When Chinese Music Met the West

School songs, gramophones and municipal orchestras pulled Chinese music into a world system.

Related

ModernPianoViolinErhu

The question

After 1840, churches, brass bands, printed scores and schools arrived together. Chinese musicians had to write their own sounds with someone else's grammar. The difficulty was deciding what to keep and what to change.

Historical arc

Matteo Ricci brought a keyboard instrument to the Ming court, where the ear met Western tuning. In the treaty ports, hymn singing and customs bands took root; the Shanghai Public Band, founded in 1879, became an orchestra under Mario Paci in 1922. From 1904 Shen Xingong and Zeng Zhimin fitted Chinese words to Japanese and Western tunes, and numbered notation spread with the textbooks. Li Shutong's Farewell borrowed an American song. The National Conservatory opened in Shanghai in 1927, making composition a teachable profession. Liu Tianhua rebuilt the erhu repertoire, Huang Zi wrote the cantata The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Ma Sicong composed Nostalgia, and Xian Xinghai wrote the Yellow River Cantata in Yan'an.

The turning point

The turn was from borrowed tunes with new words to symphonies, cantatas and art songs on Chinese subjects. The conservatory supplied technique, the war supplied an audience, and the argument over East and West became an argument over direction.

What to listen for

Hear first the American song behind Farewell, its four phrases and its harmony. Then Molihua, the folk tune Western composers took up. Finally Turandot, where Puccini sets that tune inside an invented China.

Related

The period is Modern; the piano and violin appear in Piano and Violin, and Liu's instrument in Erhu.

Sources

• 汪毓和《中国近现代音乐史》（人民音乐出版社）— 年代与史实核对，未引用
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — institutional history checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.