HITTING A HIGH NOTE
Music heralds the beginning of an era of great changes
Fu Yu, a music teacher in Beijing, is glad that he is a contemporary and beneficiary of reform and opening up. “It gave me access to music from all around the world and the opportunity to run a piano school for children,” the 44-year-old said.
When Fu was 10, his father gave him a tape recorder as a birthday gift. It was as heavy as a brick and cost 100 yuan ($45.5 then), more than one month’s salary for his father at that time. “My father hoped I would learn English with the recorder. But I used it to secretly listen to music,” he confessed.
Homeland Love was the first popular song he listened to on the recorder. It was first sung by renowned singer Li Guyi and released at the end of 1979. The heartfelt lyrics and the singer’s breathy voice made it touching and strikingly different from most songs at that time. Hailed as the first pop song on the Chinese mainland, the popular- ity of Homeland Love was a signal of reform and opening up in China’s music community. After that, pop music became part of Chinese lives.
Fu still has the old tape containing Homeland Love. “The songs on that tape were evidence of the beginning of a new era. Reform and opening up improved our lives and changed our taste in music,” he said.
Access to Western music
For the Chinese classical music circles, 1979 was a historic year. Many big names in the Western classical music world visited China that year. Seiji Ozawa, a prestigious Japanese conductor who was born in China, came back to China with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in March. Three months later, American violinist Isaac Stern staged two concerts in Beijing and Shanghai. Stern’s visit was viewed as a milestone in the history of Western culture breaking into China. The visit later became part of a documentary, From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, directed by Murray Lemer. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1981.
Four months later, two more musicians, Yehudi Menuhin, an American-born violinist and conductor, and Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, were invited to visit China successively. They helped open a wider window for Chinese classical music lovers.
In the meantime, the Chinese got closer to Western pop music. On April 10, 1985, Wham! held a concert in the Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium, then the largest venue in the capital. The British pop duo became the first Western pop band to perform on the Chinese mainland. The ticket cost 5 yuan ($1.7 then), then one 10th of the average monthly income of Chinese urban residents. But even the steep price couldn’t keep music lovers away. Many queued up for hours