An English folk melody, a Chinese orchestral favourite and a contemporary premiere ask different things of the sheng. Julia’s performances in London show how much cross-cultural music depends on understanding those differences.
Near the climax of “Greensleeves,” Yuhan Luo (Julia) takes the melody into the sheng’s upper register. The Chinese multi-pipe bamboo mouth organ, fitted with free reeds, adds a bright edge to the tune. “The timbre is a little like Scottish bagpipes,” she says. To her ear, the sheng helps retain the familiar character of the English melody, even in an arrangement played predominantly on Chinese instruments.
The performance took place during the fourth London International Chinese Music Festival, directed by Cheng Yu. Julia played with the UK Chinese Orchestra, in a programme whose instruments included the pipa, a Chinese lute, and the erhu, a two-string bowed instrument. There were also the dizi, a bamboo transverse flute, and the guzheng, a plucked zither. In “Greensleeves,” her handling of projection and blend gives the high sheng line a clear place in the texture. Its distinctive colour remains audible alongside the strings, while her balance keeps the familiar melody in focus.
In “Good News Reaches the Border” (‘Beijing Xixun Dao Bianzhai’), she opened with her sheng alone. The melody is familiar to Julia, and its celebratory character feels immediate to her. Other instruments respond to the solo, so the way she shapes the opening phrase gives the ensemble something to work from. “Here the sheng is the main character,” she says. “In ‘Greensleeves’ it’s more of a colour.” Her shaping of the exposed melody sets up the orchestral response. The direction she gives the phrase carries into the answering parts, keeping the exchange coherent as the texture expands.
The Cultural Exchange of Music
The arrangements assign those roles, but the player still has to judge how strongly to project a line and how it will sit alongside the other instruments. Julia’s control of that balance is the persuasive part of these performances. Her phrasing and projection give the sheng a different weight in each score: a leading melodic voice in “Good News Reaches the Border,” a supporting colour within the orchestral texture of “Greensleeves.” An English melody rescored for Chinese orchestra also makes clear how cultural exchange can happen through repertoire, with predominantly Chinese instrumentation.
Julia comes from Guangdong and notes that she received her professional training at Xinghai Conservatory of Music, studying euphonium, a low brass instrument. Western classical ensemble work gave her a close understanding of how an individual part fits into a score. That background informs her current work with the sheng, particularly when composers and performers bring different expectations to a rehearsal.
In some Chinese instrumental ensembles she has played with, musicians rely heavily on a shared sense of melodic direction. A change of pace or the shaping of a phrase may be agreed through playing together, with room for individual treatment. Her Western classical training generally placed more emphasis on settling articulation, tempo relationships and balance from the score. Julia describes habits she has encountered, with considerable variation within both environments. An accomplished player can still arrive with a different instinct about how much to follow a written marking and how much to take from a colleague’s phrasing.
She wants composers approaching Chinese instruments to spend time with their repertoire. Range and construction are a start, though they reveal little about how musicians have used an instrument. Hearing traditional pieces gives a composer a sense of its melodic language and the relationship between technique and expression. Contemporary writing can depart from that practice as far as the composer wishes. Julia’s point is that understanding it first makes the departure an informed choice, and may suggest possibilities that a list of available notes would never reveal.
The Adaptability of Composers
For the sheng, one such possibility begins with breath. Its reeds can produce sound on inhalation as well as exhalation. Julia would want a composer to know this before planning a sustained passage: it affects the options for musical continuity.
Michael Ellison’s curve, which received its UK premiere at the festival gala at Holy Sepulchre London this past August, required a different kind of preparation. Musical gestures pass between parts, with some players waiting for a previous gesture to end before continuing. Julia had to listen across the ensemble while following the conductor’s cues. Her account of the rehearsals shows an ensemble awareness that extends beyond her own part, particularly in the attention she gives to the timing of entries and the ends of other players’ gestures. “I found curve the hardest,” she says. Its writing was unfamiliar to her, combining Chinese instruments with a contemporary approach that did not fit neatly into either of the musical traditions she knew.
Some ranges and note-to-note transitions were initially awkward for the performers. After hearing them rehearse, Ellison adjusted other parts of the score, making the music more workable for the ensemble. Julia recalls this as a useful exchange between the composer’s ideas and the players’ instrumental knowledge. A difficulty heard in one part could be addressed through changes elsewhere. Julia also recalls adjusting passages she found too high and revising the articulation herself, without consulting Ellison about each change. She felt he trusted her judgement as a performer.
Music for International Audiences
Julia has also encountered composers drawing on techniques from Western instruments when writing for Chinese ones. That can prompt worthwhile experiments, provided the idea is reconsidered for the instrument being played. A technique may produce a different timbre or require different physical movements; sometimes the original effect cannot be reproduced. Working through those differences gives the composer more material to create with. The performer can help find a workable way of achieving the effect, or a different effect worth using.
“I really love Chinese music,” Julia says, explaining why she wants to hear it in more contemporary settings. She wants international listeners to enjoy its sounds as she does, and would like to collaborate with other musical traditions and other art forms. An instrument with a long history can still play new music, she points out. The festival gave her practical reasons to insist on that, particularly when a score was being revised around the musicians who would perform it.
The role Julia wants to develop is one she describes quite happily as being in the middle. It involves understanding what another musician expects and helping colleagues make sense of it, whether the issue is an instrumental technique or a way of phrasing. The differences can stay audible as the musicians decide what to do with them. “If I can understand how one side thinks and help the other side understand it, I’m happy,” Julia says. Julia aims to bring Chinese music to wider audiences through contemporary work developed with musicians from other traditions, drawing on the understanding they build in rehearsal.