鐵建造的機場所代表的當(dāng)代中國——一個將在21世紀(jì)扮演決定性角色的國家——正是這場音樂會所呈現(xiàn)的中國。

This is a China in which Juilliard is deeply engaged. Seeking to develop a new revenue stream, the school has broken ground on a degree-granting satellite in Tianjin, in the country’s northeast, that is scheduled to open next year. The Binhai New Area where the school is located, is one of China’s largest development zones.

這也是茱莉亞音樂學(xué)院正深度參與的中國。為了開辟新的收入渠道，這所學(xué)校在中國東北部的天津創(chuàng)辦了一所頒發(fā)學(xué)位的分校，計劃于明年開校。該分校位于濱海新區(qū)，這里是中國最大的開發(fā)區(qū)之一。

“A China festival had been on my mind for some years,” Joel Sachs, the founder and organizer of Focus!, said by email. “But it had seemed so daunting that I kept putting it aside.” Then, last spring, President Polisi” — Juilliard’s retiring president, Joseph W. Polisi — “with whom I had jointly created the Focus! concept in the first few weeks of his presidency, expressed his desire to have it for 2018 because it would be his final Focus! festival and would tie in beautifully with the Tianjin project.”

“很多年來，我一直在考慮舉辦一屆中國音樂節(jié)，”“聚焦!”音樂節(jié)的創(chuàng)造者、組織者喬爾·薩克斯(Joel Sachs)在郵件中說。“但這看起來太艱巨了，所以我一直把它擱在一邊。”然后，去年春天，茱莉亞學(xué)院即將卸任的校長喬瑟夫·W·波利希(Joseph W. Polisi)——“在他最初擔(dān)任校長的幾周內(nèi)，我和他共同創(chuàng)造了‘聚焦!’這個設(shè)想，他表示想要在2018年辦成這件事，因為這將是他的最后一屆‘聚焦!’音樂節(jié)，而且可以與天津的項目完美地結(jié)合起來。”

Including 33 composers, Mr. Sachs has put together something like a history of Chinese “classical” music in our time, from the 94-year-old master Chou Wen-Chung, who has spent a lifetime building bridges between Chinese composers and Western audiences, to Shuci Wang, born in 1990.

薩克斯整合了一份堪稱我們這個時代的中國“經(jīng)典”音樂史的表演名單，其中包括從現(xiàn)年94歲、畢生為中國作曲家與西方觀眾搭建橋梁的大師周文中，到出生于1990年的王舒辭(Shuci Wang，音)等在內(nèi)的33名作曲家。

What elements in the music on offer mark it as definably “Chinese”? Laudably, Juilliard ruled out the easy options of Chinoiseries — gongs and zithers and the like — and scooping up ethnic Chinese composers based in the United States, although some of the most famous ones have lived here for many years.

這些參演的音樂具有什么樣的元素，讓它們絕對能夠“代表中國”?值得贊賞的是，茱莉亞排除了中國鑼鼓之類的簡單選擇，并且篩掉了在美國的華裔作曲家，盡管最有名的一些中國作曲家已經(jīng)在這里生活了很多年。

“This question brings my mind back to the endless debate in the 1920s and ’30s about ‘Americanness’ in music,” Mr. Sachs said. “Europeans liked to bray that the only ‘American’ music was music based upon jazz. Henry Cowell, who was probably the most prominent voice of American composers in his many articles and interviews in European and Soviet newspapers, always argued that such a version of Americanness was rubbish. He maintained that if a piece was composed in America, it was American. The criterion had to be quality.”

“這個問題讓我想起了上世紀(jì)二三十年代關(guān)于音樂中‘美國性’的無休止?fàn)幷摚?rdquo;薩克斯說。“歐洲人喜歡嚷嚷說，唯一的‘美國式’音樂是從爵士發(fā)展而來的音樂類型。亨利·考埃爾(Henry Cowell)在歐洲以及蘇聯(lián)報紙上發(fā)表的許多文章和采訪中，也許代表了美國作曲家最洪亮的聲音，他總是說，這種對美國精神的詮釋是垃圾。他堅稱，如果一首曲子是在美國創(chuàng)作的，它就是美國音樂。對它的評價必須取決于質(zhì)量。”

That Focus! will skip pieces using Chinese instruments was not so much an aesthetic choice as a logistical and philosophical one: It would have required hiring players, a difficult move budgetarily and educationally, since the point of the festival is to give Juilliard students the opportunity to play new music.

“聚焦!”排除用中國樂器演奏的作品的決定并非出于審美，而是出于對物流和哲學(xué)意義的考慮：如果采用它們就需要聘請演奏者，那么這在經(jīng)費和教育培訓(xùn)方面，都是一個困難的選擇，因為這場音樂會的目的是給茱莉亞的學(xué)生們一個機會來演奏新作品。

“The main exception in this festival is the performance of Guo Wenjing’s concerto for erhu and orchestra,” Mr. Sachs said, referring to the two-stringed Chinese fiddle. “But, as it happened, one of our alumni is both a first-rate violist and a busy professional erhu player. I also managed to get another piece into the festival after hearing it and realizing that the sound of the xun, a very ancient wind instrument, was very similar to the ocarina. When I asked the composer” — Yu Baoyu — “what he thought of doing it with ocarina, he responded very enthusiastically. One of our flutists jumped at the chance to do it.”

“本次音樂節(jié)的主要例外是郭文景的二胡和管弦樂隊協(xié)奏曲，”薩克斯說。二胡是兩根弦的樂器，相當(dāng)于中國的小提琴。“不過，湊巧的是，我們的一位校友既是一流的小提琴手，也是忙碌的專業(yè)二胡演奏家。我聽到另一首曲子后，也設(shè)法把它加到了音樂節(jié)上，我發(fā)現(xiàn)塤的音色與陶笛非常相似。塤是一種非常古老的管樂器。當(dāng)我問它的作曲者”——于寶玉——“對用陶笛演奏這種曲子有何看法時，他的反應(yīng)非常熱烈。我們的一名笛手抓住了這個演奏機會。”

Yet if the instruments are Western, there are still glimmers of what could be called distinctively Chinese qualities about the music on these programs. Some make references to traditional Chinese melodies, some to Chinese aesthetics or ideas — pentatonic scales, for example — and some to the kind of evocations of nature (mountains, flowers) that are widespread in Chinese culture. One young composer, among the seven commissioned to write a new piece for Focus!, had imbibed the contemporary European trend of getting unusual sounds from instruments, but had used those techniques to subtly evoke — not imitate — the sound of traditional Chinese instruments.

不過，就算樂器是西方的，這些節(jié)目中仍有一些可被稱為中國特色的元素。有些是采用中國傳統(tǒng)旋律;還有些是采用中國的美學(xué)或思想，例如五聲音階;還有些讓人聯(lián)想起中國文化中常見的大自然(比如山和花)。在七名受委托為“聚焦!”創(chuàng)作新作品的作曲家中，有一位年輕作曲家追隨當(dāng)代歐洲從樂器中獲得不同尋常聲音的潮流，用那些技術(shù)巧妙地讓人聯(lián)想起(而非模仿)中國傳統(tǒng)樂器的聲音。

One younger composer, Liang Nan, will be represented by two intriguingly contrasting pieces: a thornily up-to-date “European-style” new work, and a song he wrote in 2015 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the victory over Japan in World War II. “The song, for soprano, cello, and piano,” Mr. Sachs said, “is very European-traditional, perhaps evoking the epoch of Fauré, but turned out to be so beautifully, creatively wrought that I decided to program it alongside the piece he has been commissioned to write, simply to show how two visions of music could flourish in one composer.”

一位更年輕的作曲家——梁楠——將推出兩首對比鮮明的曲子：一首是最新式的復(fù)雜的“歐洲風(fēng)格”新作品;另一首是他2015年為紀(jì)念抗戰(zhàn)勝利60周年創(chuàng)作的曲子。“那首供女高音歌手演唱、供大提琴和鋼琴演奏的曲子，”薩克斯說，“極具歐洲傳統(tǒng)，也許會讓人想起弗雷(Fauré)的時代，但它非常優(yōu)美，很有創(chuàng)造性，我決定將它與他委托創(chuàng)作的那首曲子結(jié)合起來，表明一位作曲家可以同時創(chuàng)作出兩種風(fēng)格截然不同的音樂。”

Contemporary Chinese composition takes place in the shadow of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, under which instrumental music, theoretical physics, mathematics and other abstract pattern languages seemed “safer” than more explicitly thematic artistic forms. But precisely because classical music is a space of privacy and fantasy, Mao found it unacceptable. Underlying the era’s brutal house-to-house searches for pianos and busts of Beethoven was the fear that music preserves a spirit that is incompatible with the collective.

當(dāng)代中國的音樂創(chuàng)作是在20世紀(jì)60、70年代毛澤東發(fā)動的文化大革命的陰影下進(jìn)行的，當(dāng)時，演奏音樂、理論物理和數(shù)學(xué)等抽象語言形式似乎比語義更為明確的藝術(shù)形式“更安全”。但恰恰因為古典音樂是一個充滿隱秘和幻想的空間，毛澤東覺得它不可接受。當(dāng)時，挨家挨戶嚴(yán)格搜查鋼琴和貝多芬半身像，因為擔(dān)心這種音樂保留著與集體不相容的精神。

In those bad old days, He Luting, director of the Shanghai Conservatory, was denounced for his passion for Debussy. As Lu Hongen, then the conductor of the Shanghai Symphony, was led off by the police in shackles, he asked his colleagues to lay flowers on the tomb of Beethoven. Music in China was a matter of life and death.

在那個糟糕的舊時代，上海音樂學(xué)院院長賀綠汀因為對德彪西(Debussy)的熱愛而受到譴責(zé);上海交響樂團(tuán)指揮陸洪恩帶著手銬被警察帶走時，讓同事們在貝多芬的墓上獻(xiàn)花。在中國，音樂曾經(jīng)是生死攸關(guān)的大事。

But the festival also features works by composers who were educated in a very different China, before Mao. One died a few years ago; another in August in his 90s; and another is still alive at that age. Sang Tong, whose 1947 piece for violin and piano (China’s first 12-tone work) is a highlight of the festival, was an underground Communist guerrilla who studied with a former student of Schoenberg who had reached safety during World War II in Shanghai; after the revolution, insisting that classical music shouldn’t be politicized, he suffered greatly. The composer Ye Xiaogang was sent down to work in a factory during the revolution.

不過，這次音樂節(jié)上也有一些在毛澤東時代之前、非常不同的時代接受教育的中國作曲家的作品。其中一位幾年前去世了;另一位去年8月在90多歲的高齡去世;還有一位也90多歲了，依然健在。桑桐1947年的小提琴和鋼琴作品(中國的第一部十二音作品)是這次音樂節(jié)的重頭戲。桑桐曾是一名地下共產(chǎn)黨游擊隊員，曾受教于“二戰(zhàn)”時到上海逃難的勛伯格(Schoenberg)的前學(xué)生。革命結(jié)束后，他堅持認(rèn)為，古典音樂不應(yīng)該被政治化，因此受了不少苦。文革期間，作曲家葉小剛被下放到工廠工作。

The festival goes from the darkness of that era all the way to a new piece by Liu Sola, a Central Conservatory classmate of famous composers like Tan Dun, Chen Yi and Zhou Long. China’s first female rock ‘n’ roll star after the Cultural Revolution, Ms. Liu is best known for “Blues in the East,” an almost-avant-garde jazz-Chinese opera fusion that scored a Top-10 hit in Britain.

本次音樂節(jié)從那個黑暗的時代，一直演繹到劉索拉的新作品，她畢業(yè)于中央音樂學(xué)院，是著名作曲家譚盾、陳怡和周龍的同學(xué)。劉索拉是文革后中國的第一位搖滾女星，以《藍(lán)調(diào)在東方》聞名，它是將爵士樂與中國戲劇相結(jié)合的前衛(wèi)音樂專輯，曾登上英國十大熱門專輯榜單。

A powerful setting of Tang dynasty poems for soprano, piano and two percussionists in the festival was composed in 1981 by Yang Liqing, the first Chinese composer to be sent abroad to study during the loosening of culture in the early 1980s. The poems are set in German translation and were published by the Shanghai Conservatory, and the style is a fascinating mixture of East and West. When Mr. Sachs asked the singer, the Hong Kong-born soprano Vivian Yau, if she could substitute the original Chinese texts, “she replied to me that the songs were clearly written to be sung in German and could not be done in Chinese.”

本次音樂節(jié)上有一首磅礴之作是女高音在鋼琴和打擊樂器的伴奏下演唱唐詩，它是1981年由楊立青創(chuàng)作的，楊立青是20世紀(jì)80年代初文化氛圍放松后第一位被派往國外學(xué)習(xí)的中國作曲家。那些詩是德語譯文，由上海音樂學(xué)院出版，風(fēng)格是東西方的迷人結(jié)合。薩克斯問香港出生的女高音歌唱家邱芷芊(Vivian Yau)是否可以用中文原文演唱，“她回答說，這些歌曲創(chuàng)作時顯然意在用德語演唱，沒法用中文唱。”

“In short, as everywhere else, national styles may or may not be present,” Mr. Sachs added. “That fact itself was to me extremely revealing. It showed that at least among high-quality Chinese composers, one can now find almost anything — and any level of “Chineseness,” including none.”

“總之，和其他地方一樣，民族風(fēng)格可能存在，也可能不存在，”薩克斯還說。“在我看來，這個事實很有啟迪意義。它表明現(xiàn)在，至少在高品質(zhì)的中國作曲家中，幾乎可以找到任何程度的‘中國特色’，包括一點也找不到。”