linda@amdcad.UUCP (Linda Seltzer) (09/08/85)
Two weeks ago a Chinese professional singer came to a class I'm
taking at UC Berkeley and invited us to a concert of Cantonese opera,
followed by a visit to a Chinese music club (it is very unusual for
Americans to receive an invitation to such a club). We were very
fortunate, as the singer came to our class out of sheer impulse and
whim. Last night we had a fascinating and enjoyable musical tour
of Chinatown (San Francisco). The third floor of the Holiday
Inn on Kearny Street is the Chinese Cultural Center, which includes
a gallery, a shop, and an auditorium, which is quite modern and
well-equipped. There we saw two scenes from the Cantonese opera
Cheery Ripe, Hearts are Broken, performed by the Pear Garden in
the West's San Francisco Chinese Opera Troupe. The performers
were raised and trained in Hong Kong, but now live here. The
story was a romantic drama involving various family intrusions and
in-law problems occurring in marriages which arose from duty and
arrangements. This opera followed the early-twentieth mood of
people who desired love marriages rather than arranged marriages to
be the norm in society.
The instruments included loud gongs, woodblocks, and a few string
instruments. The women's voices had a very high range, with
C two octaves above middle C being no problem at all; they
cultivate a very high-pitched sounding timbre, in contrast to
the fuller timbre of Western opera singers or the lyrical
timbre of Indian raga singers. The singers set the beat (there
was no conductor) in the course of their parts, and the instrumentalists
followed. Experienced opera performers are supposed to be trained well
enought that they don't have to rehearse. All stage dierction
is carried out spontaneously during the performance with no
planning and no rehearsal; the players relied on experience and
customary performance practice. The costumes were of brilliant pastel
colors decorated with sequins and other ornaments.
Next to the music club - a completely different atmosphere. Here
the atmosphere was very informal, not high-society as at the opera.
The musicians start playing at 9 p.m. and continue until about 3-4
a.m., regardless of what the neighbors think (Saturday nights
only). There are numerous instruments hung from a rack and
stored in cases, and anyone who wants to join in (assuming some
knowledge of the instruments) just picks up an instrument and plays,
althouth there are many regular attendees who have their positions
and instruments. We had another amazing coincidence. There was
a woman there wearing a somewhat formal dress and a fur stole.
She is Luw Yim Hing, one of the foremost prima donnas in Peking,
and she happened to be in the U.S. for awhile (not giving concerts
right now - I guess there isn't anyone to sponsor an opera of
that level of professionalism here). Unlike professional musicians
in the U.S., who would *rarely* join a group of amateurs and perform
in front of a group of strangers for free, she took her turn at the
microphone and proceeded, with a student, to perform a duet from an
aria. Her voice was quite beautiful and high. We were told that she
started at the age of ten - she had a hard life and never had a chance
to go to school. She learned how to read by learning librettos.
Many of the opera performers watched and imitated the performers they
watched - they weren't taught by teachers. We were told that this was
a quite week - not too many people had come because two weeks ago
two female singers got in a fight over the microphone, and they
were tearing at each other's hair.
The music at the club was from opera - the singers led, and the
instrumentalists improvised as in jazz jamming. At midnight everyone
took a break and dinner was served. Then the music resumed (many
of these people were over 50, but they weren't tired at all).