2 folks shake up the music world
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, April 9, 2013
Eccentric folk singer Gong Linna and her German composer and musicologist husband Robert Zollitsch have shaken, rattled and rolled the world of contemporary Chinese folk music.
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Folk singer Gong Linna and her German composer husband Robert Zollitsch create innovative "new Chinese art music" that disquiets some listeners. Photo by Courtesy of Gong Linna |
Together they have created discord with three controversial experimental songs that some say disrespect traditional Chinese culture and make light of icons like the Monkey King, but others call a welcome innovation in music that tends to be uninspiring and saccharine.
The colorful and extravagant performances, with sometimes incomprehensible lyrics, have gone viral on the Internet, where opinion appears to be running against the light-hearted, if somewhat jarring to conventional taste, spectacles.
Gong and Zollitsch, an expert in traditional Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian music, say their aim is to create a "new Chinese art music," integrating Chinese folk elements with modern musical forms. It's a bit like world music. Some songs are experimental and playful. Others are serious, such as "Quiet Night Thoughts," using the lyrics of a poem of the same name by Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai (AD 701-762). Zollitsch also composes for a full, Western-sized orchestra of mostly Chinese traditional instruments.
"China has incredibly old culture and history but where is the sound to represent China in the 21st century?" asks Zollitsch, also known as Lao Luo or Old Gong in English. "The world is waiting for this sound, music to help people understand the soul of Chinese people. And it isn't just one sound, but should be as colorful as today's China," he told Shanghai Daily in a recent interview along with Gong Linna at the Chinese Top Ten Forum sponsored by China East Radio.
Gong herself is famous for her outlandish costumes, makeup and exaggerated facial expressions. She created an Internet sensation in 2010 with "Tante" ("Perturbed" in English), a composition of eloquent but meaningless vocalizations and clicks in a sweeping range, performed in a lavish and bizarre costume incorporating fantastic elements. Her facial expressions changed rapidly and were described as quirky but fascinating. Lao Luo wrote the music and together they created the "nonlyrics."
That was when she made her first big splash. Internet users struggled to figure out what she might be saying. It was so intriguing and incomprehensible that it was called shenqu or sacred song, an apparent reference to the repetitive chanting and murmuring of religious music. It was cool.
Now Gong and Lao Luo have done it again, but this time there's mounting indignation on the Internet that they have gone too far with their colorful, catchy and somewhat jarring works. Zollitsch composed the music and together they work on lyrics, her costumes, stage design and a bit of choreography.
To a Western audience, the performances are interesting, sometimes humorous and not a big deal. It is quite funny when Lao Luo breaks into "Only You," in English, a hit in 1955 by The Platters.
"Slapstick" and "auditory pollution" are a couple of the terms used to describe her shows, which are mini musicals. Lao Luo appears on stage in ancient Chinese costume; in one scene he's her lover and husband, in another her idiot husband (he sings, "I'm such an idiot"), and in a third he's the Buddhist monk Xuanzang in "Journey to the West." They are accompanied by a band in which musicians are costumed as gods and goddesses; Guanyin, for example, plays the "guzheng" (a zither with at least 18 strings.)
Gong and Lao Luo performed them recently, two of them on Hunan Satellite TV's New Year's Eve gala. They are "Fahai, You Don't Understand Love," "Golden Cudgel," and "I'm In Love With A Big Idiot."
Break with tradition
"Golden Cudgel," or "Jingubang" in Chinese, is the Monkey King's magical weapon. Gong dressed like a glamorous Monkey King with strange headgear and shimmering golden powder on her face. She sang, "I am the Monkey King from the Flower and Fruit Mountain and I have a golden cudgel, golden cudgel, golden cudgel," repeating the words for many lines. She also makes the nonsense, jibberish sounds "made" by a golden cudgel. This goes on for quite a while, until she concludes, "I am the Monkey King with a golden cudgel."
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