Recordings of instrumental music are repositories of the sounds produced at particular historical moments. They reflect the changes music making and performance practice undergoes over time. Together with the instruments themselves, these sounds, too, need to be preserved in order to be able to draw a full-scale picture of music making in China. This paper introduces the Liu Yuan Record Collection now digitized and available in Heidelberg and attempts to elucidate what this collection, along with its collector, Liu Yuan, can tell us about music making and instrumental performance practice in China.

We will argue in this paper that a closer look at record production and record consumption in China since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 will make us understand China’s politics of music better. Our presentation intends to shed new light on some old assumptions about cultural and ideological continuities and discontinuities in musical production and consumption.

Our paper is divided into four parts:

Liu Yuan: The Musician, the Collector
Record Politics: Modes of Cultural Production in “New China”
The Liu Yuan Collection: Reflecting on Music and Politics
Record Receptions: Music Consumption in China

1. Liu Yuan: The Musician and collector

Liu Yuan 刘元, born 01.01.1960 in Beijing, was trained as a musician playing suona 唢呐 and flute, he later also learned how to play the saxophone, and joined (and formed) China’s first rock band together with Cui Jian 崔健. Later, he also founded his own jazz band and owns a jazz club in Beijing.

Liu Yuan’s father was Liu Fengtong 刘风桐, a famous suona-player. In 1952, the family had moved from Anhui province to Beijing, where the father joined the prestigious “National Music and Dance Orchestra” (Zhongyang gewutuan 中央歌舞团). The members of this danwei all lived together in one Beijing hutong where Liu Yuan continues to live today.

He began to listen to records at the age of 3-4, on a record player of Swiss origin, bought by his father on one of the many concert tours to “socialist brother countries.” Liu remembers that the family had a collection of a dozen or so records then which covered a variety of music styles and forms. The family also engaged in exchanging records with friends and neighbors. Moreover, the danwei had its own library, which also stored various music records from diverse origins.

At age 5, Liu began studying suona and, at the request of his father, the dizi 笛子 at the age of 9. In 1975, he entered the Beijing Art School, and shortly thereafter the Beijing Music School (Beijing yinyue xuexiao 北京音乐学校), majoring in suona and folk music (minyue 民乐). After the Cultural Revolution, in 1978, the Beijing Song and Dance Troupe (Beijing gewutuan 北京歌舞团) was founded. In 1979, Liu Yuan started “working” there. This was the period of the “tape-recorder”: people began to throw away their old records, to sell them cheaply or simply to put them outside for somebody to pick up. That’s what Liu Yuan did.

As the “Beijing Song and Dance Troupe” had the task to represent the PRC outside China, Liu Yuan had the opportunity to travel to and perform in different countries in West and Eastern Europe. While the Troupe was performing for two months in Paris, a French jazz musician gave him a few jazz records as a gift. He took them back to Beijing, and in 1984, with the help of his family, he managed to buy a saxophone from a Tianjin factory for 265 yuan. In the same year he joined Cui Jian’s band.

Thus privileged to travel outside of China, and to live at a time when records were no longer in vogue, Liu collected both, the new sounds from abroad, and the “old sounds” from within, of his country and his childhood, folk tunes as well as revolutionary songs. Now an experienced collector, he began to look for specific recordings, and frequently went to the flea-markets and music stores for this purpose – over the years, his collection began to grow to more than a thousand records.

It was quite a task to sort through this rich collection, to transfer the records carefully (without breaking any) to our little “studio” in Beijing and to digitize them. Before turning to an overview over the contents of this unique collection, we will consider briefly the history of record production that they originated from.

2. Record Production: Modes of Cultural Production in “New China”

Before 1949, record production in China was concentrated in Shanghai where national and international companies were competing. When the People’s Liberation Army arrived in May 1949, all record studios were closed and existing pressing plants were liquidated. Imports of Western music were stopped and in 1958 the China Record Company (Zhongguo changpianshe 中国唱片社) was officially established, being the only organization of record editing and publishing in the PRC for the next twenty years. China’s records were pressed in Shanghai; three additional pressing plants were built in Guangzhou (1964), Beijing and Chengdu (both 1968). The new guidelines for record production gave no attention to commercial profit, musical content and form had to be composed according to the rules prescribed by Mao Zedong at the famous Yan’an Forum in May 1942.

During the 1950s, records were systematically catalogued and production manuals were published. The repertoire consisted of various folk music styles and operas, Beijing opera, re-releases of acceptable pre-1949 records, European and Russian classical music and – this was new – revolutionary music and songs, many of them composed in pre-1949 China.

After 1949, listening to music on record at home remained an activity limited to a distinct minority, some one million middle- and upper-class households in urban areas. Most people were able to gain access to recorded music only via the increasing number of broadcasting units and loudspeakers installed especially in rural areas. The number of wired broadcasting units increased from 835 in 1955 to 11,124 in 1959; the number of loudspeakers from 90,500 to 4,570,000 [Fn. 1].

The Great Leap Forward campaign also had its effect on music production and dissemination: the number of wired broadcasting units almost doubled, the China Record Factory (Zhongguo changpianchang 中国唱片厂), Shanghai, increased its production output, China’s most modern sound recording studio was built in Shanghai (1958), and - nearly ten years later than in the West – production of “Long playing Discs” (LP, miwen changpian 密纹唱片) began on a small scale. The first release of LP-records in September 1958, among them people composer Xian Xinghai’s 冼星海 “Yellow River Cantata” (Huanghe dahechang 黄河大合唱) and a “Song Collection of Nie Er” (Nie Er gequxuan 聂耳歌曲选), marked the beginning of a new era and were celebrated as a big success. Ten years later, in 1968, a third record format was introduced and began to spread in the PRC, the cheap and flexible plastic records (bomo changpian 薄膜唱片).

Based on this technical and organizational structure, listening to a selected set of recorded music via a nationwide broadcasting network became most intense during the years of the Cultural Revolution, when records were regarded as political propaganda products (zhengzhi xuanchuan pian 政治宣传片).

From 1966 onwards, Mao Zedong´s wife, Jiang Qing 江青, became the arbiter of Chinese art and literature. Under her instruction the Propaganda Ministry and the Central Broadcasting Administration implemented censorship regulations that severely affected the recording industry. Meanwhile, Red Guards were encouraged to destroy the “Four Olds” (ideas, culture, customs, habits), raided houses and destroyed or made disappear many music records [Fn. 2]. Liu Yuan also took part in activities like these and – at the age of 7 “tried” to destroy the “feudal” records stored in the library of his compound. However, only a few records were destroyed, later he and his friends would take the surviving records home and listen to them, enjoying secret moments of curiosity and excitement.

Western classical/symphonic music was banned officially, and Chinese music records were criticized as “a huge pile of feudalist, capitalist and revisionist poisoned weed”, recorded during a “17 year long line of cultural revisionism”. From then onwards, musical “sound” and content was to become political and truly “revolutionary” – at least officially.

Between 1967 and 1969, the number of record titles officially accepted for distribution throughout China was reduced from 400 to a mere handful. “Officially”, the year 1969 marked the climax of record-censorship and the lowest point of music circulation in the PRC’s history. However, although listening to politically correct music records was strongly promoted as a revolutionary activity, it is safe to say that (among certain audiences) prohibited music forms only disappeared on the surface. People may not have destroyed the records or simply buried their record collection and later unearthed it again [Fn. 3]. In other words, cultural flows via music records were not stopped but continued if in a rather limited and hidden space.

The case was slightly different for the masses of audiences out in the countryside: Not only did restrictive directives reach them much later; to them, the broadcasting services even opened up new spaces where they were able for the first time to consume a new and revolutionary music – like it or not.

3. The Liu Yuan Collection: Reflecting on Music and Politics

Indeed: What the Liu Yuan collection shows clearly is the variety of musics available throughout the 1950s and into the 1990s: most of these are hybrid styles that came into being from a dialogue between different types of European (military music, classical music, light music) and Chinese or Chinese Han and Chinese minority musical traditions. The nature of this dialogue changes over time, and there are clearly discernible changes in emphasis in the selection of musics but also in their visual representation. If we have a closer look at what there is in the collection, this becomes quite obvious. The collection contains some 1200 records, which can be roughly categorized as revolutionary songs and revolutionary music, operas (local, revolutionary, traditional), music for Chinese instruments, foreign music performed by Chinese performers, and new hybrids. Each of these categories can be connected with particular times where they would have been primarily produced or broadcast: The records of revolutionary songs and music cover the period since the 1940s and throughout the 1960s and 70s. They would change, following specific political movements: Land reform (tudi gaige 土地改革) is a topic of the early 1950s records (7), recovering or “liberating” Taiwan occurs as a theme in the late 1950s and again in the early 1970s. etc., songs based on quotations from Mao, so called yüluge 语录歌, date to the early years of the Cultural Revolution (31:1967), a time which also saw the proliferation of songs like “Red is the East” (Dongfang hong 东方红), for example, while songs to “Beat down the Gang of Four” (Dadao Sirenbang 打倒四人帮) date to shortly after the Cultural Revolution (32). These revolutionary works would occur in a great variety of musical settings: for choir, for symphonic orchestra, for chamber music group but also for Chinese orchestra or musical ensemble etc. (19).

The collection also contains different types of operas (local, revolutionary, traditional) which date to as early as the 1940s but appear quite consistently through to the 1970s (e.g. Shandong kuaishu 山东快书 and other local forms from the mid-1960s to 1970s (e.g. 22 & 24), and a lot of revolutionary operas throughout the Cultural Revolution period, but not exclusively to be sure (23)). Again, we can see that while the record’s record mirrors particular political preferences of specific times, it is hardly as consistent as the history books would tell us. This point becomes most strikingly clear when we look at the collection’s section of music for Chinese instruments which consists of recordings from the 1950s, and the early 1960s, while the bulk of the records stem from the second half of the Cultural Revolution, the early 1970s (e.g. 39). As the Cultural Revolution is well known as a time where traditional music did not fare well, how can this be explained,? We will come back to this.

A much smaller part of the collection consists of foreign music performed by Chinese (and sometimes also foreign) performers, e.g. Oistrakh performances in China (33) in the 1950s and Schubert played by Ma Sicong 马思聪 also in the 1950s (33), or a performance of Swan Lake, originally recorded in 1962 but then remade in 1978 (39). This section of the collection also contains musics from other socialist states, such as Cambodia, or Korea. Finally, the collection features, next to a number of recitations of political speeches and the like, new types of hybrids, as typical for the 1980s, when the effects of pingpong diplomacy began to be felt, thus pointing the way from revolution to Rock’n Roll which Liu Yuan would also soon be embarking on.

4. Record Receptions: Musical Consumption in (revolutionary) China

The Liu Yuan collection obviously mirrors the official historical periodization which Andreas introduced, but it also offers reason to question the standard story. If we take Liu Yuan’s own assumption of the close relation between records and history seriously, we find that throughout the period 1950–1990 there are not all that many significant breaks, after all. To the contrary: we can observe a rather consistent use of genres:

1. The record collection does not provide evidence, for example, for a period often termed “ten years of stagnation”: especially if we take into account the massive production of plastic records bomo changpian which form a huge part of Liu Yuan’s collection (35-37 etc.), record production seems not to have declined as much as we might have assumed (presumably, these plastic records did not enter record publishing statistics?).

2. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution as seen through the record of Liu Yuan’s records, is also much less xenophobic and iconoclastic than is usually understood: the collection contains not just Mao quotations in many languages as we have seen, but also different language versions of the model operas, for example (e.g. the Spanish version of The Red Lantern (Hong Dengji 红灯记) (37)). Traditional music, too, is at a highpoint not before but during the Cultural Revolution. One could argue, of course, that this may be due to the fact that early ransackings of private collections destroyed so much from earlier periods that it simply is no longer available to a collector like Liu Yuan in the late 1970s. Since Liu Yuan himself, however, has stressed that the numbers of records in private possession were really not significant, then, and since indeed, a greater part of his collection are so-called Guangbo zhuanyong changpian 广播专用唱片 (5), i.e. records for use by work units to “fill” their loudspeakers, to follow this argument would be to overstate the significance of the Smashing movement in the early months of the Cultural Revolution [Fn. 4]. Some of the records in Liu’s collection, like one which contains a qingtan 情叹 (Music Drama) performance of scenes from the novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” was obviously prepared by its owner for possible attacks by Red Guards: he/she had written onto the record: “Lovestories [like the Dream of the Red Chamber] should be beaten down” 打倒才子佳人 (3). In the end, however, the record was not smashed but preserved.

Liu Yuan, and quite a few music lovers like him recall listening to records even during the Cultural Revolution. Some of the Red Guards, instead of smashing the records they had taken away, listened to them instead and thus had their first impressions of foreign and traditional musics. One of them recalls listening to the Beatles in 1969, another remembers: “We organized these underground concerts and listened to records: Beethoven, Bizet, Schubert! We were so fed up with the revolutionary songs, so listening to this was simply great! Our parents did not know anything about this. We would have our “concerts” in the homes of children whose parents had “disappeared.”” (Writer, 1958– ), a third talks of friends meeting in a library, where they would listen to recordings of foreign music.

The Cultural Revolution officially negated foreign “bourgeois” culture and traditional “feudal” culture, it was a time when old instruments such as the literati zither guqin 古琴 had to be hidden away in order not to be smashed. Officially, only very few works from the foreign musical repertory were deemed “correct sounds”. While all of this is true, it is also possible to argue that, far from demolishing all of China’s and the foreign performance heritage, the Cultural Revolution actually helped perpetuate or even popularize particular parts of it. By political fiat, these were spread to a much greater part of China’s population than ever before (or after). Record production played an important role here. The model works and revolutionary songs as well as the localized model operas which started to be produced in the early 1970s and the many instrumental pieces written in accordance with the standards set for the model works, and their many recordings, then, played incessantly through the loudspeakers, introduced particular artistic genres to those who had never known about them. Urban youths thus learned about Peking opera (and later local opera forms, the Yizhi YBX, too MUS), peasants about piano concertos and ballet.34 This is perhaps one reason why, today, this revolutionary music is worthy of an entire section in the music stores.

It is obvious from the record of Liu Yuan’s collection, then, that both traditional and foreign music continued to play a significant role in revolutionary China and even during the Cultural Revolution, that people did listen to, practice, and perform musics other than those officially prescribed but that they may also have enjoyed listening to, practicing and performing those music made popular by official fiat. While it is obvious, that the late 1970s and early 1980s take up and republish many of the foreign (and traditional) musics originally published in the 1950s or even earlier and pushed rather more to the background during the Cultural Revolution, the break between old and revolutionary and between foreign and revolutionary is far less pronounced than is usually assumed, and this is mirrored in Liu Yuan’s collection. Moreover, what his collection also hints at is the consistent presence of the old and the foreign, first published and produced in the 1950s and early 1960s and the revolutionary which comes to only slightly greater prominence since the late 1960s. What this faithful reading of the record’s record shows, then, is that in writing a history of music receptions in the People’s Republic of China, one needs to redraw boundaries and timelines and one needs to show not only many of the untold continuities with China’s own tradition but also the many embracings of foreign heritage in Chinese cultural history which have hitherto been disregarded in studies of Chinese revolutionary culture. The records’ record, in production and even more so in reception, is one that shows up many, often unlikely contemporaneities which have significantly constituted China’s distinctly transcultural musical experience: from Revolution, to Rock’n’ Roll and back again.

Notes

Production of record players declined rapidly in the wake of the Cultural Revolution: 1952–1965: 390,270; 1964–1972: 96,632. In 1976, 70,100 pieces of the electrical motor-driven model “206 (C. D.)” were manufactured, see: Lin Qing 1994, pp. 253–254.
See Nien Cheng 1986, pp. 74–75. Here, she recalls the events of August 30, 1966, when a group of Red Guards entered her house in order to destroy and carry away her bourgeois and decadent belongings. On her request, to save the recordings of Western classical music, it was answered: “Shut up! In any case, do the peasants and workers want Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky? Of course not! We are going to compose our own proletarian music. As for the Music Society, it’s disbanded.”
Kraus 1989, p. 141.
See Mittler Smashing and Enjoying the Four Olds, AAS 2008.

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Latest Revision: 2024-03-08