A symphony combining vivid Chinese folk songs and Western classical
music to portray the history of an immigrant group of people will
be performed in Connecticut of the United States in mid November.
Prof. Zheng Xiaoying, a world-renowned symphony director as well as
China's top female conductor, is scheduled to leave Saturday for
the United States at the invitation of Wesleyan University to lead the
university's orchestra in performing the Echoes of Hakka Earth
Castles.
Meanwhile, the composer of the symphony, Liu Yuan, and two Hakka folk musicians will
accompany Prof. Zheng.
The Chinese symphony will be performed during the annual music
festival of Wesleyan University, a top US college in the field of
ethnomusicology. A typical seminar on blending Western music with
Oriental music will be held at the same time.
Hakka people, popularly known as descendants of a tribe of ancient
Han people, China's largest ethnic group, are believed to have been
moved six times in the past centuries from north and northwest
China to east China's Jiangxi and Fujian provinces and southern
Guangdong Province, areas at the time mostly peopled with ethnic
minorities.
The name of the symphony derives from the Hakkas of west Fujian who
built up a number of square, round earth castles called
tulou in the Chinese or Han language, meaning "earth
buildings," which are unique and indigenous to their area of
China.
Made up of five movements, the symphony uses two old Hakka
folksongs as the theme, with a number of beautiful tunes recomposed
from the Hakka music.
During the 37-minute performance, two Hakka folk musicians will
perform with the orchestra, displaying the symphony's uniqueness
and indigenousness.
Li
Tiansheng, a 74-year-old reputed as the "King of Hakka singers,"
will sing a folk song in the second movement, describing
homesickness and the hope of Hakkas compelled to leave their
hometowns to make a living abroad.
At
two performances given in Beijing recently by the Xiamen
Philharmonic Orchestra, and also led by Prof. Zheng, Li's tender
and powerful performance moved the audiences, most of whom know
little about the history of Hakkas people and even do not
understand the Hakka dialect.
The second Hakka performer surprises the audience by using only a
leaf instead of any man-made music instrument during the third
movement of the symphony.
Qiu Shaochun is one of the few popular Hakka musicians who know how
to play this traditional musical instrument, which once was widely
sung and enjoyed by local farmers and cowboys.
The name "Hakka" comes from the people's dialect and in the Han
language or Chinese translates to "Kejiaren," or
"guests."
About 60 million Hakkas are scattered far and wide around the world
and an annual Hakka conference is held in different countries.
Echoes of Hakka Earth Castles debuted at the international
Hakka conference held in Longyan City of Fujian Province in the
year 2000.
At
that concert Hakkas from around the world joined the chorus in
singing the folk song in the last movement of the symphony, said
Prof. Zheng Xiaoying, who was herself born into a Hakka family.
"They share the same emotion and feelings as the symphony," she
said.
Liu Yuan, the symphony's composer, has also lived for 11 years in a
Hakka residence in the western part of Fujian Province.
"I
would like to dig out the soul of Hakkas as a group who had to
leave their hometowns and aspire and work very hard for a new
world," he said.
Echoes of Hakka Earth Castles has won not only Hakka fans
but also Westerners as well.
Prof. Janice Engsberg, who worked in China for 15 consecutive years
and now teaches in prestigious Xiamen University in
southern part of Fujian Province, has visited Hakka earth buildings
five or six times.
"It is indeed a great wonder that a typical Chinese symphony could
evoke my feelings and sentiments about the history of my own
family," she said. "My grandparents left Germany for the United
States in the late 19th century to look for a new world and I
myself came to China from the United States to find my own
world."
The symphony was performed in Japan in April this year. A
100-member Japanese chorus sang the Hakka folk song at the last
movement in Hakka dialect.
According to Prof. Zheng, the US chorus would also love to sing the
song in genuine Hakka dialect.
(Xinhua News Agency November 9, 2002)