Xiamen's (
Amoy's) tiny "
Gulangyu Islet" (formerly Kulongsoo, Kolongsoo, etc.) is well known as the
Isle of Music, with more pianos per capita (1 in 5 families have a piano) than anywhere else in China. Eleanor Doty, wife of an American Amoy missionary
Elihu Doty, had the first piano in the 1850s, according to the
memoirs of Mary Doty, who was 6 at the time.
The
Amoy Mission built China's first Protestant Church (
Xinjie Church), and many not only became Christians but also musicians--especially pianists, because of their use in worship.The small island of Xiamen has produced several hundred well known Chinese musicians, including Yin Chengzong, whom the New York Times said was the best Chinese pianist on the planet (and who was famous for saving pianos from destruction during the Cultural Revolution by rolling one out into Tiananmen Square and playing revolutionary music; who could destroy a politically correct instrument!).
In the 1920s, a British resident of
Gulangyu attended a music concert at the newly built
Xiamen University, (厦门大学，then known as
Amoy University),which was built in 1921 by the Henry Ford of Asia,
Tan Kah Kee (陈嘉庚，who invested over USD 100 million in education--over 1 billion in today's dollars). She wrote about this concert in her fascinating account of foreign life in Amoy, "A Race of Green Ginger." (I've never figured out what the title means). Below is her delightful account of this concert.
Amoy University Music Concert, 1920s
Anne-Averil Mackenzie, "A Race of Green Ginger":
'Let me ask the Lim Boon Kengs if we may bring you to the concert at the University. There are going to be celebrated musicians, playing the classical table lute.'
....'I do not like the Chinese,' she said stubbornly.
'You don't know them.'
....She really was impossible. I meant to go, but, all the hardness gone from her face, she was playing Debussy, which I could never resist, and ... How I wished that, like the Lims' daughter Ena, she could enjoy the music of both Europe and Asia. Ena, who told me of her love of the Chinese flute, 'especially when it is played at the dead of night'; Ena, then a quiet, but never anonymous girl in the shadow of her formidable mother, who was to win distinction at the Royal Academy of Music in London, sing the classics of both East and West, write poetry in the style and manner of her forebears and, prevented by circumstances from living in Amoy, to campaign as competendy as her mother for the social services in Singapore, and to send her son to Cambridge.
Ena inherits the tradition of the integrated life and the zest for all aspects of it, which is so salient a characteristic of the educated Chinese. It struck us vividly then that this wholeness of life was still largely taken for granted; the universality of man held to be right and normal, not suspect and phenomenal as we of the West, who have lost it, regard versatility. In China, music's complexity of cosmological connotations persisted longer than in the West. For the West, too, shared the intuitive sense ofoverriding unity until scientific method began taking man and the world apart and developing the pieces. The harmony of the spheres, the association of times, seasons, planets, the ideas of humoral pathology, were not merely the fanciful conceits of poets and doctors steeped in magic, but the intuitive apprehension of an underlying truth, which losing, he who loses is lost.
Media:val schoolmen, such as Aleuin, in his Disputation with his pupil (Charlemagne's son), uses defmitions that would have had a familiar ring to a Chinese scholar.
'What is writing?' asks the younger Pepin. 'The guardian of history,' Aleuin replies. 'What is speech?' 'The revealer of the soul.' 'What are the stars?' 'Pictures on the roof of the heavens, guides to sailors.' 'what is the sun?' 'The splendour of the sky, the divider of the hours.' Had Aleuin been given the latest scientific answer from Greenwich, he would not have been greatly affected, because it was their effect on man, their value as symbols with which he was concerned. The knowledge of phenomenal origin and cause was of far less importance.
In China, music had been inextricably woven into the whole pattern of life. The notes of its pentatonic scale were male and female, were each related to the compass, the planets, the elements; to substances and colours. Do was North, Mercury, wood, black, and each aspect was reversible because it was not a substitute. Music not only had the powers that the West knew through Orpheus, but was held by the Chinese to be essential to the world's equilibrium. Through his musical harmonies or disharmonies, man was responsible for the balance of the earth. The welfare of the empire depended on the correctness of the pitches and scales that he made. But it was in man's heart that music was born, and 'it is the heart that works the miracles, the great heart that in music finds its voice and form'. Music, the ancient Chinese believed, affected government and government affected music. Fourteen centuries before Christ, the psychological and therapeutic value of music was not only recognized but accepted as part of the apparatus of rule, as it was later in classical Greece. The Emperor Wu who lived in the ftrst century
B.C. created an imperial office ofMusic, with special departments
A Race of Green Ginger
for the composition of the various kinds necessary, not to enter
tainment, but to ritual and to rule.
Had 1 known all this at the time, had 1 then been convinced,
as 1 am now, that the pursuit, preservation and correlation of all
forms ofharmony is ofvital importance to me and to humanity,
perhaps I could have learned more from Jeanne; carried her with
me out of
Kulangsu to explore broad fields of limitless promise.
As it was, we went without her to the University concert.
Amoy University looked quiet and purposeful in the grey afternoon.
The large plain blocks were lifted from monotony by the upcurved, green-tiled roofs, an excellent blend of Eastern and Western idioms. Its situation, between the granite rocks and the sea, had an austere dignity. It was hard to associate the place and the quietly animated students, drifting about the still raw quadrangle and gardens, with riots and rabbles; with histrionics perhaps, but not with hysterics.
Yet, all over China, it was the students who supplied the most ardent and fanatical agitators, as well as the political spearheads of revolution.
There were a lot of Chinese visitors, also Mr. Peck, the Roots and, striding among them, magnificently tall and fair, the Viking -Mrs. Chen. Was she ever homesick? I could have imagined her fmding some kinship with the Tartar tribes ofthe Mongolian steppes, but the very name Iceland, and all it symbolized for me, seemed impossible to reconcile with this subtropical country and its dark, fine-boned people.
In one of the smaller halls we gathered to hear the se players. The first performer already sat behind the table which bore his instrument, a kind of psaltery, and was there a single orchid in a vase-or am I in another picture? He wore grey brocaded silk beneath his short black satin jacket and bent gravely over the silk strings.
'1 hope,' he eyed us solemnly, 'you, my honoured audience, will not emulate the Emperor Huang Ti who, you will remember, was so deeply moved by the Lady Su's playing of the se that he forthwith ordered the number of strings to be halved in order that he might suffer less.'
The audience was delighted.
'What are they laughing at? What did he say? Do tell me.' I, who had not been able to follow him, pestered Mrs. Lim. She told me, and added that the Emperor Huang Ti had lived a legendary four thousand five hundred years ago.
From the frrst, the music was between the player and his se. He seemed to be privately communing with the strings. Then I had the sensation that he and the se were one, and that their utterances were too subtle for me to understand. As ofhis mother, Talleyrand could have said of the man-se: 'Elle ne parlait que par nuances . .. jamais elle n'a dit un bon mot: c'etait queIque chose de trop exprimee.' Its idiom was entirely strange, too baffling for immediate enjoyment, but it left us both with an aftermath in memory as strong and elusive as the aroma of Chinese tea on the palate.
In China, from legendary times, music was written for poetry and poetry written to be sung. Both spoke a language I could not understand, using age-old symbols, classic repetitions and allusions to which I had not been educated to respond either intellectually or emotionally. Yet this delicate, esoteric-seeming music, the Chinese told me, had been considered so potent as to be dangerous to the virtue of young women, so that the female performers were usually hetaira-like courtesans. Balinese and Javanese music I can easily accept as emotionally and erotically stimulating, but I have never heard any Chinese chamber music that I felt to be anything but cerebral. Perhaps for the Chinese, too, it had a delayed effect, for the Chinese, in spite of a culture based on the male-female concept-the Yin and Yang-and of a hearty sexuality, are one of the most sexually decorous people in the world. No open display of sexual emotion is tolerated. The twentieth-century girl entertainers, who were'still a feature of Chinese banquets, were trained to charm but not seduce, and each one appeared to sing and to pour wine accompanied by her elderly woman attendant. Harris, a guest one night of some Chinese merchants, had committed an unforgivable social error by pinching the buttocks, and generally treating as a prostitute, the highly respectable girl who had poured his wine-behaviour so barbarous in the eyes of his hosts that he had never been invited to another Chinese feast.
Listening to the se players, the power ofChinese music seemed to me to be by association rather than direct appeal to the senses.
Association played a great part in the life of all Chinese. One might say that on all levels, the Chinese were classically educated, as Cyril and I had observed that morning, standing in the audience at the open-air theatre of the city god's temple.
The rich elaborate dresses shone magnificently above the bare brown shoulders, the sweat-soaked shirts of the onlookers. The crowd was packed tight below the stage; sugar-cane sellers, hot dumpling and bean-cake sellers, vendors of brilliant raspberrypink and lime-green cordials generously flecked with dead flies. The crowd was held like meat in brawn, by a thick, cloying smell of sweat, frying and cheap tobacco; glazed over by the brazen assault of the sun, of the cymbals, drums, clappers and clarionets.
There had been no performance since the New Year Festival, and the troupe was playing The Monkey King (part of all repertoires) to an appreciative and certainly chiefly illiterate crowd, who, according to our Chinese companion, never missed a point. Each gesture, each movement, was symbolic, and tradition has trained the audience to interpret it. From dress, ornaments and paint, they recognize a character's profession, his goodness or badness. Even his walk and his sleep revealed his role to the onlookers. They had no need for scenery or properties; a switch was enough for a mounted man, gestures completely to furnish the stage. The audience had seen and heard it all before, they condemned the same villains, applauded the same featherdecorated patriots, laughed at the same buffoons, as generations of their ancestors had done.
But rigid as was the interpretation, it did not prevent the Monkey King himself that morning, when he saw us taking photographs, from shouting at us from the edge of the stage to take a photograph of him, and to pose there, with tossing beard and, we were told, broad comment, which sent the audience into paroxysms of laughter. He carried a fan, but the audience knew that he also had about him the peaches of Immortality which he had been stealing for centuries.
As we returned from the concert that evening, the players were still acting with undiminished gusto, the raucous band still lustily tearing the air with horrible discords. The children who had been sitting on the garden walls were still there, the seats for patrons on the stage were still occupied.
'At least: I said, half-stunned by the din, 'we now know there's something better than that. There was something fascinating about the table lutes.'
'I prefer Lee's p'i-p'a every time: declared Cyril. 'Perhaps,' I replied, 'because it's got only just the right number ofstrings for playing to your emotional capacity.'
CHAPTER VII ......
Bill Brown Xiamen University www.amoymagic.com
I'm working on another historical book about Amoy, and have run into a dead end trying to find a copy of the Popular Mechanics December 1922 edition. Does anyone have an idea where I can get it, other than the low quality scan at Google Books? I'd love to get either the original page or a high resolution scan of page 823 (I do have the original photo from which the page was made, but need the sketches in it--a scan of the entire page).
