Striking a new chord in culture with neighbors

Students from Guangxi Arts University use padded sticks and mallets to strike bronze percussion instruments laid out onstage, forming beautiful melodies that echo across a conference hall in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region’s Beihai city.

The students are performing gamelan, an ensemble form indigenous to Indonesia, which features xylophones, drums, gongs and other instruments.

“In 2015, our university started to hire teachers from Bandung to teach students how to play Indonesian music and opened gamelan electives for students. Later, we founded the first gamelan orchestra in China,” says Chu Zhuo, the orchestra leader.

Situated near several Southeast Asian countries, the university has benefitted from its geographical advantage and developed wellrounded study programs related to musical genres found around the ASEAN region.

“The university has collected more than 300 types of traditional instruments from Southeast Asian countries,” says Chu. “We also have faculty and international students from these countries to teach us how to play their local instruments.”

Randy Geovani Putra, an Indonesian teacher in Chu’s orchestra, says Guangxi Arts University has been organizing its annual China-ASEAN music week since 2012 to provide gamelan enthusiasts a platform to promote the art form.

He has run gamelan workshops and delivered related speeches at the university, while integrating elements of Chinese folk music into gamelan performances.

“I was inspired to compose pieces that use both gamelan and traditional Chinese instruments like the flute, guzheng (zither) and erhu (two-stringed fiddle),” says Putra. “I can feel the harmony created by these different musical elements.”

Putra and his students were invited to perform at the third Belt and Road International Symposium on Cultural and Artistic Exchanges and Cooperation on Dec 19, since the Chinese gamelan orchestra is among the positive outcomes of international cultural exchanges in recent years.

The symposium held by the Chinese National Academy of Arts in the Guangxi port of Beihai gathered experts, scholars and artists from 11 countries, including China, Russia, Mongolia, the United States and South Korea, to study the role of culture in the construction of “a community of shared future for mankind”.

Xin Hongmei, vice-mayor of Beihai, says the city that once served as a port of departure for the ancient Maritime Silk Road is now a window for China to further open up to Southeast Asia.

Xin says: “We hope the symposium will encourage academic cooperation and cultural exchanges among countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative and raise its theoretical achievements to a new level.”

Han Ziyong, director of the academy, emphasizes the importance of engaging border areas at international cultural exchanges.

“People from areas like the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Yunnan province, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Heilongjiang province have more common languages with people in these neighboring countries,” says Han. “It’s necessary to carry out in-depth, longterm and stable cooperation with other countries by holding activities like this symposium and also by sending art troupes abroad to learn from their foreign counterparts.”

Wang Dandan, a professor at Quanzhou Normal University, agrees, citing the development of nanyin, an ancient music style from East China’s Fujian province, which was initially only promoted by a handful of enthusiasts. Now with the numerous nanyin associations setting up a variety of competitions and shows, the genre has been spreading to other countries.

Zhao Minglong, a researcher with the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, points out that frequent people-to-people communication will encourage the government to organize more large-scale cultural-exchange activities.

“For instance, some ethnic groups living in Guangxi and Vietnam often visit each other and celebrate their traditional festivals together, which has come to the government’s attention,” says Zhao. “Last year, our local government started to run a festival gala for residents on both sides of the border.”

With his research of the many nationalities living along an ancient Silk Road route running from China’s Sichuan province to the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia underway, he is finding that there are many crossborder communities within which people from different countries share languages and customs.

“The protection of these shared intangible heritages should be based on goodwill and mutual understanding,” says Zhao. “We should uncover their common values by absorbing the essence of this and discarding the dregs, and then pass down these cultures to future generations together.”