The China Project

Welcome to the site that foregrounds my recent collaboration and experiments to synthesise traditional Chinese music with British Post-punk. Since 2006, I have been working with the traditional Chinese musicians of Xiamen college of Music and some fruits of the cross-over and contact of cultures can be heard here.
This is a part of a wider series of exchanges between MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design) and China, which includes exchanges, masterclasses, new postgraduate courses, exhibitions of art and design, and profound friendships. (http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/chinaproject)
To be truthful, I cannot do enough for my friends in Xiamen. They made me the happiest man in the world, this year, when they presented me with a hand-carved Matouqin – a Mongolian traditional cello-like instrument with a carved horse’s head, which you can hear me playing here, on the site, with a song, “Deepest Feelings”, that I wrote in Beijing earlier this year.
I am trying to translate the aesthetic and the feeling of Mongolian music through the body of a Western post-punk. This is not a process of literal translation but more in the vein of Ezra Pound’s translations of traditional Chinese poetry, which is a research preoccupation of mine. I collected the instrument from a small shop near to the Forbidden City and it was one of 2008 being made by a traditional Chinese instrument maker for the opening of the Beijing Olympics. 2008 Matouqin (or Morinhuur - horsehead two-string fiddle) are going to be playing “Horses on the Wind”. But Xiaojohn (“Little John” – my Matouqin’s name) and I will know that there is a two thousand and ninth maverick that got away and is running wild and free in Manchester. Xiaojohn: the lone stallion. They say one in two hundred of us is directly descended from Genghis Khan – remember the Mongolian Empire covered one third of the known world at its height – and I’m sure it is true of me. I only have to feel the Matouqin in my bones as it groans tectonically and I want nothing more than my home, my blue sky, the wind, my horse and my girl.
Interestingly, Damon Albarn was commissioned to write a stage version of the “Monkey” myth for the 2007 Manchester International Festival. He went the other way, using Chinese lyrics and a hybrid music.
Our collaboration is more trans-cultural with new content sung in English and my solo violin (The Void) with traditional music. It is more of a compositional montage than a blend. It has a harder edge and is less comfortable than the admirable “Monkey” performance but disjuncture and discomfort seem to be more in keeping with the lived contradictions of China.
I was asked on the plane to Beijing by a very jolly German man, “I have never been to Beijing, what is it like?” I said, “Whatever you expect, it won’t be that, what are you doing over there?” “I sell roller-coasters,” he said, the best answer I have ever had to the inevitable, “What do you do?” question that I try so hard to avoid. I thought, he, for one, might, in that case, understand a contemporary China that builds concrete replica trees in its temples and looks back from its Industrial Revolution, through Communism to poems like my translation (with Dr. Zhou) of Wang Wei’s ancient, “Random Poem”:
Random Poem
You come from my home.
What news from there?
Outside my lattice window,
Is the spring light warm yet
For a plum blossom flower?
Professor John Hyatt August 2007