Hong Kong can learn from the mainland in how it promotes music
Monday Vibes
The author is deputy news editor of China Daily Hong Kong Edition.
In May, I got a chance to sit down and talk with Hong Kong’s first female orchestra conductor, Yip Wing-sie. At the end of our lovely conversation, I brought up a question to the Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s music director: Is Hong Kong doing enough to promote orchestral music?
Without a doubt, I think Yip has done her part. Under her direction, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta became a pioneer in classical music promotion. As early as in 2006, the Sinfonietta teamed up with local comedian Jim Chim Shui-man, incorporating standup comedy with performances and classical music terms explanations. All six performances were sold out. It was her decision to “hire” McDull, Hong Kong’s favorite piglet, as the Sinfonietta’s resident artist. Every summer since 2012, the popular cartoon character joins musicians to bring segments of orchestral music with storytelling and animations.
The attempt was successful, judging from the packed venue and bursts of laughter I witnessed when I watched a performance with my 6-year-old nephew last summer. The audiences, mostly kids and middle-aged parents, were all captivated. But all that is not enough in Yip’s mind: The orchestral performances still fail to attract young audiences; namely, those who are new graduates to their early 30s.
“Why do we lose them?” Yip asked me.
Upon hearing Yip’s remarks, I could not help but think of the vigorous market that mainland theater performances now have. Mainland audiences have a great appetite for overseas musicals. In 2017, the box office of imported musicals reached 116 million yuan ($16.7 million), accounting for nearly half of the total box office musical theater receipts generated.
But for locally made productions, be it the adapted version of foreign musicals or Chinese original productions, the market response has been lukewarm. In 2017, locally made musicals accounted for less than 30 percent of the total box office.
I watched one original production in 2015 in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. Half of the performance venue was empty. The tickets were priced seemingly impossibly low: the highest price was 280 yuan.
But things saw a 180-degree change after 2017. In February, online tickets of a Japanese-adapted musical, Letter, which is performed by an all-mainland cast, sold out in 10 seconds. Tickets for the ringside seats were priced at 3,880 yuan each, four and a half times the original price, on the black market. Such a great change is all thanks to a mainland reality show called SuperVocal. Thirty-six professional musical/ opera performers compete for six seats that could send them to concerts held across the country. In the show, the contestants need to perform pieces from well-known musicals and operas.
The show was not an immediate success; as my friend once put it, “Opera is too far away to be reached”. Yet, with the rearrangement of musical/opera pieces and the down-toearth performance of the contestants, the show managed to win the hearts of audiences, mainly the younger generation.
“It makes me realize that opera is not too exquisite to be understood, while a musical is not just about a bunch of people singing instead of reading their lines,” one audience member wrote to the show’s Weibo account.
Building an audience takes time. It took the mainland market three months (as the show ran on for three months on TV) to cultivate a large audience. And most of the newbies are people younger than 25. They are passionate and energetic, both onand offline. Most importantly, they are willing to spend time and money on musical performers they love, which makes them a rising spending power in the mainland musical market.
Zheng Yunlong, who participated in Super-Vocal, is one of the Chinese cast of the musical Letter. When knowing his show was sold out in 10 seconds, Zheng wrote on his social network account: “For this moment, I’ve waited for 10 years.”
Looking back, it all begins from a reality-show underdog that was bold enough to take the risk of combining fine arts with popular culture. Liao Changyong, renowned baritone and one of the show’s judges, said the reason he joined the show was because it aims to bring TV audiences into theaters. And the show has done that.
Hong Kong has never lacked maestros. But when it comes to promoting traditional art forms, it lacks a bit of boldness and innovation compared with the Chinese mainland. And innovation is the key to win young audiences’ hearts.