From Confucius To Beethoven: China’s embrace of Western classical music is rooted in Confucian values
Classical music has taken off in China, which is producing more musical instruments, more music students, and, increasingly, more superstar players, such as Lang Lang, than any other nation. While Western musicians fearing for the art form’s future have welcomed this trend, the reasons behind it have remained unclear.
Why have so many Chinese embraced an art form that is, after all, the product of a foreign culture? A prominent Chinese-American pianist and scholar has proposed an intriguing answer: Confucius.
Hao Huang, an internationally renowned pianist and professor of music at Scripps College in Claremont, California, sees a sublime convergence between Western classical music and Confucian philosophy. He points out there are profound “trans-cultural affinities” between the musical tradition that produced Bach and Beethoven and “Confucian traditional values of artful self-cultivation and virtue.”
For young Chinese, he writes, studying classical music is a way of embodying those deep cultural values while simultaneously signaling one’s “modernity and individual creativity.”
Huang lays out his argument in an article just published in the International Journal of Music Education. In it, he points out that while the Chinese government’s attitude toward Western music has swung back and forth wildly over the decades, the underlying values spelled out by Confucius — who was himself a musician — have continued to guide popular attitudes and behaviors…