Summary Report: People: Liang

Summary Report on trip to Beijing, China (21 May 1997 - 10 June 1997)

Meeting People: Professor Liang Maochun

LEFT: Professor Liang and me at the Central Music Conservatory. © EC 1997	One of my contacts through Cathy Chan was Liang Lei, a young Chinese composition student at the New England Conservatory. Liang Lei's father, a professor of modern Chinese classical music, Liang Maochun is a benign and scholarly, if slightly rotund, man with glasses. During the period of my stay in Beijing, he was conducting a graduate seminar on modern Hong Kong classical music at the Central Conservatory. I attended a couple of these sessions. These were my only meetings with him in person during my stay in Beijing.
The first such seminar I attended featured a young Hong Kong composer by the name of Joshua Chan (Chen Jinbiao). We heard three of his sample works after which he gave a short speech about his compositional philosophy and process. The students had much to say about his works, not all of which were very meaningful. The main criticism they, and the faculty present, had was that Chan's works lacked a distinctive character. It was a smorgasbord of east and west, and even within the east, it was unclear from which region of China he drew his inspirations. For example, the celebrated young Chinese composer, Tan Dun, makes frequent and clear references to the traditional music and shamanistic rituals of his home province, Henan.
	Graduate seminar on HK music run my Professor Liang. © EC 1997.
Professor Liang was not able to schedule another composer in the second session, so he invited a visiting graduate student from U.C. Berkeley, John Christopher Hamm, to speak on Hong Kong's popular culture. Christopher conducts research on the genre of kungfu stories, in particular, the works of Jin Yong. He was insecure about his command of the language and read from a script, which I thought took away from the content of his message. Professor Liang proved to be an invaluable help in setting up meetings with other musicians. He knew everybody, or so it seemed. Despite his busy schedule, he called Zhou Guangren (pianist) and Wei Tingge (musicologist specializing in Chinese piano music) on my behalf to make the proper introductions.	Professor Liang with Christopher Hamm, PhD candidate in East Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. © EC 1997.