new sounds

The Xi’an Conservatory of Music just ended their three performances here. Despite warning from some quarters that the new musical invention was yet just another fad, I attended two out of their three shows here.

The debut night, which I attended, featured vocal works, instrumental solos, and ensemble works. I was deciding between attending this and the second night as I was getting my tickets, and eventually settled for this one because there was a qinhu solo in the program.

The concert left me with a single question: how would one describe the sound of the qinhu? The major modification is in the replacement of the soundpiece with wood, rather than snake-skin. The result is an instrument that sounds more like the banhu and the violin especially at higher registers. Indeed, unlike in an erhu, it sounds cleaner and crisper at the higher notes. The orchestration for the qinhu ensemble took advantage of this by tending score qinhu parts higher than one would for erhu parts — something I observed from the finger positions of the string players.

The orchestra was basically a western orchestra, complete with the brasses, woodwinds and all, with the string section replaced with their qinhu counterparts. Even with about 40 qinhu players in all, I found the sound somewhat thin. Naturally, I felt compelled to compare them with the erhu and violin string families. The claimed improvement of the qinhu over the erhu at higher registers was achieved — the qinhus were clear and loud at higher registers. But it seemed to have lost some of the mellowness of the erhu, and the full bodied tone of a violin. When the performance of the erhu concerto Lan Hua Hua came on, I felt soothed by the sounds of the erhu.

The concerts had their shares of classical transcriptions. There was Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, there was Bizet, Mozart and all, but nothing really avant garde, unlike what one of the member of the consultancy group wrote in the program book. There were some recently composed work too, but that and transcriptions of the Western classical music are already commonplace in the concert scene. How was there “symphonised Chinese music”? I went expecting a Chinese orchestra with erhus substituted by qinhus, but saw instead a western orchestra with its entire string section replaced by qinhus. How did that achieve a “symphonised Chinese sound”?

In the end, I was rather unconvinced. It was not a sound I take a liking to, even after hearing the qinhu solo on the first night. Still, there were some memorable pieces, such as the Meng Yu Hua Qing (梦浴华清) by composer Han Lan Kui (韩兰魁), and the other infrequently heard vocal works.

There’s some wisdom in one of my friend’s opinion of musical experimentations from China. On an invention named the laruan, which was meant to play the role of a cello in a Chinese orchestra, he said in a rather exasperated way: “Why don’t they just use the cello?”. After both night’s concert, I’d say the same: “Why don’t they just use the violin?”

mars occultation

I was lucky enough to catch the occultation that happened two weekends ago, on May 10th, unlike most others in the local amateur astronomy community. The weather wasn’t fantastic to start with, but it was good enough for Mars and the Moon to be seen through thin clouds in a pair of binoculars. Honestly it wasn’t that spectacular, thanks to the clouds. The dimming of Mars took about 2 seconds, unlike the occultation of Antares I observed years ago, which saw the star blink in and out instantaneously.

That measurement can be used for a back-of-an-envelope type estimate of the angular size of Mars. Since the occultation is caused by the motion of the Moon, the angular speed of the Moon (360 deg/sidereal period) multiplied by the time taken for Mars to dim and disappear should give a pretty close estimate. The angular size, estimated from my eyeballing, is about (2 sec * 360 degs)/27.3 days, which works out to be about 1.1 arc-seconds. My planetarium program gave 5.5 arc-seconds for the angular size, so that’s on the correct order of magnitude. Below average sky conditions, plus the fact the human eye can’t detect a small fractional change in magnitude must have meant that the entire duration of the dimming ought to be longer.

I’m looking forward to the sigma Sagittarii occultation this Friday!

of schools and orchestras

I’m back in the scene again. Stage appearance in mid-July. I’m slowly picking up the pieces at home, and at weekly practices. The calluses on my fingers are testiment to that.

The folks there are generally amicable, but I’m still anxious that I may have trouble assimilating into their already established social circles. Had I stayed on after my stint with them in March last year, I would have no such apprehension, for most of them were still new then.

I had lunch with the ‘elders’ in the orchestra after practice ended and got an update on the current landscape in local school and amateur orchestras. Much was discussed over lunch, from students’ level of motivation in school orchestras to politics in China.

The usual lament of the difficulty of roping players into the orchestra was heard. With so many student members graduating from school orchestras, there still is difficulty in recruiting players to play in an amateur set up. Having seen the attendance in the past weeks’ practices, there is much evidence for that phenomena. It is no wonder that some of them, including my teacher, who convinced me to help out in the next concert, were glad that I agreed to volunteer in their upcoming performance. I may be playing in a section that will not face dire ‘manpower’ problems, but more importantly, they would like to establish a new circle of members who would form the core players of the orchestra, as opposed to the students members, who are in flux.

Understandably, we become more busy when we graduate from schools and transit to work or university life. The other reasons offered for the lack of amateur participation were disheartening. Those who took part in orchestras during their student days did so out of compulsion, not interest.  Some become sufficiently disillusioned with other aspects, which could be inept administration or uninspiring instructors, to be turned off from the pursuit for life.  The competitive shift in the education system today may be blamed too.  More than once I’ve heard or read about schools favoring student groups that produce tangible results usually in the form of achievements in competitions.  The ugly flip side is that groups that don’t have results to show for get their support cut.  Schools have become enterprises that KPIs everything they do.  Consequently, students in school orchestras spend most of their time drilling and perfecting the few competition pieces, which leaves little time for anything else.

Also mentioned was one musician school instructor, who asked that the school kids under his charge have to take private lessons from him, if they wished to, and not from any other teachers.  One of that school children happened to be my teacher’s student.  As I’ve heard from my teacher, that kid seemed quite pressured by the situation.

There was also some of the “youngsters nowadays…” refrain, but it wasn’t emphasized, probably because of my presence.  Someone observed that while the older (and former) regular members in the orchestra volunteered out of passion and saw it as a certain calling, some younger performers had thoughts of receiving tangible benefits out of their participation.

Even though I didn’t have much of a conversation going on my side, I definitely learned a lot more about a segment of the local music scene.  Hopefully, I’ll start to see more interaction between myself and the others in the next sessions.