A Hundred Million Musicians: China's Classical Challenge

China is the fastest-growing nation in history.

But this economic superpower with a fifth of the world's population

has a cultural agenda, too.

In the last 30 years it has enthusiastically embraced

Western classical music.

Huge sums are being poured into instruments and concert halls,

making music very big business.

I believe in the universality of music,

and I think Beethoven's symphony speaks with the same

directness to anybody who has the capacity to open himself.

Superstars like Lang Lang are inspiring a whole generation

of Chinese children, over 50 million of whom are learning piano.

Overall, my estimated number for people who are learning music,

it's almost 100 million, I would say.

The surprising thing is that 40 years ago, this music

was condemned as imperialist and corrupt.

Now it seems that almost everybody in China wants to master it.

SHE SINGS

It is a cultural experiment on a vast scale.

Is this part of the government's initiative to sell China to the West?

Or is it a form of social engineering?

There's no doubt that there's a new generation of Chinese

who are immersing themselves in this music

that has its roots on the other side of the world.

SHE SINGS

Peking Opera is China's own ancient musical form.

Dating from the 18th century,

it's based on long-established folk tunes.

Performers are expected to subdue their own individuality

and copy the masters of the generation before.

In contrast, tonight's opera performance

is followed by a Beethoven string quartet,

which requires a personal, emotional interpretation from each player.

These are members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,

and in this setting it's a very public statement

of the new status of Western music here.

MUSIC: String Quartet No. 14 By Beethoven

The latest foreign orchestra to visit China is here

with its conductor, Daniel Barenboim, to perform the Beethoven

symphonies in Beijing and Shanghai.

You cannot speak about music only as emotion,

as you cannot speak about music as only discipline.

Music really allows the marriage of inconceivable partners.

It is most definitely thrilling,

I think for the audience as well as for us.

Coming here to Asia, playing concert halls to a full public

and getting such warm response, it is exhilarating.

It is like a wave coming and washing you up.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

This appreciation of Western music has been fuelled by local

governments building brand-new concert halls all over China.

Every city, it's not just the top tier cities now,

it's the secondary cities and even the tertiary cities are building these places.

There are cities no-one in China has ever even heard of and has this fantastic concert hall in it.

So it's a real, real building boom.

They say they have hundreds of beautiful halls,

no programme to fill in, but at least you see the intention

to make classical music part of the Chinese life, you know?

Not an exotic import, but part of our life, as well.

The music isn't entirely new to China.

It first arrived with missionaries, but took hold in the early

20th century among the Western colonial population of Shanghai.

For the Chinese government, it has always had a political significance.

After World War I in 1919, there was a real questioning of traditional

Chinese culture and there was this idea that maybe the reason

these Western countries can come in here and create

colonies like here in Shanghai is because our culture is too weak.

Several people actually wrote - if our Chinese people

went to a Western classical music concert every week,

they wouldn't spit, they wouldn't gamble, and they wouldn't go to prostitutes.

Because Germans don't do those things,

ergo, we won't do those things if we hear this kind of music.

This is the globally recognised Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

When it was founded in 1879,

it consisted of 20 Filipino musicians and a French conductor.

Initially, only Westerners were allowed to listen to them perform.

The first Chinese musician, Tan Shuzhen, didn't join until 1927.

This is a Chinese musician, he started to learn the violin

with missionaries, but he had never been to an orchestra.

Especially a foreign orchestra.

So he's the first one, sitting in an all-foreign orchestra

to play this piece which he had never heard before.

The music starts. Beethoven Fifth Symphony. Ba-ba-ba-bam!

MUSIC: Symphony No. 5 By Beethoven

He just...shaking! Because he has never heard sound come out that loud.

As Tan Shuzhen was becoming part of the musical establishment,

others were able to learn about European music on its home ground.

One of these was Zhou Xiaoyan, who studied in France and Germany in her teens,

and is still teaching today in her late 90s.

SHE SINGS IN FRENCH

There!

-"Le silence."

-Le silence.

SHE SPEAKS CHINESE "Si-LAN-ce".

My Father is a music fan.

He loves music, so whole family studies music,

Singing, violin, piano, composition - all my brothers and sisters.

For me, I like to sing.

STUDENT SINGS, PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT

On her return from Europe, Zhou became a teacher at China's

first conservatory of music, in Shanghai.

Even today she is one of very few teachers there who have studied abroad.

The Communist government, which took power in 1949,

wanted the Chinese to listen to Chinese music, and distrusted musicians, like Zhou,

who seemed to know more about Western music than their own.

When I went to France they say, "You are from China. Could you sing a Chinese song?"

I had no Chinese song. Only I remember one Chinese song

is a lullaby my mother sang, you know?

SHE SINGS IN CHINESE

A song like this. "Oh, this is lovely!"

That's the only Chinese song I could sing.

During China's Cultural Revolution,

between 1966 and 1976, everything Western was condemned.

And those involved in Western music suffered for it.

The Cultural Revolution is the worst time for classical music developing in China,

in the sense of the people.

Whoever studied Western music, you get punished.

You cannot play Beethoven, you cannot play Mozart.

Tan Shuzhen, who had blazed a trail for Chinese musicians,

was now teaching the new generation at the Conservatory Of Music.

The Red Guard took him from the home

and he stayed in the conservatory in a little room under the stairway,

and so his function is not teaching violin any more,

his function every day is to clean the bathrooms.

And he can tell you very clear when we visit him,

when you talk about this period,

he said he knows exactly 134 toilets in the whole building

he had to clean every day.

Zhou Xiaoyan was another victim.

At that time, almost ten years, I couldn't sing.

Because I was an enemy. Enemy of the Chinese people.

STUDENT SINGS, PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT

'They could forbid me to sing and to teach,

'but they couldn't forbid me to think.'

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra had survived changes of leadership

and the ups and downs of government policy.

Now it was sent to play for the peasants in the countryside.

The results changed the government's mind about classical music again.

Chinese music was seen as lethargic and making you want to sit

and listen to poetry or go off to the mountains and not make you want to fight,

whereas Western music was seen as more inspirational and more martial.

LIVELY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Mao's wife believed that Western musical instruments would

promote people to want to be more revolutionary.

And when they created these so-called model operas that were

basically big propaganda set-pieces,

they all used Western-style musical instruments

because she thought it would inspire people to revolution.

So, it was an unintended by-product of the Cultural Revolution,

was the training of a whole generation of musicians

of Western musical instruments.

Today, this unlikely product of Maoist propaganda has become

the main attraction in nostalgically themed restaurants.

UPBEAT MUSIC

HE SINGS ALONG

APPLAUSE

Despite the political turmoil, classical musicianship had survived.

After the Cultural Revolution in 1978,

when the conservatory started recruiting students

there were 18,000 applicants

competing for 200 positions.

The symphony that always spelled freedom to the Chinese is Beethoven's 5th.

It was the first piece to be played after the Cultural Revolution.

And Beethoven's masterpiece was welcomed for its symbolic meaning as much as for its music.

It's like a symbol of a coming back to civilisation,

to art and from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is performing the Fifth

in Shanghai's vast Oriental Arts Centre.

This music, despite coming from a different culture,

clearly has a huge attraction for Chinese audiences.

These young musicians come from Middle Eastern countries

and some of them, like the Chinese, were not necessarily born into the Western tradition.

It has to be said, you know, as an Arab,

I'm not supposed to be appreciating Beethoven either, right?

I mean, I'm supposed to be listening to Kulthum or what have you.

Yet here I am, and I love this music.

I don't know, I've always questioned the notion of origin

defining one's appreciation of art, whether it's music or otherwise.

But China's drive to become a world leader in this music involves

much more than simply welcoming foreign orchestras.

One particular instrument is key to Chinese musical aspirations.

When Western music came in, the piano just somehow became

a big symbol. It's big, it's expensive, it's dramatic,

and so if you could play the piano, it showed that you had kind of arrived.

Chinese enthusiasm for the piano is driven by this man.

Lang Lang is one of the most famous pianists on the planet,

and he's inspiring a whole generation of young Chinese musicians.

Piano lessons aren't just a stepping stone to the best schools,

but also a sign that a family can afford more in their lives than just work.

Jing Ting has been playing since he was five.

I think music also fills some of the role

that sport fills in other countries,

cos you don't see Chinese kids going into sports

nearly as much as you would see American kids.

A lot of kids are cared for by their grandparents

and their grandmothers don't want them to get dirty,

or rip their pants or cut their knees,

and so playing violin or piano is a much safer endeavour

than playing football or basketball or something like that.

I like playing the piano.

I do it five years.

It can make me smart, it can make me clever,

it can make me famous.

And it can make me happy.

My grandfather, grandmother, mother, father is proud of me.

Chinese parents very much view children as a continuation

of their own life's pursuit

and dream and aspiration.

So, in a way, they very much

fuse their own life together with children's.

Chung is 11 and she's also been playing the piano

for just five years.

In China's new culture of success,

the pressure on children like her is intense.

I notice often, then, one of the parents,

feeling that it's best to spend all their time helping the child

and to look after his or her life,

and sometime even sit with them

while they practise hours and hours.

So that means that one of the parents simply has to stop working.

LANG LANG: I mean, that's actually Chinese mentality,

is that we work everything harder.

It's not just music.

Everybody knows this is maybe a little bit too much,

but the whole society is like this,

and to ask me to say to a parent "Hey, slow down,"

is a waste of time. Just no-one going to listen.

The Chinese capacity for hard work

may be producing an army of aspiring professional musicians,

but classical music demands more than sheer mechanical perfection.

PIANO PLAYS

LANG LANG: I mean, nobody wants to only play piano like a machine.

You can always copy a recording, listen 100 times

and you kind of get some kind of a right accent,

right kind of a beat,

right pulse,

but that's not going to be for long,

because you need to understand why,

that actually the interpretation is that.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

This is why Daniel Barenboim's players are drawn to the

West-East Divan Orchestra,

to learn from one of the world's greatest interpreters

of classical music.

MUSIC: Symphony No 4 by Beethoven

He's giving us the inspiration, he's showing us the direction,

he's telling us how he hears it in his ear.

He's working with us

down to very small details.

And then he gives us room to do it ourselves.

Those are one of the most beautiful moments

and not every conductor can do that.

Just have this trust in his musicians and go back

and let them create it.

It is reflecting from one's own emotions into the bigger,

broader picture of humanity

and it's taking you on a journey.

AUDIENCE APPLAUDS

A literal journey, to the source of the music,

was undertaken by Lang Lang himself.

I toured everywhere in Europe, small towns that...

Basically, every musician who was born in those towns

had been there.

MUSIC: Piano Concerto No 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff

And, obviously, before that, I can play their notes

and their music's fine, but, when I go there,

when I talk about that composer with certain people

around the environment, it's a totally different thing.

It feels like you get their feelings,

you get their emotions, you get their thinkings,

rather than just a piece of paper.

William Chen is trying introduce his Chinese pupils not just to

notes and phrasing but to the ideas,

images and emotions that might be hidden in the music.

'The fundamental good aspects of learning music is that it

'does better help a young person to discover your inner feeling.

'At that, certain moments, you become almost vulnerable,'

but it's through the vulnerability you gain an understanding of yourself

and perhaps something greater, a sort of spirituality.

But 50 million solo pianists aren't what's required

for growing orchestras, or for the country.

Because of the government's one-child policy, making music

in groups has an important role in teaching children to play together.

So, all over China, local authorities are funding bands.

BAND PLAYS

My primary school wants to have a band.

Then the band needs a trombone.

Not one trombone, but I am one of them.

When the trombone appears the whole music changes,

it changes more energetic.

It's 35 minutes long,

but they only play for maybe ten minutes.

HE LAUGHS

The band teaches its members to be a small part of a bigger whole,

helps them to socialise and maybe even enjoy themselves, as well.

I think trombone is just...

In Chinese, we say they are heavy soy sauce.

HE LAUGHS

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Chinese society, through its Confucian philosophy,

even before communism laid great emphasis on a social structure

in which everybody knew their place.

It may be that in Western music individuals have found

a space for personal expression.

Under regimes, their oppressive culture...

And music is almost a safety valve for the people,

because a lot of things are not allowed them.

PIANO PLAYS WALTZ

Today, musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra are all Chinese,

and together they have achieved international recognition.

The scale and success of China's investment in classical music

is already changing the whole landscape of music making.

But is it also changing the Chinese themselves?

Music is just like water.

You, just like a glass,

will have a different shape as a character, as a human being.

Why we should put everybody in the same shapes?

It's not necessary and I think it's a tragedy.

We put everybody's thoughts the same thought. Why is that?

People have different imagination,

which makes our world become very colourful.

So music helps the kids to raise up their imagination

and help them to step in their own world.

FAST-PACED ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE