Confucius played the sheng

[shewhomust]

Yesterday afternoon I joined Gail at the Sage for one of the concerts in their "Chinese Connections" weekend: a collaboration between Alistair Anderson and members of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, working under the title Full Circle to explore and demonstrate the relationship between the sheng - a Chinese instrument so ancient and respected that, see above, Confucius is said to have played one, and the concertina. This is not some entertaining piece of speculation, and it probably isn't news to anyone but me, but I was delighted to learn that the concertina, like so many ancient folk traditions, has a short and well-documented history, and was indeed developed in the nineteenth century on the basis of Chinese instruments brought to Europe by returning missionaries in the late eighteenth century.

I had hoped to go to Alistair Anderson's pre-concert talk and learn about this, but a combination of incompetences (my own, for consistently underestimating how far the Sage is from the station, the railway's, for running trains late enough to eat up the margin I had allowed for error) meant that I arrived just too late for that. This at least gave me a chance to sit in the Concourse and eat my sandwiches (the train had also been too packed with football fans for me to lunch en route, as I had planned) while being entertained by the Silk String Quartet. To a listener who knows little about western classical music and even less about the Chinese repertoire, their programme seemed extremely mixed: it started with a couple of very accessible ensemble pieces, with a recognisable Chinese flavour but strongly melodic character, then shifted to solo pieces spotlighting each instrument in turn. Inevitably, the one I liked least - a piece for the hammered dulcimer which sounded to me like every classical piece that has ever been plundered for the soundtrack of an action movie - also seemed to go on the longest. I preferred a piece called White Snow in Sunny Spring played on the pipa (described as a four-stringed lute, but which the musician attacked with some authentic bluegrass licks); it has certainly done the magic and conjured up the weather described.

We had to leave before their set was finished to go to our concert; this, too, was structured as an introduction to the Chinese instruments involved, with ensemble pieces bracketing a series of solos, and although I was sorry to have missed the introductory talk, which Gail told me had consisted of a run-through of the different instruments, I was grateful to the Silk String Quartet for giving me a partial preview. This time, though, the star of the show was the sheng, a cluster of vertical pipes - well, I told my brother about the concert, he said "Ah, the sheng: did it look like a bundle of asparagus?" "No," I said, "it looked like the Dark Lord's Tower in the fantasy of your choice." Fortunately, no-one need rely on this description, because athenais, knowing I would be trying to explain the sheng, went out and photographed not one but two examples for me. (Thanks, athenais!) The musician raised this contraption to his lips and blew, and the sounds that came out were both identifiably related to the concertina and identifiably the sounds which were were recognisable from any Chinese music you might previously have heard.

There was also a Chinese ocarina, which looked like a china egg, very dark and shiny, rather larger than the ones used to encourage hens to lay, but on the small size for an Easter egg. This produced a very pleasant, flute-like sound, but not before it had been warmed up ith a much breathier tone, a sort of wuthering - and the piece ended with the same sound, as if the instrument had to be warmed up before playing and coled off after (but perhaps this was just the shape of that particular piece of music). And of course, since each of the instruments had its turn in the limelight, there was a concertina solo too.

All this was interesting and enjoyable, but the ensemble pieces which started and ended the concert were something more; the way phrases were thrown back and forth between instruments, sounding now plausible oriental, now familiarly Northumbrian - and not always the expected way round. The final piece (whose title I ddn't catch) also made play with the sounds of the instruments, with sheng or flute picking up a note from the concertina, playing at first in unison and then gradually diverging; you could drift off into the music and not be sure whose note you were hearing at any given point. I felt a slight awkwardness in the way the musicians from the Singapore Chinese Orchestra were described - clearly they were neither the full orchestra nor a formally constituted sub-set of it, yet phrases like "some members of... " felt unduly informal. So the word which kept recurrng was "ensemble" which seems a good description of the entire enterprise.