在茱莉亚学院，听一场“中国特色”的音乐会
是什么让中国音乐具有中国特质?经历了一个世纪的革命和巨变之后，在当代中国作曲家试图与全球观众产生联系的同时，他们如何理解并反映自己传承的遗产?
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.
这些问题触及到了一种音乐文化的核心，对于美国听众，这种文化在很大程度上依然模糊不清。茱莉亚音乐学院(The Juilliard School)的年度“聚焦!”(Focus!)新作品音乐节正在努力揭开那层面纱，把音乐的世界缩小一点。“今日中国”(China Today)主题音乐会将由1月19日至26日的六场免费音乐会组成，学校将避开传统中国乐器和在国外的作曲家，集中展示在中国生活和创作，并且作品采用西方乐器演奏的中国艺术家。
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.
如果说，20世纪30年代的中国音乐家必须通过对抗西方，在60年代通过对抗国家来定义自己的话，他们现在可能不得不与狂热的全球化经济角力。参加本次音乐节的作曲家的履历——其中充满了国际化的交叉、多种职责和多元的志向——清楚地表明，他们的音乐往往既是混乱现代生活的基调，也是它的反映。高铁和玻璃与钢铁建造的机场所代表的当代中国——一个将在21世纪扮演决定性角色的国家——正是这场音乐会所呈现的中国。
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.
这也是茱莉亚音乐学院正深度参与的中国。为了开辟新的收入渠道，这所学校在中国东北部的天津创办了一所颁发学位的分校，计划于明年开校。该分校位于滨海新区，这里是中国最大的开发区之一。
“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.”
“很多年来，我一直在考虑举办一届中国音乐节，”“聚焦!”音乐节的创造者、组织者乔尔·萨克斯(Joel Sachs)在邮件中说。“但这看起来太艰巨了，所以我一直把它搁在一边。”然后，去年春天，茱莉亚学院即将卸任的校长乔瑟夫·W·波利希(Joseph W. Polisi)——“在他最初担任校长的几周内，我和他共同创造了‘聚焦!’这个设想，他表示想要在2018年办成这件事，因为这将是他的最后一届‘聚焦!’音乐节，而且可以与天津的项目完美地结合起来。”
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.
萨克斯整合了一份堪称我们这个时代的中国“经典”音乐史的表演名单，其中包括从现年94岁、毕生为中国作曲家与西方观众搭建桥梁的大师周文中，到出生于1990年的王舒辞(Shuci Wang，音)等在内的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.
这些参演的音乐具有什么样的元素，让它们绝对能够“代表中国”?值得赞赏的是，茱莉亚排除了中国锣鼓之类的简单选择，并且筛掉了在美国的华裔作曲家，尽管最有名的一些中国作曲家已经在这里生活了很多年。
“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.”
“这个问题让我想起了上世纪二三十年代关于音乐中‘美国性’的无休止争论，”萨克斯说。“欧洲人喜欢嚷嚷说，唯一的‘美国式’音乐是从爵士发展而来的音乐类型。亨利·考埃尔(Henry Cowell)在欧洲以及苏联报纸上发表的许多文章和采访中，也许代表了美国作曲家最洪亮的声音，他总是说，这种对美国精神的诠释是垃圾。他坚称，如果一首曲子是在美国创作的，它就是美国音乐。对它的评价必须取决于质量。”
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!”排除用中国乐器演奏的作品的决定并非出于审美，而是出于对物流和哲学意义的考虑：如果采用它们就需要聘请演奏者，那么这在经费和教育培训方面，都是一个困难的选择，因为这场音乐会的目的是给茱莉亚的学生们一个机会来演奏新作品。
“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.”
“本次音乐节的主要例外是郭文景的二胡和管弦乐队协奏曲，”萨克斯说。二胡是两根弦的乐器，相当于中国的小提琴。“不过，凑巧的是，我们的一位校友既是一流的小提琴手，也是忙碌的专业二胡演奏家。我听到另一首曲子后，也设法把它加到了音乐节上，我发现埙的音色与陶笛非常相似。埙是一种非常古老的管乐器。当我问它的作曲者”——于宝玉——“对用陶笛演奏这种曲子有何看法时，他的反应非常热烈。我们的一名笛手抓住了这个演奏机会。”
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.
不过，就算乐器是西方的，这些节目中仍有一些可被称为中国特色的元素。有些是采用中国传统旋律;还有些是采用中国的美学或思想，例如五声音阶;还有些让人联想起中国文化中常见的大自然(比如山和花)。在七名受委托为“聚焦!”创作新作品的作曲家中，有一位年轻作曲家追随当代欧洲从乐器中获得不同寻常声音的潮流，用那些技术巧妙地让人联想起(而非模仿)中国传统乐器的声音。
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.”
一位更年轻的作曲家——梁楠——将推出两首对比鲜明的曲子：一首是最新式的复杂的“欧洲风格”新作品;另一首是他2015年为纪念抗战胜利60周年创作的曲子。“那首供女高音歌手演唱、供大提琴和钢琴演奏的曲子，”萨克斯说，“极具欧洲传统，也许会让人想起弗雷(Fauré)的时代，但它非常优美，很有创造性，我决定将它与他委托创作的那首曲子结合起来，表明一位作曲家可以同时创作出两种风格截然不同的音乐。”
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.
当代中国的音乐创作是在20世纪60、70年代毛泽东发动的文化大革命的阴影下进行的，当时，演奏音乐、理论物理和数学等抽象语言形式似乎比语义更为明确的艺术形式“更安全”。但恰恰因为古典音乐是一个充满隐秘和幻想的空间，毛泽东觉得它不可接受。当时，挨家挨户严格搜查钢琴和贝多芬半身像，因为担心这种音乐保留着与集体不相容的精神。
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.
在那个糟糕的旧时代，上海音乐学院院长贺绿汀因为对德彪西(Debussy)的热爱而受到谴责;上海交响乐团指挥陆洪恩带着手铐被警察带走时，让同事们在贝多芬的墓上献花。在中国，音乐曾经是生死攸关的大事。
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.
不过，这次音乐节上也有一些在毛泽东时代之前、非常不同的时代接受教育的中国作曲家的作品。其中一位几年前去世了;另一位去年8月在90多岁的高龄去世;还有一位也90多岁了，依然健在。桑桐1947年的小提琴和钢琴作品(中国的第一部十二音作品)是这次音乐节的重头戏。桑桐曾是一名地下共产党游击队员，曾受教于“二战”时到上海逃难的勋伯格(Schoenberg)的前学生。革命结束后，他坚持认为，古典音乐不应该被政治化，因此受了不少苦。文革期间，作曲家叶小刚被下放到工厂工作。
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.
本次音乐节从那个黑暗的时代，一直演绎到刘索拉的新作品，她毕业于中央音乐学院，是著名作曲家谭盾、陈怡和周龙的同学。刘索拉是文革后中国的第一位摇滚女星，以《蓝调在东方》闻名，它是将爵士乐与中国戏剧相结合的前卫音乐专辑，曾登上英国十大热门专辑榜单。
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.”
本次音乐节上有一首磅礴之作是女高音在钢琴和打击乐器的伴奏下演唱唐诗，它是1981年由杨立青创作的，杨立青是20世纪80年代初文化氛围放松后第一位被派往国外学习的中国作曲家。那些诗是德语译文，由上海音乐学院出版，风格是东西方的迷人结合。萨克斯问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，“她回答说，这些歌曲创作时显然意在用德语演唱，没法用中文唱。”
“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.”
“总之，和其他地方一样，民族风格可能存在，也可能不存在，”萨克斯还说。“在我看来，这个事实很有启迪意义。它表明现在，至少在高品质的中国作曲家中，几乎可以找到任何程度的‘中国特色’，包括一点也找不到。”
