Yang Jing & Festival Strings Lucerne - Singing Strings – Identity: Works for String Quartet and Pipa (2024)

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Yang Jing & Festival Strings Lucerne - Singing Strings – Identity: Works for String Quartet and Pipa (2024)

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YANG Jing was born in China at a time when the so-called Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, had a major impact on her childhood. This wiped out all traditional, bourgeois culture to an extent that we can hardly believe even today. Mao's wife Jiang Qing postulated that only proletarian art and literature was acceptable, which for her only really began in 1963, with everything created before that being regarded as reprehensible and decadent. As one of the four leading figures of the Cultural Revolution, which was later dubbed the Gang of Four, she was largely responsible for the attempt to erase China's cultural heritage. Only so-called model plays, six Peking operas and two ballets, newly written for the purpose of public education, were permitted.

Although a few years earlier Mao Zedong still viewed tradition as a "living stream" He allowed the Cultural Revolution organized by the Gang of Four to take place. In addition to the spiritual impoverishment, this also brought with it a material impoverishment through the cruel liquidation of a large part of the so-called elites as well as all those who supposedly and actually thought differently; the chaos that accompanied social transformation led to famine. As part of the "superstructure", almost all artists and musicians were robbed of their actual skills and were supposed to be "re-educated" through field work organized in camps in order to preserve the historical legacy that had previously been conveyed how all foreign influence would be wiped out.

Perhaps this explains YANG Jing's interest in Chinese tradition, which is revealed through her instrument, the pipa, and her musical notation. Like hardly any other Chinese composer, she succeeds in creating an amalgam of Western and Eastern tonal language, which is further condensed here by the confrontation of Pipa with a string quartet. This cast is almost symbolic of the meeting of different worlds, which is all too often negated in the standardized cultural world.