{"id":1977,"date":"2021-04-04T22:38:29","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T02:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1977"},"modified":"2021-04-05T16:19:12","modified_gmt":"2021-04-05T20:19:12","slug":"savage-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2021\/04\/savage-beauty.html","title":{"rendered":"Savage Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Min Xiao-Fen&#039;s &quot;White Lotus&quot; soundtrack trailer for 1934 silent film &quot;The Goddess&quot; with Rez Abbasi\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5uXpjzEX1hI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the highest achievements in present-day world music is the Chinese-American fusion. It is wondrously explicable. China\u2019s seismic political and cultural upheavals produced an earthquake of creativity. Conservatory-bound composers wound up on the countryside, absorbing folk music styles exploring timbre in ways they had never imagined. And \u2013 following Chinese speech, in which tonal inflections impart meaning \u2013 Chinese folk tunes subtly manipulate pitch, sliding between notes that are separately voiced by keyed Western instruments. A generation of important Chinese composers, paradoxical beneficiaries of enforced rural relocation, wound up studying in the West. For many, Bela Bartok became a lodestar for his way of retaining the spontaneity and savage beauty of folk elements. And so they discovered a middle ground between Chinese and Western instrumental performance \u2013 a musical kaleidoscope sounding \u201cAsian\u201d to American ears for its sighing speech-song and taut percussion patterns, yet equally foreign, in harmonic idiom, to Chinese audiences.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This new music spawned a new virtuosity of which Min Xiao-fen is a peak exemplar. She is both a demonic artist and a great instrumentalist. Her musical adventures have led in many directions. Her present collaboration with Rez Abbasi \u2013 showcased on a new CD titled <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/minxiaofenbluepipa.org\/news-2\/\">\u201cWhite Lotus\u201d<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 is special. His virtuosity is as protean as hers. Born in Karachi, raised in Southern California, he is a keen student of jazz, ethnic, and classical music. The resulting combination of pipa, guqin, ruan, and sanxian \u2013 all plucked instruments \u2013 with acoustic and electric guitars produces a limitless range of juxtaposition: of similarity and imitation; of dialogue and contradiction. The strumming physicality, the skittish passagework, the delicacy of inflection accessible to both players yields a veritable lexicon of East\/West fusion. To this are added the complex melismas, shifting vibratos, and rapidfire ornamentation of Xiao-fen\u2019s vocalism, as rooted in scat as in timeless Chinese tradition.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Though the new Xiao-fen\/Abbasi CD derives from Min Xiao-fen\u2019s original score for the classic Chinese silent film&nbsp;<em>The Goddess<\/em>&nbsp;(1934), it requires no video component to saturate the senses.&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17NMBLVq7V6XE7u417VRNdI7aefT0b4es\/view?usp=sharing\">Here<\/a><\/strong>, for instance, is the first, introductory track, in which Xiao-fen\u2019s haunted vocalism overlays guqin and acoustic guitar. And&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1KUPRgvN_z8ZLsr5OY7db0Q7S4X_dadEX\/view?usp=sharing\"><strong>here<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/a>is \u201cThe Flower Song,\u201d in which Eastern and Western plucked instruments \u2013 ruan and guitar \u2013 engage in a dialogue so symbiotic that it never registers as a juxtaposition of \u201cEast\u201d and \u201cWest.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I met Min Xiao-fen in 2004 during my tenure as Artistic Advisor to the Pacific Symphony. Subsequently, she\u2019s been a frequent guest with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postclassical.com\">PostClassical Ensemble<\/a> (the DC-based chamber orchestra I co-founded in 2003 with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez). She\u2019s played Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis for us. Also, we\u2019ve commissioned and premiered compositions by Zhou Long and Daniel Schnyder featuring&nbsp;&nbsp;Xiao-fen (the Schnyder being a devilishly difficult pipa concerto).&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The back-story: Min Xiao-fen arrived in the United States in 1992 feeling a \u201cneed for something new.\u201d She had grown up in Nanjing, where her father was a pipa master. He taught her his instrument, and also to sing Beijing Opera. The family also knew Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Her sister became a prominent erhu virtuoso, her brother a symphonic conductor. When she graduated from high school in 1977, the Cultural Revolution had not quite subsided \u2013 music conservatories remained closed. She successfully auditioned for Nanjing\u2019s leading traditional music ensemble and wound up playing eighty concerts a year, including European tours. Meanwhile, she began singing in Chinese clubs, backed by saxophone, electric guitar, and drums. Her voice proved adaptable to cooler Western styles. Some of her father\u2019s colleagues were not pleased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A turning point came in New York City when John Zorn invited her to improvise \u2013 which she had never attempted. That led to performing Thelonious Monk tunes for Jazz at Lincoln Center. She thought Monk \u201cwas actually a monk. \u201cMy contact with his music felt physical,\u201d she recalls. Her transformational Monk renditions remain a Min Xiao-fen signature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman once remarked that \u201cmusical borders can be crossed, but the value of crossing them depends on the degree to which you respect them.\u201d Some hybrids are slapdish. The intermingling of styles in \u201cWhite Locus\u201d is complete and comprehensive.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>(This blog post is adapted from my booklet note for \u201cWhite Locus.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the highest achievements in present-day world music is the Chinese-American fusion. It is wondrously explicable. China\u2019s seismic political and cultural upheavals produced an earthquake of creativity. Conservatory-bound composers wound up on the countryside, absorbing folk music styles exploring timbre in ways they had never imagined. And \u2013 following Chinese speech, in which tonal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1977","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-vT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1977"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1988,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}