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creating Chinese orchestras more like western ones
Probably the best known of these was the Datong yinyue hui” (great harmony music society, 大同音樂會) established in Shanghai in the 1920s. They were supposed to perform at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, but couldn’t raise enough money to go, and sent a recording instead; it appears to have been lost. Here’s a picture of them:
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(Source: Xuruhui. Please contact us if any copyright issue.)
even dressing the orchestra
The National Orchestra on the mainland wore Mao Zedong jackets and pants. The one in Taiwan wore Western suits and ties, like Western orchestras; so did the Chinese orchestra in Singapore. Not wanting to imitate either of these models, and wanting to affirm a connection to traditional Chinese culture, the HKCO chose a modified version of a Qing dynasty scholar’s gown for men, and a cheongsam (really an early 20th century innovation) for women.
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(Source: The image originally appeared in Light and Shade: Sketches from an Uncommon Life. Copyrights © 2009 by Hong Kong University Press. Reprinted by permission of Hong Kong University Press.)
creating new instruments
Traditional Chinese instruments were not as standardized as western ones. The violin that an orchestra would use in New York and the one that an orchestra would use in Berlin are the same (unless it’s a concert designed for old instruments), but a huqin in Shanghai would not necessarily be the same as one in Chengdu. Nor would it necessarily sound the same, raising problems for the use in one place of scores written for performance elsewhere. Moreover, modern Chinese orchestras that wanted to play adaptations of western music found that traditional Chinese instruments could not do certain things. For instance, Western string instruments rely on the air vibrating within a hollow chamber inside the instrument for their sound: big instruments with a big hollow sound can produce very low pitches, as on a cello or double bass. However, traditional Chinese string instruments did not rely on a hollow chamber behind the strings, but on a membrane made from an animal skin – usually a snakeskin. Limits on the size of available snakeskin pieces therefore limited how low a sound a string instrument could make, and there simply was no traditional Chinese string instrument that could produce a sound like those of a cello or bass. By the mid-20th century, however, there were artificial fabrics that could produce the right sounds, and be made in pieces as big as one wanted; the HKCO was a pioneer in creating string instruments using these fabrics, which allow for low-sounding strings, and are now used by many other Chinese ensembles. As a bonus, since these fabrics do not come from animal skins, some people feel that they represent a more humane approach to instrument-making. At first, some people felt that instruments made with the new fabrics did not sound as good as the old ones, but they have now improved and are widely accepted – some people feel they sound better (which was apparently Bard’s opinion).
