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City’s increased funding for cultural activities brings hope for spreading traditional music
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“SHALL we sit and listen to the aunties and uncles’ music?” a 30-ish mother asked her toddler daughter in a farmhouse-turned-inn in suburban Hangzhou on Sunday.
Nudged by her mother, the little girl of about 5 years nodded and sat beside us. In silence, the mother and the daughter, whom we never knew before, listened to us playing guqin — the definitive Chinese musical instrument favored by Confucius — for about an hour at night.
Altogether there were seven of us amateur players, including my wife and me. We happened to lodge in the same small inn with the daughter and her parents. While her father buried himself in the room watching TV, she and her mother chanced upon us in the parlour, and were instantaneously drawn by the tranquil melodies of guqin, a seven-string plucked instrument with a history of about 3,000 years, possibly the oldest plucked instrument of China.
Mind of peace and balance
Guqin became a world non-tangible cultural heritage in 2003, partly due to its lofty role as a Confucian instrument to teach people to cultivate a mind of peace and balance. Guqin was popular for thousands of years until the “cultural revolution” (1966-1976), when it was regarded as part of the so-called feudalistic culture. The year 2003 marked its return.
That the young mother and her little girl would be interested in such an ancient musical instrument was a surprise to us all. Most tourists we had met before would mistake guqin for the 21-string instrument called guzheng, whose sound is much louder, thus not as conducive to meditation as guqin. And few tourists we had met would bother to sit down and enjoy the serenity of guqin music.
Indeed, when we saw the mother and her daughter emerging from their tiny room, we expected them to have no interest in guqin. After all, it’s the very musical instrument that carries the Confucian idea of being peaceful and balanced, an idea that has yet to be fully restored in this age of industrialization and consumption.
Broader audience
If there are more people like the mother and her daughter, and if people like us amateur players had more societal support to perform for non-profit, the tone of our society would be more balanced. All serious music purifies the mind, for sure, but guqin embodies the ultimate Confucian concept of harmony — inner harmony with oneself and external harmony with nature.
The seven of us gathered in the small inn over the weekend to think how we could better spread guqin music and culture to a broader audience. Among others, we were looking into the possibility of organizing regular non-profit concerts and lectures for that purpose. But we lack financial support and may face certain bureaucratic hurdles if we go down that path. Not just us, but many guqin — and for that matter traditional opera — studios in Shanghai and many other parts of China operate on a small scale, due to a small audience base and lack of government financial support.
Good news, however, came out on Monday — one day after our happy encounter with the mother and her daughter — when the Shanghai municipal government unveiled a plan to tilt financial support to cultural enterprises, especially “toddler” ones.
One key point of the plan is to attract more and more venture capital investment to help small — “toddler” — cultural enterprises grow in their startup stages. The plan also considers making it easier for cultural enterprises to be listed on the stock market, to acquire loans and to issue bonds.
Shanghai’s heightened financial support may not cover all kinds of cultural enterprises or entities, but it signifies a higher status of culture in the city’s overall development blueprint. I hope that, one day, GSP (Gross Spiritual Product) will supplant GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as the index of the wealth of nations, and in that process, Shanghai can take the lead.
In fact, it was not just the mother or her daughter that surprised us with an interest in traditional Chinese music embodied by guqin. Many fans of traditional Chinese literature, especially those fans of Hong Lou Meng (The Dream of the Red Mansions), joined us in a mini-concert of guqin and kunqu (a kind of traditional Chinese opera) in a kunqu club the Gubei Civic Center in Changning District, Shanghai, on Saturday.
Hong Lou Meng is possibly the greatest novel of all times in China, describing the vicissitudes of life and fleeting fortunes. Kunqu and guqin are two recurring themes in the novel. It so happens that many fans of the novel, who can recite many of its paragraphs and poems, do not know how kunqu or guqin is exactly performed. So on Saturday, we organized a free lecture-concert of kunqu and guqin for about 20 of them — from Shanghai and Jiangsu Province.
With Shanghai’s enhanced financial support for cultural business, there’s a hope that more and more “free spiritual goods” — free lectures and concerts on traditional Chinese culture — will be given to the public.
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