a heart in a field of flowers for china--Linda Neil

Introduction

The topic as presented to us was The Future of East and West. I felt it was very difficult to cover such a large topic in a short paper so I thought I would present my talk as a memoir.


THE FUTURE OF THE EAST AND THE WEST:

A Heart in a Field of Flowers

I grew up in a place called St Lucia in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, one of the northern states of Australia. My parents were both teachers. My father taught Latin, History, Maths and English at a local grammar school and my mother, who was from the country and had left school when she was fifteen, taught singing and piano.
I grew up a few streets away from the University of Queensland. It is renowned for its beautiful grounds, its wide lawns and green trees, the river along which it lies and especially for the lake which occupies its centre. Growing up near the university meant that long before my four brothers and sisters and I attended to study for degrees, we played in the grounds of the university. I especially loved to walk up to the lake on a Sunday afternoon with an empty container to catch guppies (small fish). It would take me twenty minutes or so to walk to the lake where I would sit quietly for another thirty minutes, watching the ducks swimming in formation before scooping my container through the rippling water and filling it with the tiny, golden fish that swam near the surface of the water. I would then walk home, which took another twenty minutes, show the guppies to my mother or father, and then walk back up to the lake to release the fish back into the water.
This capturing and releasing of the fish was a childhood ritual that meant I spent quite a bit of time on my own beside the lake. I had to learn to wait and watch for the movement of the fish, to observe how they moved together—in “schools”, as my father told me—to be able to move unobtrusively towards the water as I tried to scoop up my prey. I found it soothing to sit beside the lake although perhaps anyone who saw me there—a young girl on her own—might have thought I was troubled or lonely. But as it did for many ancient Chinese poets, the lake became a metaphor for the gentle movement of time, the rituals of the days and years, and the contemplation of seasons and landscape.
A few years after I grew too big for my childish ritual, I attended the University officially— to study Law and Music. The music department was situated right near the lake and students could sometimes be seen and heard practicing their cellos and violins, flutes and oboes under the willow trees by the water. Looking back now, I see what a privileged life it was — with opportunities and freedoms that many young people around the world long for.
In between classes and lessons and rehearsals, I often sat beside the lake with my boyfriend, Sean, who also studied music. As we sat and sipped cool drinks, we read the words of the poet and philosopher, Lao Tzu. His non-western, non-materialistic contemplations seemed to resonate perfectly with our eclectic reading of European writers, such as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley, who had also turned towards Eastern philosophy for inspiration.
Sean was studying Chinese poetry at the time and once read me this stanza written in the eleventh century by Su Shih:
Shimmering water at its fill—sunny day is best;
Blurred mountain in a haze—marvelous even in rain
Compare wet lake to a beautiful girl, she will look
Just as becoming—lightly made up or richly adorned.
I look back now on this simple scene of two first year university students sitting and reading by the lake and I understand that in his awkward way, Sean was romancing me with this ancient Chinese poem. We were perhaps more bookish than the average Australian, but we were young and in love, a state of being and feeling that, according to the classic poems and texts from many cultures, is typical across time, culture, gender and class. And at the lake, which resonated with words inscribed centuries ago, Sean was relating this old Chinese text to our lives as young contemporary Australians.
The poetry became a kind of motif that ran through the narrative of our relationship. He sent me these lines written in the eighth century by Zhang Jiu Ling:
I loathe this endless night;
And could not sleep but think of thee.
In this full moon light,
Who cares for candlelight?
Stepping out I don my gown,
And feel dew on the ground.
I wish to offer you moonlight in a handful.
…. and I sent this one back to him from the ninth century poet, Wen T’ing Yun:
A gold finch in my hair
My cheeks brightly rouged
For one brief moment we met among the flowers
You understood my heart
And tender was your love
Only Heaven knew the joys we shared
And while my cheeks were still un-rouged and powder-free, and to my knowledge I had never seen a goldfinch, I did relate to the lines — we met among the flowers, you understood my heart. Even if I may not have fully understood at seventeen exactly what an ‘understood heart’ felt like, it gave me a vision that I have held inside me ever since—the image of meeting in a garden of flowers and being recognized as my self by another. When further study overseas meant we were separated by oceans for a whole year, Sean sent me lines from the twelfth century poet, Chang K’uei:
This land among the rivers
So quiet and still
I sigh for a friend far away
I’ll always remember the place where we held hands
a thousand trees in bloom press down on the cool green of the lake
then one by one the petals were blown away
when can we see them again?
While we were also aware of the many injustices suffered by Australia’s indigenous citizens, and would become more politically active in this regard as time went on, it struck me even then, that the world is a small place and that in my life in Brisbane, songs and poems and philosophy from the east—and from China in particular—were already part of the fabric of my life.
Sean studied cello at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane. Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, students of western classical music from Shanghai and Beijing had come to this conservatorium to study with Professors and teachers of music of the western tradition. Perhaps they had been inspired when they were children by the marvelous film, From Mao to Mozart, about violinist, Isaac Stern’s groundbreaking journey to China and his interaction with Chinese music students eager to learn about not just the technique, but the “feel” of western music. As travel and study in China became more accessible, students and composers from Brisbane began to journey over to China to create and produce collaborative works with contemporary and folk musicians in both urban and rural areas of China. Creative acts not only create tangible artistic outcomes, they also create possible futures and these
collaborations, which had their fragile origins over twenty years ago, are ongoing today.
At the same time that the music community in Brisbane welcomed our musical friends from China, Sean and I were still absorbing the ancient texts of Lao Tzu and the philosophy of Taoism. Just as I suspect there was something that the Chinese students of Western music yearned to learn from teachers in Brisbane, there was something appealing to a western music student about these words from Lao Tzu:
Music from the soul can be heard by the universe.
Around this time my mother’s singing teaching practice expanded and some of the overseas Chinese students studying at the University of Queensland came to learn singing from her. They were interested in learning western vocal techniques, but she was also interested in the possibility of them teaching her some simple Chinese songs. In the recitals she held in her music studio underneath our house, I heard students from China--who were usually studying a variety of communication and technological subjects--singing their folk songs in sweet, sometimes wavering voices, before joining my mother at the piano for a rendition of an art song from Schubert or Handel. I recall one of these songs, about a Jasmine flower, even today.
This juxtaposition of so-called high art and popular art, the classical and the folk tradition, enacted across cultures, generations, and musical genres, was always part of my heritage. My father, a man who valued writing and books, and my mother, a beautiful singer and vocal artist, saw equal value in both traditions and we were encouraged to travel broadly in our tastes.
Years later, I began to write and sing my own songs. The instrument I used to accompany myself—the violin—was traditionally used in the classical western music tradition in what some might refer to as its “high art” form. When bowed, it usually plays melody rather than rhythm and its music is considered a high point of western European music, especially regarding the virtuosic works for violin, which range from the architecturally magnificent Chaconne in D minor by JS Bach to the great concertos by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. For me, putting down the bow and strumming the strings with my fingers transformed the violin from this vehicle of singular expression into a kind of folk instrument—with all the rawness and honest simplicity that this implies.
From the first few simple songs I wrote and sang, my project grew to the stage where I embarked on a year-long odyssey through peoples’ lounge rooms and private spaces in which I presented my songs and stories much like a travelling minstrel did in medieval times. This story became a radio documentary and next year it will be made into a film. What began in lounge rooms is now a global journey. My project in Shanghai is called Singing Love Songs in China and next year when I will be living in Paris my project there will be called Singing Love Songs in Paris.
Although the project was conceived in my lounge room in Brisbane today, it was inspired by the lounge room of my childhood, where people freely shared poetry, song and music. The philosophy behind it, though, is not much different from that of Lao Tzu’s, whose words I first read by the lake up the road from where I grew up.
Music from the soul can be heard by the universe.
And these:
To love someone deeply
gives you strength.
Being loved by someone deeply
gives you courage
According to Lao Tzu then, to sing love songs—to give them and to receive them across the world, as love is given and received— means to engage in music that regenerates both our strength and courage, qualities that can then be heard by the universe. To discover these things in the cultures of both the East and the West offers us a chance to recognize the creative, innovative and communicative spirit in all of us. It echoes—as music from the soul does—around the whole world.
My love songs employ the principles of folk song—they are direct, simple and from the heart. I acknowledge, though, that these songs, as simple as they are, have been enabled by my years of training in the western classical tradition—the same tradition that students from China came to my home town to absorb—that has now allowed me to reach out across the world to communicate and sing to other cultures and to find in this global community the things that connect rather than divide. This is my small way of contemplating the future of the east and west in words and song and to acknowledge that even in my simple life they have always been connected—from those days as a child in Brisbane in the twentieth century when I visited and gazed upon the lake just as Chinese poets from the eleventh century did to inspire their poetry and song. When I was researching recently the subject of love songs in China, I read about a popular folk song phenomenon called Hua’er, which is found in Qinghai province in the northwest part of China. Although Qinghai is historically one of the poorest regions in China, the province is known as the “ocean of Hua’er”, a phrase that signifies its cultural abundance. Hua’er means “flowers” and flowers usually represent the object or subject of these love songs. In the Hua’er tradition, the ability to sing high is also especially valued as singing in the high register carries the voice farther into the open fields and mountain valleys.
I think of the Hua’er now as I contemplate how the singing and sharing of love songs is also a calling out from isolation towards connection, whether it is from one outcast group to another, one country to another, or from one soul to the other. Just as Lao Tzu once expressed, the sound of this calling can reverberate beyond the personal into a global tapestry of different melodies, sounds and calls. And as much as any possible future requires sufficient wealth, security, opportunity, education and stability, it also requires this calling between souls full of music and song. It also perhaps needs to recognize that our shared human feeling is also necessary for our true flourishing.
As I think of the love songs of Hua’er and of the ancient Chinese poets and the incredible vibrancy of life in modern Shanghai, I think again of how much more connected the ancient and the modern, the material and the contemplative, the past and the future are now in the era of the internet and global communication. There is so much to admire in China today: its incredible growth, its super cities and its race to the future. But embedded within its present and future is its magnificent past, its poets, its artists and musicians who inscribed wisdom and thought in poems and songs long before the West of Europe had even come out of its dark ages.
And while in China, as in all parts of the world, writers and artists go in and out of fashion according to the time, parts of China’s past had already found its way to my present when I was a girl in Australia and would, in time, affect my future—as a writer, as a musician and as a student of the world. This particular future has resulted in this particular present talking to you now, here in China. The possible futures that have resulted in our meeting perhaps rely more than we realize on these sometimes tenuous threads not being unraveled or categorized into “Eastern” and “Western” thought, but integrated into a complete—and complex—system of thinking that takes in the past and future, the traditional and the contemporary, high and low art, and the thoughts and ideals of both the east and the west. Perhaps this integration of philosophies and models of thought, as ideal as it might sound, could provide us with a real basis for exchange and understanding and create a map to a truly mutual future.
Recently, as I prepared for this trip to China, I travelled back to the lake of my childhood on the grounds of the University of Queensland. I took my violin with me and as I sat under a willow tree, I sang this simple song which is also about flowers. I sing it here for you now, as an honouring of Hua’er folk music, of the splendour of modern China as its strides towards its future, and of the ancient Chinese poets, who first made me aware that a heart might be understood in a field of flowers.