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Last night we were at the city's concert hall, architecturally reminiscent of another building significant to music history: the Philips Pavilion, site of Edgard Varèse's groundbreaking Poème électronique in 1958.

Xinghai Concert Hall

Philips Pavilion, 1958

The occasion? A concert by the Chinese-instrument orchestra of Guangdong Province, of works by Fang Xiaomin, who is the chairman of my conservatory's composition department. Good playing, generally precise. The program was worrisome at first, with the first half consisting of what seemed to be little more than polite folk song arrangements. I had the uncomfortable thought during these pieces that composition training in China might focus on learning to execute a style correctly, without deviating from it too much. Then I remembered that composition departments in the West are often no less conformist, the difference being that the enforced style is "difficult modernism" rather than accessible, light concert overtures. This is changing in America -- I was lucky to study as an undergraduate and graduate student with truly open-minded professors -- but bastions of dry academicism still exist.

Two pieces on the second half dispelled those doubts. A large work from 1996 for gaohu and orchestra held the audience in a dreamlike state for long stretches, and the following piece for erhu (violin) and dizi (flute) brought some surprises in the orchestration.

Avant-garde composers in the West would not recognize the style as especially "forward-looking," but why should they? His musical style is fully Chinese. If we learned anything from postcolonial writing, it's that it's a mistake to impose European cultural priorities on music or art from other parts of the world. I admit I found the music confusing at first, but I've heard enough music in China to know that it operates on quite different principles, and I don't understand those principles in my bones in the same way that I do for Western music.

I've heard enough to know as well that his music, especially the two best pieces on the concert, are not strictly commercial while still pleasing the audience. He is extending the style of Chinese folk-related music beyond the familiar traditional pieces without aping European ideas of innovation.

Realizing this during the concert took me back to the concert in the fall of pieces by all the composition faculty at the conservatory. The one that distinguished itself to my ears was by a composer who studied in France, and it was stylistically the most European. I now wonder if Fang's approach is actually a more difficult tightrope to walk. It risks the accusation that the music is somehow "not serious." In some ways, I'm taking a similar path by working in a hybrid of avant-garde and popular styles. I won't get prizes at ICMC or SEAMUS -- and, come to think of it, I was turned down for a one-year faculty appointment some years ago -- because my music doesn't segregate itself enough from popular culture. Fang and I seem to agree that in the end, it's the audience that matters.