OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 3 November 2011

AS MODERN technology shrinks the global village, traditional musicians from sundry cultures are able to come together and compare notes, in both senses.

World music is developing a cult following and the latest example, The China Project, received its very first outing in this concert. The China Project came about through a meeting between Edinburgh bass player, Emma Smith and Cheng Yu, virtuoso pipa player (a sort of four-stringed lute) and leader of the Silk String Quartet. Together they planned to explore the differences, and maybe more importantly, the similarities between Scottish and Chinese musical cultures.

Emma Smith and the Silk String Quartet

The evening began with two pipe tunes, ‘Lochanside’ and ‘MacLeod’s Farewel’l, arranged for Chinese string quartet with added double bass. An interesting idea, but these two tunes were written for the powerful Highland bagpipes, and the four Chinese instruments, with their gentle and delicate voices, were not able to do the tunes justice. Much more genuine was ‘Three and Six’, a traditional tune from Shanghai that brought to life the full flavour of its origins without any unnecessary embellishments.

Emma Smith’s solo contribution to the event was a trio of Scots tunes, Neil Gow’s ‘Lament for the Death of his Second Wife’, ‘Bonawe Highlanders’ and Corrina Hewat’s ‘Bass Strathspey’. Smith’s argument was that if bass virtuoso Edgar Mayer can win a fiddle competition playing tunes such as these, then why not her? Perhaps because Mayer plays a three-quarter size bass, a sort of halfway house between the cello and the double bass, an instrument that is much more agile and versatile.

The first half was brought to an end with two pieces by Mo Fan, ‘Sounds of the Yau People’ and ‘In That Remote Place’. This was traditional Chinese music, with added bass line, that seemed to demonstrate the story-telling characteristics of both the music and the instruments.

After the interval there were more slants on the Scottish-Chinese combinations; the traditional Chinese Variations on Beijing Opera, an oriental take on a pair of traditional Scots tunes, ‘The Warlocks and The Witches’ by Robert Lowe, and a Chinese-style piece by Barnaby Taylor called ‘Tundra Swans’.

The four members of the Silk String Quartet had the opportunity to showcase their instruments; Cheng Yu played ‘White Snow in Sunny Spring’ on the pipa (four stringed lute), He Tiantian gave a graphic account of ‘Battling The Typhoon’ on her guzheng (a 21-stringed zither), Wang Xiao showed the variety achievable from fiddle tone to near human voice on the two stringed fiddle or erhu in a piece called ‘Horse Racing’, and Emma Smith provided a bass accompaniment to the hammered dulcimer, or yangqin, of Kimho Ip in his arrangement of the traditional Scots air ‘Flowers of Edinburgh’.

The concert entered the home stretch with a piece called ‘Sky Gardens’, commissioned from Jim Sutherland as part of The China Project, and inspired by his ecological beliefs. And, almost finally, another western composition in oriental style by members of the band Lau, Horizontigo using these versatile and, to our ears, very different instruments to conjure up an image of a wide and flat landscape.

Normally the level of applause from the fifty or so in the audience would not have warranted an encore, but one had been prepared and there was no way it wasn’t going to be played! The well-known and often rearranged Mo Li Wha was even used by Puccini in Turandot and as atmosphere for the Beijing Olympics.

I am slightly suspicious of these cross-over projects as I feel they do little to protect a nation’s cultural integrity. Scottish-Chinese co-operations such as this are not new – Eddie McGuire’s Harmony has been doing something similar for several years – and the cynic in me wonders if this was an example of the sort of boxes that have to be ticked to qualify for one of the complex funding streams available from Creative Scotland. Let’s hope that this was not one more step down the road of our nation’s cultural traditions being merged into an homogenous universal morass in the same way as our seasonal “guising” has become “trick or treat”.

© James Munro, 2011

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