the serpernt side view of the Great Wall

Eighteen days. Three cities. One hundred thirty-four students. Forty-two chaperones. Thirty boxes of programs. Several tons of baggage. And a spy plane incident barely grown cold. Phillips Academy’s China Concert Tour to Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong was clearly the most ambitious tour of the Cantata Choir and orchestra in PA history.

Although the annual PA Cantata tour is customarily planned for spring break, this year the tour was bumped to June 7-24 to allow extra time in China.

A week before the departure for Shanghai, William Thomas, director of performance, in the first of two conversations with the Andover Bulletin, found his mind less focused on the music than on the mass of production details, the culmination of more than two years of planning. To realize his dream of performing with the Chinese people, Thomas said, he had to tackle a "waterfall of details." He had to get the go-ahead from the academy and secure the financing; finalize the itinerary and complex logistics; obtain permission to perform; develop specific venues for performance and opportunities for cultural exchange; arrange travel scholarships, gifts for hosts, and accommodations; and publish a 36-page program with text in both English and Chinese. There were the complexities of baggage handling and negotiating airfares for nearly 200 travelers, many returning to separate destinations, and there were safety as well as educational, political and disciplinary concerns, not the least of which was how to control graduated seniors. Would word of the trip have an impact on Campaign Andover and on admissions? Every ramification had to be scrutinized.

Planning the Tour

Thomas said the tour involved "a lot of serendipity and a lot of good friends and contacts, in which the school is fortunately very rich."

One helpful friend was former President George Bush ’42, who was chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People’s Republic of China in 1974-75. He wrote to the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship in Foreign Countries about the idea. Madame Li Xiaolin, vice president of the association, welcomed the visit by Andover musicians and offered sponsorship.

"You cannot do a concert in China without an official sponsor," Thomas explained. "It’s not like in the United States, where you can engage a hall, put up posters, issue a press release and just go forward."

Mainly through the involvement of longtime Shanghai resident Shirley Young ’51, former member of the PA Board of Trustees and current chair of the Committee of 100 Cultural Institute, details of the tour began to fall into place.

Arguably the two best music schools in China agreed to perform with the academy visitors. For the opening concert in Shanghai, the magnificent Grand Opera Theatre was secured, along with the participation of the Shanghai Conservatory Orchestra under the direction of Zhang Mei, the orchestra’s first female conductor. In Beijing, a June 17 date was set at the Beijing Concert Hall with the Central Conservatory of Music Orchestra, conducted by Wing Ho, who joined with Thomas and the academy orchestra and choir. Schooled in the United States at Kent State, Oberlin and Yale, Wing Ho is an international viola virtuoso. In Hong Kong, a radio performance was followed by two concerts, one at St. John’s Cathedral on June 21 and another on June 22 at the University of Science and Technology, a stunning site overlooking the city’s harbor and surrounding hills.

On the cross-cultural front, Yuan Han, chair of PA’s Chinese department, who was on sabbatical in China last year, scheduled visits to four high schools, one in Shanghai and three in Beijing, and set up informal concerts and overnight home stays with Chinese families in Shanghai.

The Music

Selection of music for the Asian tour has been on Thomas’ mind for two years, he said. "I had to look at the students we had, then design a program that would showcase their talent and at the same time have aspects that were uniquely American, reflective of who we are. One of the first choices was Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ a phonic formed of jazz and classical music."

There was some synchronicity in the choice of the Gershwin with the eventual sponsorship by United Airlines. Casting about for the right airline and placed on hold when on the telephone with United, Thomas found himself humming along to the airline’s theme, "Rhapsody in Blue." When Stuart Oran, a United senior vice president, came on the line, he offered the airline’s logistical assistance, especially with baggage and return flights. His help proved invaluable.

The real reason for the choice of the Gershwin, however, was the availability of four brilliant student pianists to perform it: Matthew Rotman ’01, Melvin Huang ’01, William Chan ’01 and Alexander Leigh ’02. Rotman played the piano solo in Shanghai, Huang in Beijing, and Chan and Leigh in Hong Kong.

The next choice similarly showcased PA’s student talent on the violin; Thomas praises PA’s young violinists as "among the best in the country." Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major featured James Shin ’01 as soloist in Shanghai, Byoung Jin Kang ’02 in Beijing and Kathryn Cash ’01 in Hong Kong. Kang had performed this piece with the Boston Pops last year and won the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concerto competition.

Bach’s Double Violin Concerto added the talents of Megan Prado ’01, Bjorn Buschan ’01 and Jan His Lui ’02 in Hong Kong and allowed a one-on-one musical exchange with Chinese students in the Shanghai and Beijing concerts. Six violinists shared in each performance, instead of the usual two, with one pair soloing in each of the three movements.

The finale in Shanghai and Beijing was the familiar and

rousing "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel’s "Messiah," chosen to feature the combined choirs of PA and Datong High School in Shanghai and Ren Min High School in Beijing. Visits featuring joint activities and informal concerts with local orchestras in these two schools enhanced the cultural exchange.

Thomas’ final major musical selection was a work by Haydn, also in D minor, "Mass in Angustis (Mass in a Time of Anxiety)," the "Lord Nelson Mass."

"I chose it because I love it, and I thought audiences would find it accessible and enjoyable. It’s also a sacred piece, and they haven’t heard a lot of sacred music in China."

With the trip still ahead, Thomas mused on what he most looked forward to: the unexpected. Despite meticulous planning, he anticipated surprises, and it was the promise of new places and situations, the adventure itself, that called him.

For the 176 participants on this adventure, he said, there would be at least 176 answers to the question. For many, it was the music. Playing it. Listening to others play it and sing it. The chance to find a common language in the music with kids of another culture.

"Music, like laughter, is the international language," Michael Ruderman ’03, a member of the Cantata Choir, wrote in his journal. "To think that we came half way around the world and the students here can sing and play the same music as us ... . I learned that though cultures are different, the family is the same, education for children is a universal wish, and friendship has no political boundaries."

The opportunities to hear the work of Chinese composers in China and to share Western works with some of China’s best young musicians were the trip’s unexpected highlights for some. Others were surprisingly touched by the hospitality and warmth with which families, individuals and Chinese officials welcomed and honored the tour participants.

Others yet were most disarmed by the sights and sounds and smells of a strange land, including the Great Wall, Shanghai’s old city and gardens, Beijing’s now-notorious Tianamen Square, shark fins and other "sea things" littering the streets in the teeming markets of Hong Kong.

A few were struck by the vast difference in two venues, both filled to capacity: Shanghai’s gleaming Grand Opera Theatre, a hall at the level of Lincoln Center, where relatively unsophisticated audiences would clap between movements and in rhythm during the "Hallelujah Chorus"; and Beijing’s timeworn (but acoustically stunning) Concert Hall, hidden among narrow streets in a run-down neighborhood, but with audiences as cosmopolitan as any in the world.

And who could fail to be amazed by the food? The shopping? The high school visits, which, more often than not, featured the similarities between cultures more than the differences? The demonstrations of dance and martial arts and acrobatics? Or–again multiplied by 176–the unexpected fruit of any one of hundreds of events and encounters? Some were too private to mention, and others were too public–like the death of an American tourist whose fatal heart attack atop the Great Wall was witnessed by the students.

For Thomas, though, the most unexpected turn of events was that the tour went as smoothly as planned. No disciplinary nightmares, no accidents among the group, no untoward international incidents, no concert that unraveled, no more than the usual travel hiccups. And no hostility.

There had been real concern beforehand, on the part of both parents and administration, about the shadow that recent political events were casting over the trip: a new administration in Washington, the spy plane incident, changes in relations with Taiwan. In fact, the trip was not given a green light until the very last moment. In light of these fears, said Thomas, the most surprising and perhaps most gratifying aspect of the tour was "the extraordinary welcome we received, both on the part of the people we met and on the part of the government." Time and again, the tour’s hosts went out of their way to make everyone feel comfortable. Their generosity was played out in everything from the little American flags they waved in welcome to the cordiality of nearly every individual encounter.

In Shanghai one evening, Shirley Young brought some Shanghai Conservatory of Music opera students to a reception to perform complex works in elaborate costume. They were 12- and 13-year-old boys playing old men–amusing in some respects. What struck Thomas, however, was their sheer dedication, their level of commitment to a craft they knew, even at this tender age, they would practice for a lifetime. They knew the work inside and out; it would take much longer to perfect it, to grow into it. Perhaps here, for Thomas, was the true epiphany, the metaphor, of the China trip: a kind of cultural perfectionism that rose far above the politics of any given moment, that was perhaps embedded in the long history of the Chinese nation, and that made every exchange on this tour between Andover students and the youth of China so rich.

Dennis Lanson is an instructor in art at Phillips Academy.