Thursday, 29 October 2009

This week has been calmer than last week.

Last Sunday, we went exploring a bit in the "Old Town" neighborhood of Shanghai, which is south and east of People's Square, right along the Huang Pu river on the Puxi side. As I neglected to take any form of camera, I'm afraid there aren't any pictures from our walk. We'll have to make do with some images I've garnered from the web. (They're much better than mine would have been anyhow.)

It turns that much of the Old Town neighborhood has been taken over by the Yu Yuan Bazaar, an unpleasantly crowded shopping mall for tourists, which is kind of sad. We did get to see some real sights though:

• The Taoist Temple of the Town Gods (originally from Ming dynasty, middle 15th century but much altered since)

• The Yu Yuan Gardens (also dating from the Ming dynasty, middle 16th century)

• The Buddhist Chen Xiang Ge Nunnery

While trying locate some of these sights, we also got to see some of the old residential part of this neighborhood. With all the pressures exerted on this neighborhood by development on all sides, its quiet "Old Shanghai" way of life is probably not going to continue much longer.

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Last night, I went to a concert. Or I should say: half a concert. The first half was so excruciatingly execrable I didn't stay for the second half.

There's no other way to say it: this concert was a total fraud.

I was supposed to be hearing the same wonderful pianist (Behzod Abduraimov) that we heard last week playing Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, this time playing Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. There were also to be a work by a Dutch composer (Rogier van Otterloo) and two by Chinese composers (Huang Yijun, He Luting) on the program, along with Mahler's Totenfeier and Strauss' Till Eugenspiegel. The orchestra was to be the "Philips Symphony" which I had never heard of, but which was billed to be "the best orchestra in Holland."

The Philips Symphony turned out to be an amateur group comprised of employees of Philips (you know, they make TV sets, etc.). They were passable as an amateur group, but not one I would advise to tackle the likes of the Rhapsody or Totenfeier or Till Eugenspiegel. Well, no matter. They didn't play the Rhapsody, they hacked their way through Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto instead. Oh, and it wasn't Behzod Abduraimov at all! I don't know who the impostor at the keyboard was, as he was never identified by name, but he was also (at best) passable. (The program still had Abduraimov and the Rhapsody on the bill. Some program changes were announced in Chinese and English, but the change of piano personnel was not. If I was Abduraimov, I'd definitely explore legal action.) The Chinese works were not played on the first half (where the program said they would be). Perhaps they played them in the second half I could not bear to stay for. I did get to hear van Otterloo's mercifully brief Soldier of Orange. As I really can't say anything nice about that, I won't say anything at all.

Miles must have sensed that this concert was one to skip, and he did. I know I wish I had. As I sat squirming in my seat, once it became brutally clear the evening would be no better than a total débacle, dying to walk out, but not daring to do so until the intermission (a recorded announcement forbade doing that), I decided to focus on the clinically interesting sounds produced by the man sitting just behind me, who snored during the entirety of the Tchaikovsky. Not even the tutti sections would rouse him. Nor, apparently, did his cell phone, which rang out loudly several times.

I guess I now know the best — and the worst — that the Shanghai classical music scene has to offer.

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Weather permitting, we're thinking of taking a day trip out of town this Saturday. We want to explore the town of Suzhou with some friends visiting from Australia. Yesterday, the Saturday forecast was for rain, but that seems now to be moved to Sunday, so we may yet get to go. Fingers crossed!

Saturday, 24 October 2009

Just a quick follow up to my last post.

First, two corrections:

• MaiMai and Olaf Hochherz are not in fact connected. MaiMai turns out to be a guitarist here in Shanghai, but he was not present on Wednesday. Olaf's solo presentation was a substitution.
  
• Ben Houge's contribution Wednesday was in fact two pieces, not just one. They were: Lukou (Intersection) and Kaleidoscope Music. The one I took good notes on was Lukou, which is a sound installation that features manipulated recorded material (pretty much the traffic sounds that I thought I heard). But now that I think back, there was something distinctly different that I heard in the latter portion of his presentation, but that I didn't note down on my pad. That was the Kaleidoscope work, which takes a captured live audio signal and filters it various ways, with the filtering methods varying over time, as an aural analogue to what a kaleidoscope does with bits of "captured" visual data. This apparently exists in alternative versions where either a live person or software makes the decisions that determine the aleatoric destiny of the piece. You can read in Ben's blog about Lukou here and about Kaleidoscope here and here. (Thanks for the references, Ben!)

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Next, a brief report about Bang on a Can's gig at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center. 

This was in the Performance Hall, a much smaller and more intimate setting than the Concert Hall. They did some of the same material I heard on Wednesday (the Nancarrow, the Reich, and Ziporyn's Shadowbang), but there were four works that were not repeats:

• Tan Dun's Concerto for Six
• Julia Wolfe's Believing
• David Lang's Cheating, Lying, Stealing
  
• Michael Gordon's I Buried Paul

The Tan Dun Concerto, which was written for the ensemble, was an energetic fusion of Eastern and Western musical styles, and gave each of the members of the ensemble his or her virtuoso turn in the spotlight.

Wolfe's Believing was also written for the ensemble. It had a remarkably beautiful and passionate moment for the cellist to vocalize to her own tremolo accompaniment.

Lang's piece was the only one for which nobody gave any live description at the microphone, so I had to look it up on the web. It was written as a kind of response to how classical music seems only to be written to capture something positive. In the composers words: "in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. There is a swagger, but it is not trustworthy. In fact, the instruction in the score for how to play it says: Ominous funk." (More here.)

Gordon's I Buried Paul is a very effective (and affecting) work that takes as its inspiration, and point of departure, the strange ending to The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever from the Magical Mystery Tour album from 1967. (Yours truly at age 10 played his own LP so many times, the needle practically wore through the vinyl). The "real song" fades out, but not away, and when it comes back, you are kind of on "the other side of the looking glass" musically speaking. At some point near the true end of the track, John Lennon says "I buried Paul." America heard this and went a bit loopy thinking Paul was dead! People played the record fast, slow, and backward, and claimed to find all manner of revealed material. Gordon's version, eerily, brought me right back to 1967.

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I end this post by reporting minor temblorettes from the category of cultural shocks.

When you attend an event at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, you enter the hall with a ticket which is torn in two pieces. The attendant takes the stub. You keep the other part of the ticket. At the interval, if you wish to leave the hall, an attendant hands you one of the many stubs taken on the way in, but of course, not your own stub. On the way back in, you are to surrender the surrogate stub. If you happen to leave the hall by one door and re-enter by another (as is actually quite likely to happen with the Performance Hall, as the post-modernly conceived "center aisle" actually cuts across the hall on a diagonal) all hell breaks loose — this literally rends the social fabric, apparently. The attendant then points to some calligraphed character scrawled on the stub that indicates your crime of mixe-door-ation. Why they don't just rely on audience members showing the half of their ticket they retain is a mystery.

As you exit from the hall after the performance, you do so to some piped-in music whose meaninglessly happy (if intrusive) character is hard to describe, and whose purpose is even harder to ascertain. From our small sampling of concerts (just two), it may be unfair to infer that this piped in music will always be disturbingly jarring, juxtaposed to whatever one last heard on the program — but the score is definitely 2 for 2.

Thursday, 22 October 2009

It's a very busy week!

And it's not over yet....

Tuesday night found Miles and me at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center in Pudong for a concert of the Sydney Symphony with conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and young Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov. It was an all-Russian program, beginning with an orchestration of Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, continuing with Tchaikovsky's B-flat minor Piano Concerto, and concluding with Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Abduraimov is 19, and looks even younger. But his playing is amazing. After taking Grand Prize at the most recent London International Piano Competition, he is surely going places. The Tchaikovsky is a great piece to showcase his command of the instrument: his delicate rendering of all the filigree-work passages made me remember how much I loved this work when I was younger. Ashkenazy's reading of the Prokofiev was really exciting. The Sydney Symphony may not be the strongest orchestra in the world, but Ashkenazy surely got some great playing from them. Abduraimov gave the Chopin C major Étude as his solo encore. The orchestra obliged with Elgar's Morning Song, a little bon-bon I'd never heard before.

The Shanghai Oriental Art Center is an ultra-modern affair architecturally. It's actually supposed to be a flattened orchid flower. I forgot to bring any sort of camera, so I didn't take any snaps. Here's something I got from the web:

It's a big complex. There are three separate halls: the Concert Hall (where we were Tuesday night), the Performance Hall (where we will be tomorrow night), and the Opera Hall. The acoustics in the Concert Hall were really good.

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Yesterday was devoted to new music.

While Miles was busy at Fudan teaching, I spent the afternoon at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, for an informal concert in their 2nd "International Electroacoustic Music Week." The concert's subtitle was: "Rear Window: Non-academic Style Electroacoustic Music." I'm not too sure what that title was meant to convey, so I just quote it, faithfully, except for the addition of what I hope is illuminating punctuation marks.

I got to this event after hearing about it from someone I met through one of those "oh, you're going to be in Shanghai? you must meet ..." email exchanges that starts with the email equivalent of friends of friends and precedes to increasing degress of separation. That someone — Ben Houge — is an expatriate American musician, sound designer, and composer, who works quite a lot on tracks for video games, and who was presenting one of the featured works.

There were six performances on the bill, all active artists, groups, or bands in the Shanghai new music scene:

• Wang Changcun's compositions began with unpitched synthesized rhythmic material in the background, to which pitched material is gradually added in the foreground. His stuff was LOUD. (I was grateful I happened to have a set of earphones in my bag.)
• I think what was called MaiMai actually was a person named Olaf Hochherz (who also participated in the last performance, see below). His work was very delicate. There were little bursts of sound — like bird chirps.
• Next came Torturing Nurse, a "noise band." Their stuff was, well, amplified analog noise, and it was VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY LOUD (again, I resorted to the earphones, as did several others in the audience). The torturing part of their name is definitely truth in advertising, at least as regards their amplification equipment. About 4 minutes into their set, there began to be little wispy coils of smoke coming from one of the amps. At length, the wisps grew to be more of a real plume that was hard to ignore. Whereupon they stopped. They are definitely wild, crazy, and pretty much way out there.
  
• Ben Houge's piece was next up. It was a fascinating "sound installation" which I think began with recorded material (I think I heard trains, traffic, crowd sounds, ship sounds, sirens), which was then mixed and blended together. I only met Ben in person yesterday, and look forward to hearing more from him about his work. His web site is here. His blog ("Aesthetic Cartography") is here.
• Then came Yen Yi, who presented a couple of works, one of which featured an electroacoustic flute-like instrument played live against a track of bell-like synthesized sounds. The other was a really great audio/video work based on a typical scene of Shanghai traffic at an intersection. The sounds of of the beeping horns were remixed to last unnaturally long, and eventually they "took over" everything, while the video similarly seemed to freeze. The work develops like this for a time, and eventually a realistic flow of time re-emerges.
• The last act brought back Olaf Hochherz, this time together with Jun-Y Ciao, who, together, are Power Wood Quality. Ciao did some free improvisation on amplified analog instruments against a background track prepared by Hochherz. This was first on a bass clarinet, later on an alto saxophone. If not familiar with free improvisation, it's a little hard to describe. Whatever instrument is used, it is used almost accidentally. It is not "played" in the ordinary sense of the term. Sounds are made on it, but not necessarily in the way customarily intended for the instrument. The instrument may also be "prepared" in novel ways. Ciao used improvised "mutes" that looked like they were plastic bottles.
  

There was a discussion session following the concert, but I asked Ben if it would be in Chinese, and he said it probably would, so I didn't stay. Too bad, as I would have liked to hear more about how various things were actually done, but I could have only benefited from hearing that in English.

New music was still the order of the day yesterday evening.

The great Bang on a Can All Stars ensemble are in Shanghai this week, giving a big concert (that is what we are seeing tomorrow night back at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center), and a smaller concert this evening at the Conservatory, as part of their Electroacoustic week. Lucky me, I got to see them last night for an informal free gig in the garden of the James Cohan Gallery (a New York gallery which has opened a Shanghai "branch"). Forewarned to do so, I got there half an hour early and snagged one of the very few real seats (most people had to stand). Here's a quick snap I took (sorry for the clumsy light glare):

They did some pieces as an ensemble, and gave some solo turns to some of the individual musicians.

As an ensemble, they played a fantastic transcription (by the ensemble's clarinetist, Evan Ziporyn) of a rhythmically complex piece by Conlon Nancarrow, called 4 Piano Studies. They also played some movements of music (also by Ziporyn) from Shadowbang, a colaborative project with a shadow puppet theater company.

The electric guitarist Mark Stewart played Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, a minimalist work where the performer plays live against multiple tracks of himself on tape. Ziporyn played an interesting piece written for him on bass clarinet — David Lang's Press Release. The piece consists of alternations of low and high notes, and the name is a bit of a pun. It's based on the conception that to play a low note you press keys down, and to play a high note, you release them. (This is actually a misconception, but ignore that.) The group's double bass player, Robert Black, also played a very impressive, even virtuosic, solo piece, but I'm sorry to report that I didn't catch what it was.

After the performance I went off to dinner at a Hunnan restaurant a short walk from the gallery with about a dozen people I met through Ben.

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Today I have another duet session with my violinist friend. We are (probably) going to tackle the Schumann D minor Sonata together.

Tomorrow evening it's back to Pudong for Bang on a Can All Stars.

As I said, a busy week.

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

I love Garage Band!

I don't know why I didn't think of doing this before. Instead of publishing my latest compositions as .mid files (which end up playing in whatever middling-quality midi file player you happen to have on your system), I can import the midi files into the MacOS X Garage Band app, use its superior library of synthetic midi instruments, and export to .m4a (for which you are much more likely to have a high quality player, and which you can import directly into iTunes). Yes, the files will be bigger, but they should sound a lot better.

So that's what I've done, and the results are here:

• Prélude, Shanghai, September 22 - 23, 2009
• Barcarolle, Shanghai, September - October, 2009

Monday, 19 October 2009

Autumn weather has come to Shanghai (at last)!

Daytime high temperatures have moderated, humidity is back to reasonable levels, and while it's still quite warm when you're in the sun, when you're not, there is even a bit of crispness in the air, especially in the mornings and evenings. It's what I like to call "sweater weather." But some locals have warned us that this is temporary. As one person put it: we're now in "the one good weather month of the year." Hmm.

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The Anton Kuerti concert last Saturday was a wonderful experience musically — and, I'm afraid, an educational one as regards the Shanghai classical music audience.

Kuerti opened his program with quite a handful (especially as, at age 71, he is of a "well seasoned" age):

• Mozart: C minor Fantasy (K. 475, 1785)
  
• Haydn: E-flat Major Sonata (Hob. 52, 1794)
• Schumann: G minor Sonata (Op. 22, 1833 — 1838)
  

This was well over a solid hour of difficult music, so any doubts about Kuerti's strength or stamina at 71 are misplaced. For the Schumann, we even got a special treat. The final movement that Schumann originally composed for the sonata was regarded as "impossibly difficult" by his wife Clara. She persuaded him to withdraw it, replacing it with a more conventional rondo finale. Kuerti included both of the final movements in his performance.

Kuerti's playing of the early classical composers is all about texture. His preference is clearly for the softer end of the dynamic spectrum. But he has a powerful command of his pianissimos, and his softest tones always firmly project. The Schumann was especially dramatic. I'll definitely have to study the score to the original last movement, which was completely new to me. It is much more interesting than the replacement.

After working his way forwards chronologically during the first half of his program, he proceeded to reverse course after the interval:

• Mendelssohn: a tryptych consisting of the Variations Sérieuses (Op. 54, 1841), the Scherzo a Capriccio (written for inclusion in a compilation called the Album des Pianistes, there is no opus number, but the work dates from 1835 — 1836), and the Rondo Capriccioso (Op. 14, 1828 — 1830)
• Beethoven: A-flat Major Sonata (Op. 110, 1821)

Kuerti brought a magically silvern touch to the leggiero passages of the early Mendelssohn. (The Rondo was written before Mendelssohn was 20.) But there was real pathos in his reading of the Variations, a somewhat dark, counter-to-type work by Mendelssohn that should be played more.

But, for me at least, the high point of the evening came in the final movement of the Beethoven sonata, from the point of the return of the Klagende Lied (Song of Lamentation) theme to the end. This lied passage only lasts about a minute, during which time the performer must convey the most profound emotional desolation (the precise marking: is "ermattet" — "exhausted" — but the rhythm given to the melody, distorted from its first appearance earlier in the movement, suggests a human voice broken with sobbing). Then comes the return of the fugue subject, inverted from its original appearance to fall rather than rise. During the fugue, Beethoven does just about everything possible on the piano of his day to revitalize the emotional state of the music — the soft pedal, used at the beginning, is lifted gradually; the tempo increases bit by bit, then wildly; the contrapuntal details of the fugue are first distorted rhythmically, lose their distinction, and finally pretty much fall away in the gathering rush of notes. The peroration at the conclusion of the movement brings a resounding A-flat Major arpeggiated chord that includes notes from six octaves, and lasts 4 full bars. Kuerti was like a sherpa leading one through all of this, and the finish was positively luminous.

Now the promised word about the Shanghai classical music audience. Perhaps this event was not well marketed. Perhaps other concerts we go to will be better attended, but the orchestra floor was nearly deserted for this one (the balcony was better populated). With a top price of just ¥350 (a bit over $52) I don't think it was money considerations keeping people away. Certainly we have paid higher prices for tickets for other performances at other venues. But there is worse to report. The printed program contained errors both of omission and commission, leaving off the Schumann entirely, and listing the Beethoven work bizarrely as "G Major Sonata, Op. 10" (there are 3 piano sonatas in Op. 10, none of which are in G Major). This was puzzling, since all of the web marketing had the program completely correct. (However, this prompted Kuerti to make some off-the-cuff explanatory comments in English to the audience from the keyboard, which we thoroughly enjoyed.) But there is still worse.... Kuerti had to begin both the Mozart and the Mendelssohn Variations twice. The Mozart, which begins quietly and mysteriously, was sabotaged by the insistent bleeping of a cell phone (despite at least three public announcements — in Chinese and in English — admonishing the audience to silence these daemons). The hiccup with the Mendelssohn came when some of audience were especially noisy in returning tardily to their seats after the interval. We hope this sort of thing won't be the Shanghai norm at classical music concerts.

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The Shanghai Concert Hall itself was as ornate as promised. The vaunted acoustics were oversold, but certainly better than average. (Downtown San Diego should have such a nice concert hall, for instance.) But there is an interesting tale to tell about the building. It was built in 1934 as the Nanking Theatre, at least sometimes used for screening motion pictures. Here is a picture of it in 1934. You can just make out that there is a Tarzan movie ("Tarzan and his Mate") on the marquee.

As you can see, the building fronted right on Yan'an Road. I've been unable to confirm it but I believe that when they built the elevated highway above Yan'an Road it would have run right in front of the theater, which had, since 1959, morphed into the Shanghai Concert Hall, Shanghai's most prestigious venue for classical music. So I believe that the city planners were faced with a pressing dilemma in the early part of this decade (this is before Shanghai built the new Shanghai Oriental Art Center in Pudong, which I will report about later — we have two concerts there this week). In what we are gathering is a typical fashion for Shanghai, they decided to opt for a decidedly unconventional solution. Rather than build an entirely new concert hall (which we are told would have been cheaper) they preserved what they had, and simply moved the entire building to a new, more favorable location. It took two years (2002 — 2004) to do the work, which proceeded in three stages. The nearly 6000-ton building was first cut from its old foundations and lifted about 1.7 meters. Then hydraulics were used to move the building 66.4 meters to the south and east. Finally, the building had to be raised another 1.68 meters to be attached to its new foundations in its new location. You can read more about the engineering project to move the building here.

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I'm going to close this post with a link to another composition, my second written here in Shanghai. Again, I apologize that I only have a synthetic midi file rather than a recording. Same lame excuse as before: it's pretty difficult, and I haven't had a chance to learn it yet. I hesitate more with this piece than I did with the last one, because it suffers more than that one did from being heard this way. Still, if you take it as given, that when played by a human being, it will have a much more delicate character, you can at least get a hint of how it is meant to sound. So, no more editorializing, my Barcarolle, written during September and October in Shanghai, can be heard here.

Monday, 12 October 2009

Our Shanghai music season has officially begun.

The Sandra Shen recital last week was actually free, but we now have tickets that cost actual money, for a piano recital in an actual Shanghai concert hall, this coming Saturday night. In fact, the name of the hall is, precisely that: "Shanghai Concert Hall." It's on our very own street (Yan'an Road) but some distance east of here, over in the People's Square area. It's an ornate, European style hall, built in 1930, and it's reputed to have great acoustics. We are going to hear a Canadian pianist born in Vienna, Anton Kuerti, playing Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven.

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Miles has a quick trip this week — to what is supposed to be a beautiful resort island off South Korea. I was originally going to go, but I'm going to skip this one, partly because we couldn't get a cheap air ticket for me, partly because I'm still a little pooped out on travel from our recent trip to those interior Chinese provinces, and partly because I really want to make some progress on a certain composition I've been working on. So he's going to make it a real quick trip and come right back in good time for the recital Saturday.

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All of Shanghai appears to be back in town now, after the combined, eight-day 60th Anniversary National Day / Autumn Moon Festival extravaganza.

The eight day period actually ended officially last Thursday, but many people appeared to take Friday off as well, so as to have an extra three-day weekend to recover. This "recovery" phenomenon has been taken notice of officially with articles about it in the China Daily, with specific advice about eating light after all the holiday meals, what to do about insomnia if it strikes just as you need to rest up, and the like.

It was really eerily quiet last Thursday and Friday, less so Saturday, almost normal yesterday, and now it's back to the usual level of cacophony and energy today. Jack-hammering by night on Yan'an Road reappeared Saturday night, and right now there is a veritable rhapsody for automobile horn and pneumatic drill being performed right outside my window as I type this up above it all on the 31^st floor.

I've written a bit about this energy and bustle before, but I've probably failed to convey properly just how intense the combined effect of it is. I'm not even sure I can convey it properly. An unvarnished description of our stretch of Yan'an Road might help, though.

Our part of Yan'an Road is a double-decker affair. The lower part is at street level. At the widest part, just in front of our building, made a bit wider than "normal" by some dedicated turn lanes, you have 6 lanes each way, and they are usually quite full of vehicles, straight across, except perhaps in the slackest time of the day, or at night. As I've written before, lanes here are quite wide, wide enough for a smidgen more than 1.5 car widths, so that people can driver centered on a lane or centered on a lane dividing line. This lower level carries the traffic that is willing to be patient with stopping every couple of blocks or so to wait at a very long traffic light. Or that isn't patient but just hasn't made it to an entrance ramp that goes up to the express lanes above yet. You can tell the patient from the impatient by horn usage. People honk with no discernible purpose, just to let off the steam that rises up from the kettle where they are stewing their soup of impatience.

The lights are very long, partly because it takes quite a long time to cross all of that real estate as a pedestrian, at those places where this is sanctioned, and partly because once you've got all the traffic stopped, you may as well keep it stopped long enough for all other officially opposing traffic to have its opportunity to go. Of course it takes even longer than it should to cross because, once your green light comes, you find yourself pelted from several directions with all the traffic that doesn't obey traffic lights or rules at all, full stop — in fact, this traffic appears to wait for the precise time when pedestrians have just got their green signal to go themselves, knowing that the cars are (mostly) stopped — this traffic consisting of the bicycles and motorized cycles. Some of the motorized cycles are especially eerie because they are not gas-powered, and are consequently nearly silent. This leads to some heart-stopping moments as a pedestrian, as you suddenly see one of those quiet motorized cycles barreling down, aiming directly at you, and you had no advance warning because of their silence. That silence will be broken, at the last moment, when the driver of that quiet motorized cycle beeps its rather pathetic, chihuahua-pitched, horn at you mercilessly, because you are in his or her way.

The express lanes up at the top level occupy four lanes each way. Again, the top level is mostly full at rush hour, less so in between. This upper level is much like a freeway, except that all on- and off-ramps take you to a different level.

At "major" intersections, such as the meeting of Yan'an Road and Jiangsu Road near us, pedestrians are banished from the street level entirely by fence railings just high enough to make it impractical for anyone but an acrobat to get over. Pedestrians then get their own dedicated interchange, in the shape of a quadrilateral with curved corners, on its distinct level, midway between the street level lanes and the express level lanes. You climb steps up to that level and descend from it on steps. (Shanghai is not yet a friendly place for the disabled pedestrian.)

Finally, while you are walking on the fairly narrow sidewalks along side of any of the major roads, such as Yan'an or Jiansu Road, you must be constantly vigilant, because bicycles and motorized cycles (including the silent kind) frequently use the side walks whenever they are too lazy to use the street. This starts out with a kind of legitimate rationale, since these side walks provide the only "official" parking spaces for these vehicles. It is intended that the driver dismount to park, but very few do, and actually many more than those who are parking, or who have just left a parking space, use the side walks.

Perhaps you get a kind of picture.

I could also attempt to describe the really huge interchanges of the subway system, such as at People's Square, where three lines come together, but this is simply beyond my powers of description.

All of the energy implied by this traffic and other activity boils up every day. And this isn't just in our neighborhood, but everywhere in the city.

All this seething energy can't help but have its effects. We are lucky to live 31 floors above it all, but that is only an insulation layer, not an isolation chamber.

I definitely notice its effects in the rather frenetic music I've been writing here. It is very busy stuff, churning with notes every which way. I keep trying to comb through it, pruning out thickness and complexity, but the notes just keep coming.

But don't misunderstand. Here's where you hear me saying in my best "Seinfeld" voice: not that there's anything wrong with all this energy....

Saturday, 10 October 2009

Sandra Shen was a joy to hear!

She played Bach (a transcription of Sheep May Safely Graze, and Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring), Mozart (Sonata in B-flat Major, KV 570), Chopin (4th Ballade in F minor), a piece by Muczynski, and the anticipated Rachmaninoff Second Piano Sonata (she played his "revised version"). Her special skill is in bringing out the lyricism of whatever she tackles, and this was especially evident in the Rachmaninoff. The Muczyinski was a nice novelty. He's a living American composer of Polish extraction, new to me. She programmed his Desperate Measures — a set of variations on the familiar theme by Paganini that has inspired so many sets of variations. Sandra's web pages are here and here.

M⁵⁰ turns out to be a huge multi-building complex of museums, galleries, studios, and other stuff. We will have to go back sometime and spend a day exploring it. The concert was in a gallery that regularly programs jazz evenings, but Sandra's recital seemed to fit right in.

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I want to announce that this blog has officially broken through the "google ceiling." You can google it now, any number of ways.

Friday, 9 October 2009

I've finally gotten around to photographing some beautiful street art near our apartment.

I've been meaning to take snaps of this street art since we first encountered it on our walk to a restaurant to have dinner the first evening we spent in our apartment back in early September. The art is on Wuyi Street, a lovely, human-scale, tree-lined street that meets Yanan Road on the north side just about opposite from our building on the south side. The contrast between the hustle of Yanan Road and the serenity of Wuyi Street is striking. It's not that Wuyi Street is "empty" or "quiet." Indeed, it has lots of pedestrians, and even quite a few cars. But it doesn't have so much honking. And it does have this lovely art, which you can see here.

Nothing much else to report. We are settled back into our Shanghai routines.

Oh, but we are going to a recital this evening, our first in Shanghai! A pianist, Sandra Shen, is playing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Sonata, and I simply can't miss that. The recital is at a gallery called Two Cities (or Twin Cities) in the Moganshan 50 art complex plunked down in a formerly industrial corner of Shanghai. The gallery is supposed to do an eclectic variety of concerts. Other places in the district do concerts of Chinese classical music. I'll write more about all this once we've seen it.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

Well, our National Day Trip is over, and we are back in Shanghai.

Our final day in Sichuan was spent at Jiuzhaigou Natural Preserve. As we feared, the iffy weather we'd had the day before at Huang Long was replaced by weather that was a bit warmer, but entirely too moist. But you have to take what comes, right? (Miles suspects I am really converting to Buddhism with all this resignation.)

The drive to Jiuzhaigou was much more pleasant than the one to Huang Long. The road is curvy with switchbacks and hairpins, but it is a good solid road the whole way. There is one part that is called, essentially, "Nine changes of direction," and each of those is numbered with a properly placed sign. You can almost hear the tourists in their cars and buses as the checkmarks are being placed by each. When we got to Jiuzhaigou, the first thing we noticed is that this park is a lot more crowded than Huang Long. Assuming the less than favorable weather deterred anybody, it really would have been mobbed if the weather had been good.

The way Jiuzhaigou works, no one is allowed to tour in the park with their own vehicles. Everyone instead uses a set of shuttle buses that the park provides. Eminently sensible. The park's road system basically has the shape of a letter Y. You begin at the bottom of the Y where the entrance is. You are meant to ride to the meeting point of the branches of that Y, where the visitor center and the buffet restaurant are located, change buses, proceed up one or the other fork (all the way to the end), and then start working your way back to the meeting point, then do the same with the other fork, and then work your way back out to the entrace at the bottom of the Y. There are stops along the way on all of the branches, but the buses only make stops in one direction (the one that goes back to the meeting point, or back to the entrance).

Jiuzhaigou means "Nine Tibetan Villages" and at some point there were really nine villages inside what is now the park. We were going to tour one of these, but got too pooped out and gave it a miss. Some guide books say there has been a sort of Disneyification of the villages. We don't know if that's true or not.

The scenery of Jiuzhaigou must really be breathtaking when seen in good weather. As it was, we were impressed with what we saw in the rain we had. I apologize that there are so few pictures. In part it was difficult to take pictures in the rain; and in part it was difficult to take pictures with such a throng of visitors also trying to do so. Some of what you see here is similar to the travertine structures seen at Huang Long. But there is much more here that you can't see there. To begin with, the distances are much more vast, so that, unlike Huang Long where you can cover everything in 5 or 6 hours on foot, you really must use the buses to get across large distances, and only walk between bus stops as your energy and time limits permit. Some of the things you see here (in any weather) are bits of virgin timber (called "primeval forest") and large waterfalls. In better weather, the surrounding mountains are very scenic (but mists mostly shrouded them for us).

The pictures I was able to take of Jiuahzigou (day 7) are here.

So our day at Jiuzhaigou was yesterday. Today, we spent the whole day (uneventfully, if rather slowly) making our way back to Shanghai. There is a quite nice airport located midway between Huang Long and Jiuzhaigou parks, called, naturally, the Jiu Huang airport. We flew from there to Chengdu, a real Sichuan city (and the provincial capital). After a long layover, and a transfer from China Eastern to Sichuan Airlines (which involved collecting and moving our baggage ourselves — inter-airline luggage transfer wasn't offered to us when we checked in at Jiu Huang, and we might not have trusted it if it had been) we took off for Shanghai. All told, it took 9 hours to get back to Shanghai, about three hours of it in the air, a little over one hour of it in cars, and most of the rest just waiting about for the next stage to occur.

It is bliss on earth to be back in our Shanghai apartment. Where we have heat we don't even need to turn on but could if we wanted to. Where we have hot water any hour of the day we take a notion to use it. Where we are very much in the 21^st century, creature-comforts-wise.

Don't think I was entirely idle on this travel day. No, indeed. I took a set of shots of the Minjiang Hotel as we left it. (It was an afterthought. So there wasn't much planning or any careful composition, sorry for that.) One thing I did not have time to snap (and I regret that omission almost bitterly) was the hotel's revolving door at the grand entrance. The evidently Han Chinese architect had worked into his plan for the axis of the revolving door, a Tibetan style prayer wheel in the right sort of brass, but with all the wrong sort of markings on it. This reminded me somehow of something Miles and I saw many years ago in Japan, while traveling there at Christmas time — a Santa on a crucifix. Anyhow, you can see the pix I did snap of the Minjiang (day 8) here.

It's hard to sum up our National Day trip. We really saw a lot, much of beautiful, all of it fascinating. We also worked awfully hard to do it. I think that probably sums up what travel in the interior provinces of China is like — difficult, beautiful, fascinating.

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Our trip, which began with summery weather in Shanghai, has passed right through autumn to winter in the past two days.

Yesterday, we left Luqu (we were not sorry to leave that over-policed town!) and spent most of the day driving to the Songpan "area." Note that I say the Songpan area, and not the town of Songpan (which was where we thought we were going) but, again, I'm getting ahead of our story.

There weren't many pictures from yesterday, but you can find them (day 5) here. The high point was a small set of late afternoon and early evening pictures from the old garrison town of Songpan — once we got there (again, I'm ahead of our story, sorry, I'm simply so tired, that I can't untangle all the threads woven into this post). You can see the snow on the hills by the road as we neared Songpan. You can also see a flock of vultures feasting on the remains of what we think was a yak that we think we saw killed on the road the day before (the way from Luqu to Langmusi was the same as our way from Luqu to Songpan).

Now to the story. Trouble started when our guide started patently hunting for our Songpan hotel way before she should have. We were at that point in a particularly unscenic industrial zone still some 20 kilometers from the actual town of Songpan (which we knew from road signs we could read in English). When she piped up with "we live here tonight" and pointed at a sorry-looking mausoleum complex called the Songpan Minjiang Hotel, we were, respectively, crestfallen (moi) and livid (Miles). The problem was that our tour itinerary meant for us to be guideless and driverless, free to "wander around the town of Songpan" as our activity for today. All of which would have been perfectly ok, except we were in point of fact nowhere near Songpan, had no way to get there, and were instead to be some place we could not conceivably want to wander around. Miles had a very useful "tantrum" by cell phone with our booking travel agent Marc back in Shanghai, and we got things sorted out. The Minjiang Hotel was indeed to be our home for the remaining three nights of our trip, but we would get a late afternoon tour of the real garrison town of Songpan yesterday, and for today, we would get a visit (blissfully unguided as we have by now grown much less than enchanted with our guide) to the lovely Huang Long preserve. This was the best possible outcome in the circumstances, as there were simply no rooms to be had anywhere in the town of Songpan (or so we were told) because of the holiday week crush of Chinese tourists there. We had really wanted to see Huang Long anyhow.

I'll get to Huang Long in a moment, but first a few words about the Minjiang Hotel . This was supposed to be a 5 star hotel. And, to be fair, it is clearly the nicest of the hotels we've had for our trip. But, just as all of our hotels on the trip have done, it completely lacks any form of heating. It has the nicest hot water we've seen — usage time is still limited to a few hours in late evening and early morning, but the water is really and truly hot, rather than the tepid solar-heated water we suffered with in Luqu. The place is huge and very, very much like a tomb. In fact, I think the architect must have preferred that it be a tomb. The center of the lobby boasts a twice- or treble-life-size statue of Chairman Mao, complete with a faithful reproduction of his "rotundity." The statue is worked in some very dark metal, and is scarcely lit. We estimate the current occupancy of the hotel at around 2%. Everyone but us is a Chinese tourist here for their holiday week. The hotel's first floor is partly under repairs. This creates an extraordinarily nasty chemical sort of fume, which, if it were to be described on a restaurant menu in typical Chinese style, would be called something like "seventeen thousand carcinogen aroma." This odor seems to have decided to concentrate itself in the two elevators that take one from the football-field-length lobby to the 3rd floor, where our room is. The odor is, if anything, even worse in the stairs which are the only alternative to the elevators. One therefore has the choice of attempting to hold one's breath for the time it takes to get the elevator to make the trip up or down, or else release oneself, in Buddhist resignation, to the fumes, come what may. I used to play the trumpet back in high school, and still possess some of the lung capacity of those good old days, so I opt for the "held breath" strategy (though there have been some close calls when the elevator is being especially obtuse). We think one of the reasons that the odor has found its way into the elevators and stairs is because every single openable door to the entire place is left open all day and all night — despite the fact that the temperature is right around freezing. This makes the lobby "prairie" rather cold, and that's a shame because that is where the wifi internet is available.

Well, on to Huang Long. Some of the drama of Huang Long is on the way there (there is just one road in or out). It is really hard to describe. You start with a pretty incredible mountain road built in very difficult mountain terrain. You then add a major earthquake in Sichuan back in 2008. You end up with an indescribably difficult road. Sections of it are ordinary pavement — except for the edges that look like they have the shape of a the coastline of Maine, and you realize that major portions of the support for the road have fallen away, both on the inside edge and over on the "abyss side." Other parts have pavement covered by, take your pick, several feet of mud, or huge slides of rocks (boulders, really). Still other parts are "in repairs" or "being widened." These basically amount to the same thing. You have basically one lane (not one lane each way, just one lane, full stop) of churned up mud, forming a surface that is not at all flat like a road should be. As this is the only road that goes to Huang Long, it is heavily travelled by huge tour buses, tourists in taxis and private cars or SUVs, and heavy equipment involved in the repairs and construction. What should be an exhilarating 45 minute drive takes over two hours of periodic terror. Midway on the route, you have to make your way over a very high pass (around 4000 meters, well over 13,000 feet). The weather at that pass was, for us, in both directions, dense fog mixed with some precipitation (drizzle on the way to Huang Long, and more of a steady rain on the way back).

But arrive at Huang Long we did, and we had a perfectly lovely time!

Huang Long means "yellow dragon." The dragon in question is a huge deposit of travertine that takes on the shape of dragon as seen from above (or so we are told). The travertine in places naturally forms terraced reflecting pools of clear but colored water of various hues. In other places water runs over the travertine forming it into incredible curved shapes. There is lots of beautiful vegetation, including several species of rhododendron (definitely in their element, as this is the part of world they come from). It is very, very tempting to accuse the park people of going out each morning with eye droppers of concentrated food coloring to create all the wonderful colors you see. But it really is natural.

Pictures of Mao at the Minjiang and of Huang Long (day 6) are here.

Weather was iffy today for our trip to Huang Long. It looks no better for our trip to Jiuzhaigou Natural Park tomorrow, but tomorrow is our last full day, and so we're going if it's even at all conceivably possible.

I'll close with another really loopy sign. This is one you can see (only) as you are climbing the stair case back up out of a cave at Huang Long. You've definitely already had the opportunity of hitting your head (though not of reading the sign) as you climbed the stair case down into the cave, as it is the same staircase and the obstacle is just as troublesome coming down as coming up.

Oh, and, I have to include one more picture — just for our friends Michael and Patrick back in San Diego, who are devout poodlists. This will reassure them if they were concerned that there might not be anybody who loves poodles in China — some, at least, absolutely do!

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Our National Day trip has reached its midpoint.

We've seen a lot of beauty, and been well and truly accounted for by the local police — but I'm getting ahead of my story.

We began yesterday by saying goodbye to Xiahe, and getting a second look at the Ganjia grasslands. There were two major sites we hadn't gotten to the day before. We began with a tour of the "Ancient City" Bajiao — in fact a 2000 year old city, that was once the seat of powerful dynasties, and now is home to just a few humble citizens. The outer walls of the town are largely intact, and form the shape of a cross (like the familiar red cross). Two of the outer corners on the cross have the remains of defensive towers. An ethnic mix of people live inside these walls today — Tibetans, Hui, and Han Chinese.

After the 2000 year old city, we made a brief visit to the Tseway monastery, just a few kilometers from Bajiao out in the grasslands.

Then we visited Tarzang Lake, a beautiful high mountain lake of special importance to Tibetans. We were there on October 3rd, the day of a special full moon, chosen as the beginning of the 3-day "Autumn Festival" (which overlaps with the National Day week this year). We saw some Tibetans performing their rituals at the lake — blowing conch shells, and scattering tiny pieces of paper, each bearing a Buddhist prayer. As we were walking from the lake back to our car, the weather began to turn, and we got some precipitation in the form of sleet. If it seems strange that we had sleet so early in October, it may help to explain it to note that the lake is at about 11,500 feet.

Finally it was time to head for the home base for our next two days — a town called Luqu.

We would much rather have stayed in another town called Langmusi — the one we visited today — but because of all the holidays, and so many Chinese tourists, the only good hotel in Langmusi was fully booked (or perhaps just cleared out for the use of party elite). So Luqu it had to be.

Luqu has nearly nothing going for it. For a start, it is as muddy as Xiahe was dusty. There is an unbelievably grand theater which has been built, and which is garishly lit up at night. Sadly, the theater appears not to be open yet, and it is really hard to imagine who in the world will ever sit in the grandeur of its stalls and loges. The townspeople are very small-townish indeed. By now, Miles and I have walked about quite a lot in China, and this town was the first place where we were made to feel like aliens from the planet of the Aryan and Blonde.

We were also made to feel quite unwelcome — at least by the police. As we drove into the town, our tour guide was made to fill in the standard police forms foreigners usually have to complete whenever they check into a hotel or take an apartment — even before we had even found our hotel. After we had settled into our hotel, made our way over to, and back from, a rather mediocre evening meal at the town's only decent restaurant, and had then retired for the night, the police were back, knocking on our hotel room door, waking us up, and taking down, once again, all of the same information they always take down. Spooky? Irritating? Well, both, really.

After our police "visit" we got what sleep we could. It was once again, very cold in our hotel room (palatial, and otherwise well-appointed, but again totally unheated).

This morning, we got up and drove to Langmusi. This town straddles two provinces — Gansu, where our trip has been spent until now, and Sichuan where we go tomorrow and stay through the rest of our trip. There are two major Buddhist temple complexes here — Sertri on the Gansu side and Ketri on the Sichuan side. We got a good look at both of them, with a visit to a gorge filled with grottoes sacred to Tibetans well before the advent of Buddhism, and a free ramble out on the grasslands above Langmusi thrown in for good measure. We also got to meet an elderly widow (probably in her 70s) who showed us her tidy home, with an entire room devoted to her Buddha worship.

One "high point" of our visit to Sertri was a walk up to the sky burial site. Sky burial is a type of burial that entails having the body ritually dismembered to be devoured and scattered by vultures. It is considered the "best" form of burial by Tibetans, but is very costly, so out of the reach of all but a very few. We also got to see two monks play a pair of Tibetan trumpets.

Ketri is a few centuries older than Sertri and, while both temples may have suffered during the Cultural Revolution, it seems that the effort to rebuild Sertri is further along, while Ketri is still much loved as a "working" temple for devout Buddhists.

Langmusi is a very beautiful place. We could easily have spent more time there. But tomorrow we are on to new territory. Tomorrow won't be much of a sightseeing day, as we need to spend the entire day covering the ground between Luqu and Songpan, our home for the next three days, and the final stop on our trip. After spending the past three nights (and tonight as well) without heat, our digs in Songpan promise to be much more posh (five stars, or so we've been told).

Time to close and nurse our well-earned sunburns!

Oh, but before I forget, here are the pictures from yesterday (day 3) and today (day 4).

And here's another one of those special signs — this from Langmusi. I hope you can read it despite the bad control of light in the photo. If you can't — it says "The moon teahouse in ditch."

Friday, 2 October 2009

We've left Shanghai far behind and entered a multi-ethnic part of China.

Our National Day trip began yesterday with a princely ride to Hongqiao airport in a specially ordered private car. Miles had had such trouble finding taxis for his trip to and from Fudan the day before — a day of seeming endless rain which seemed to dissolve all the taxis of Shanghai — that we definitely thought better of just trusting that we could find a taxi on the morning of National Day. In the end, I'm pretty sure we never needed the precaution. Certainly we've never seen the Shanghai traffic so light as it was yesterday morning. But if the population of taxis was proportionally reduced we might well have been out of luck.

Anyhow, we got to Hongqiao in good time, made it through the check-in and security queues with relatively little trouble, and spent the next 2½ hours while waiting for our flight's departure watching the "festivities" as broadcast from Beijing on the airport's TV monitors — and nearly turned to stone from sheer boredom. Nearly all of the coverage sent a single message — namely, that China is a strong power militarily. Miles observed that the contrast between the "New China" 60th anniversary yesterday and the Obama inauguration last January couldn't have been more marked. There was absolutely nothing spontaneous, and not much that was joyful about yesterday's observances. Compare that to that January day when America made history that the whole world seemed so happy to see. I do have to report that when the Chinese National Anthem was sung during the broadcast, most of the Chinese in the terminal rose up and stood in respect, some saluting the flag on the monitor, some not, some singing along, some not. It was a strange sort of passionless, unfervent patriotism, but it was patriotism nonetheless.

After an uneventful flight to Lanzhou, we collected our luggage, and met our tour guide (Lilly Li) and driver (Mr. Zhao) who will be with us for the next eight days. Most of the rest of yesterday was spent driving to our first stop — the city of Xiahe. On the road, we passed by an area populated by Chinese Muslims — members of the Hui nationality — and had a very tasty dinner of Hui food. The hallmark of this cuisine is lamb, and the preparation is quite spicy. We had a look at the terraces that form the basis of the local agriculture. Pictures from this drive (day 1) are here.

When we finally reached Xiahe and our hotel (I confess to having fallen asleep in the car for the last part of the journey), we were absolutely stunned at how cold it was. And at how we had somehow travelled back a century or so in terms of creature comforts since we had left Shanghai and arrived in Xiahe. Our hotel looks like it should be comfy. Then you realize that the hot water is limited to 4 hours in the evening, and that there is simply no heating. Well, the hot water was hot. We took hot showers to try to warm up, and got right to bed at about 9:30 pm. I slept fitfully, Miles not even so well. When we broached the subject with our tour guide this morning at breakfast we discovered that extra bed covers had been secreted someplace in our room we did not think to look (in a cabinet below the TV). As I write this, we've had our full second of touring and have settled down — again, about 9:30 pm, but this time more warmly — but perhaps we're getting used to it being 50 degrees indoors (it's quite a bit colder outdoors).

For our touring today, we took in the Labrang monastery in the morning and had a too-quick glance at the Ganjia grasslands in the afternoon (but we will get another look at them tomorrow).

The Labrang Monastery isn't very old (built in 1709, it's celebrating its tercentenary this year), but it is very, very important to Tibetan Buddhism. It's also very, very beautiful, but I'll let the pictures speak to that. We had a monk who spoke good, if highly accented, English as our guide during the monastery tour, so we got quite a grounding in various aspects of Tibetan Buddhist beliefs and practices.

The brevity of our glance at the Ganjia grasslands was of a piece with our tour guide's sudden "abandonment" of us at about 2:30 this afternoon — leaving us to make our way about the town and find our own dinner. This and another annoyance — an unscheduled stop at what should have been the atelier of a noted Tibetan Buddhist artist, but turned out to be an opportunity to buy the work of the artist rather than to see him creating his art (he was not even present) — prompted us to make a tiny little phone call of complaint to our travel agent back in Shanghai. We are told that these sorts of thing are indeed below the standard and should not recur. Time will tell.

Pictures from today's touring (day 2) are here.

Well, we did in fact find our way about in Xiahe, although we had to do it twice. There is so much dust on the streets (or I should really say, street, as there really is just one) that we both had to come back to the room so that Miles could remove his contact lenses while I seriously entertained the thought of removing my eyeballs, but in the end, forebore. (To call this stuff "dust" really doesn't do justice to how sharp the particles are.) We set out again, and again walked the several kilometers to the interesting end of the town, found the "Nomad Restaurant" recommended by our trusted Lonely Planet Guide, and had a nice meal of Tibetan food. Tibetan food centers on yak beef. It's simple, but tasty. I had a huge bowl of soup with yak beef and vegetables. Miles had a similarly sized bowl of a simpler soup, and a plate of dumplings filled with — you guessed it — ground yak beef.

I would not do justice to Xiahe in this post if I did not mention a couple of things:

• The town square of Xiahe is nearly deserted all day long, except for Chinese paramilitary riot police squad. They sit on little wooden benches. About 20 meters away, their riot gear — helmets and shields — sits to the ready, but just lies there, inanimate, in perfect matrix formation, on the ground. It's two, two, two messages in one! "We're here to intimidate anybody who, like some who tried it here some time back, might demonstrate about Tibetan issues; but we're not really that scary, just look, we're only sitting on benches, not really doing anything." If you want to see what these police look like (I didn't dare photograph any of them) when they aren't just sitting on a bench 20 meters away from their gear, you can start at the wikipedia page for Labrang here, and explore various links from there to coverage of the troubles in Xiahe in 2008.
• While we were walking back to our hotel (for the last time) after dinner, and heard what I thought might be firecrackers, and hoped were not gunshots, what we were actually hearing was fireworks, as a glance back proved to us. These were a pretty pathetic specimen of the breed, but they were fireworks. We were the only ones on the street even to glance at them. Others, especially those who were evidently Tibetan or Hui, seemed not even to notice them. The Han Chinese majority didn't seem to care about them either.

Well my laptop battery is down to 62%, so time to close this post!