Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Matías Tarnopolsky, Alison Friedman, and Wu Fei .
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, brought to you by The China Project. Subscribe to the China Project to get the early release ad-free version of this podcast every week and, of course, our Daily newsletter — the best way there is to stay informed about China. You’ll also have access to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It is a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
If you like this podcast, you will love our Next China event on November 2nd in New York with a special VIP evening featuring a live Sinica Podcast the night before on November 1st. It’s going to be a night and a day of the most interesting and informative discussions on China you’ll hear this year, and great networking opportunities as well. Please come and introduce yourself to me and Jeremy and to the others at The China project. I will talk more about this before recommendations.
50 years ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by its famed conductor, Eugene Ormandy, went to Beijing to perform, and it made history. It was a seminal event, not just in the popularization and development of classical music in China, but also in the diplomatic history of the two countries. I am not going to dwell too much today on the actual visit, or even on its enduring impact, but we’ll focus instead on a commemorative event being held right here in Chapel Hill that has brought some dear ones into town for the occasion, as you will soon hear. Now, if listeners want a refresher on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s trip 50 years ago, I’ll make sure to link in the show notes to a podcast that I taped in 2021 in honor of the debut of a film called Beethoven in Beijing.
For that show, I talked to Jennifer Lin, the journalist and filmmaker who made that film, as well as to the composer and conductor, Cai Jindong, and the cultural writer Sheila Melvin. The two of them are a terrific couple who work closely with Jennifer on Beethoven in Beijing. Their book, Rhapsody in Red, which is all about classical music in China, is one that I would highly recommend. But today we’ve got three guests who, to my delight, are here in the studio in Chapel Hill to talk about some commemorative concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra with its very exciting conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 50 years ago to the day of the closing concerts of that storied Beijing tour on September 20th and 21st, 1973.
Not only that, but on the second night, Thursday the 21st, they will be performing, among other selections, an original composition called Hello Gold Mountain, by the Beijing-born composer, Guzheng virtuoso, Wu Fei. Wu Fei, I should hasten to add, married a certain South African-born Beijing rascal, who is sometimes known to co-host this show, Mr. Jin Yumi — Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-In-Chief of The China Project. We will introduce Fei properly in just a little bit. But first, I am honored and delighted to be joined by Matias Tarnopolsky, who is the President and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and who, in that role, was instrumental in making this commemoration of that historic visit possible and in keeping alive the invaluable ongoing exchanges between the Philadelphia orchestra and musicians in China over the intervening years.
Matias, welcome. I understand you used to be the director of Cal Performances and, as a Golden Bear myself, I’ve seen many, many fine performances at Zellerbach and other venues. Go Bears! Thanks for all you did there at my alma mater.
Matias Tarnopolsky: Go Bears! Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you today.
Kaiser: I’m also thrilled to finally have my dear friend, Alison Friedman, on the show. Alison, as listeners to our show will recall from her previous turns on Sinica, was a longtime Denison of Beijing, who really made a mark by creating and running ping pong productions, which brought performing arts from the United States to China and Chinese Fine Arts to the U.S., very much in the same spirit as the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy 50 years ago. Alison then went on to serve as artistic director for performances at the storied West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong for several years before, to my great delight, she came here to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she was hired to serve as the James and Susan Moeser, executive and artistic director for UNC’s Carolina Performing Arts.
She has already made a huge splash here and has kept up her ties to greater China in ways that have very much enriched our community. Earlier this year, she pulled off a remarkable feat by inviting the Hong Kong Ballet, which was performing Romeo and Juliet in New York to add a single stop to their itinerary. They performed right here in Chapel Hill, and though I was away and didn’t see it, I think I was actually in Davos at the time.
Alison Friedman: Something small.
Kaiser: Yeah, something. Anyway, as I said, they added just this one stop, and it happened to be right here in my town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was, by all accounts, just absolutely amazing. I saw lots of videos and photos. Really bummed that I missed it. Alison, it’s just so great to have you here. Just to be able to see you all the time and have lunch together and stuff, it’s wonderful. Welcome back at long last to Sinica.
Alison: It’s good to be back. Thanks for having me.
Kaiser: Of course, we are also joined by Wu Fei, who is headlining the performance on Thursday evening, and at which I will be in attendance. Wu Fei is a classically trained musician, a graduate of the prestigious China Conservatory, where she studied composition. She’s a prolific composer whose work crosses both geography and genre, and she’s also a really gifted vocalist. If you haven’t heard her work with Abigail Washburn in their duo, Wu-Force, check out the Sinica podcast that we recorded with them several years ago, which has some not-half-bad live recordings that I managed to do right there in the little Airbnb where we taped in New York. Fei, what a pleasure to see you here, welcome back to Chapel Hill.
Wu Fei: Thank you for having me back, Kaiser. It’s exciting.
Kaiser: It’s great to have you. Matias, let’s start with you and let’s talk about the Philadelphia Orchestra and its relationship to China. Is this something that the current members of the orchestra are still very much aware of and actively conscious of? Has this become, in other words, part of the orchestra’s overall identity to any extent?
Matias: Yes. We have two members still serving in the orchestra, Renard Edwards in the viola section, and Davyd Booth, violinist, who were on that tour in 1973, and they’re here in Chapel Hill right now, sharing their stories with students and audiences here as part of this residency. The connection to China is in the orchestra’s DNA at this stage. Phil Kates, another violinist, whenever we go to Beijing, he goes and plays at the pediatric hospital that’s across the street from the hotel where the orchestra stays. It’s now a multi-generational relationship. I’m always struck when we go to China and meet people who were either at that concert in 1973 or whose parents or grandparents were there.
And I hear stories frequently. Whenever we’re there, I hear stories, “Oh, yeah, my grandparents were there. And throughout my upbringing, we always talked about that concert.” It’s part of their consciousness. We’re now into the third and fourth generation of that occasion, and it’s not achieved this sort of mythic status. It’s very precious and very treasured and very real. The fact that the Philadelphia Orchestra continues to go, personalizes that historic, seemingly distant event in ways that are personal and real and deeply connective.
Kaiser: Fei, just as we were setting up all the equipment, I overheard you say something about you having sort of a lineage that’s connected to the Philadelphia Orchestra and its 1973 show. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Fei: Yes. When I was in high school, that was part of the China Conservatory of Music already, and I had to decide whether to go through orchestra conducting or composition. My conducting teacher at the time was Conductor Chu Shiji, and he was one of the five young conductors of the China National Symphony at the time. It was called 中央乐团 [zhōngyāng yuètuán]. It was still called the Central Orchestra — now China’s National Symphony. His boss or mentor was Maestro Li Delun, who was educated by a Jewish refugee musician from Vienna in Shanghai. My conducting teacher, as a young conductor, was not only at the concert, but also at one of the workshops as well because he graduated as conductor from Central Conservatory of Music.
Because at that time, China was still trying to catch up with a lot of things, and then there were very few conductors. My conducting professor was one of the promising young conductors at the time. So yeah, I’m one of the hundreds of millions of children, and now my generation that has been inspired and dreaming, practicing in the rehearsal, dreaming, “Oh, one day I’ll get to play like that.”
Matias: You hit on something really interesting, which is wherever the Philadelphia Orchestra goes, the musicians always fan out in the communities and work with kids and students and civic centers and community centers. Perhaps one of the most inspiring experiences like that for me was when a group of musicians went to Minzu University, which is a university, just as you all know, but it was totally new to me and one of the most inspiring days of my life. The university dedicated to Chinese folk traditions. There was a group of musicians there, Yannick, music and artistic director was there, and we worked a whole day with dance traditions, music traditions, choral traditions from around China. It was unbelievable. I’ve got some amazing photos in my phone.
Fei: Was it Minzu?
Matias: Minzu University.
Fei: 民族大学 [Mínzú dàxué].
Kaiser: Alison, maybe you can explain to me how it is that you managed to make Chapel Hill, of all places, the locus for the convergence of so much talent for the commemoration of something that was just so historic.
Alison: You know, I’ll have to start with a Chinese word, 缘分 [yuánfèn], which can be translated as something like fate or destiny, or people who are meant to meet. I also think of it as a crossroads. Today it actually came about from a conversation that Matias and I had when I first arrived from China to Carolina, and I have to give Abigail Washburn credit for that line. We were chatting, because Matias used to, as you mentioned, be at Berkeley, running a major performing arts institution at a major university. And so I was seeking his good advice. We also have mutual friends back in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. We were chatting about the upcoming anniversary with China and the tour. The conversation was wide-ranging about what is the meaning of arts and cultural exchanges in a divided world? Where and when does it actually build bridges and when is it just fluffy marketing copy?
That conversation was so inspiring to me. I thought, “Well, that’s why we work at universities, to have those conversations. Can we bring this incredible organization to our community here for a concert and activate our research university networks to have that broader conversation that we started on the phone?” That was the seed of the inspiration. Then, of course, all of the logistics of planning major touring orchestras begin with scheduling, budgets, planning. Yannick’s schedule is another Sudoku puzzle to figure out. But those are the easy logistics. Really starting with that inspiration of meaning was how it began.
Kaiser: Amazing. So glad that it came together the way that it did. Matias, just now you mentioned that there were two members of the original Philadelphia Orchestra who went to China in 1973. Davyd Booth, who I remember from the film Beethoven in Beijing because he features pretty prominently in that. And also Renard Edwards, who is a violist 50 years on. I can only imagine how invested that is with significance for both of them. They must be getting along in years. They must be, what? In their 70s now, maybe even late 70s.
Matias: Well, they probably started in their early 20s. I don’t know how old they are, but yeah, they must be in their early 70s, maybe even late 60s. I mean, people start young in this profession. Let’s say they joined in their early 20s, so they would be in their early 70s.
Kaiser: Amazing. Are they still actively performing then?
Matias: Brilliantly. Yes, absolutely.
Kaiser: I understand they’re doing a couple of engagements with the public here in Chapel Hill. What have their engagements been like? What are they talking about and what is it that people in the audiences have been interested in learning from them?
Matias: What’s really interesting for them is that, well, Americans and America had no idea about China, or American people didn’t know about Chinese people, and vice versa. So they talk about human connections more than anything else. That is the most moving and powerful aspect about it. Of course, the incredible reception that the Orchestra received in 1973, the massive import of this group landing in China, six years before diplomatic relations, right? As the first American orchestra. I mean, it was just imbued with firsts, but ultimately, it was about that people-to-people connection that I think impacts them to this day.
Kaiser: I can imagine.
Matias: Could I add something else?
Kaiser: Absolutely.
Matias: It takes visionaries to do what Alison has done, and she is a true visionary. She’s a little modest in her recounting of that first phone call, so I do have to correct the record a bit because my recollection is maybe it was the second phone call, but I don’t know. My recollection was that I called you to get advice on probably something that you all have thought about a lot, which is, what does it mean today for an American orchestra to be traveling to China? In your opening remark, you talked about human rights abuses and things that are very, very real. And our feeling that in going, we just wanted to be sure people understood this is about the connection between people. Alison’s helped us, me and the organization, think very differently about that and in a very positive way. It was able to remind us that often this is the only level of connection and communication that works.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Matias: That we need to keep doing it, whatever’s happening.
Kaiser: Alison is known for her 正能量 [zhèng néngliàng], for the positive energy she always brings to every project she works on. But Alison, I have to imagine that the past few years just cannot have been an easy time for people like you who are so personally dedicated to cultural exchange, or perhaps it’s the case that all the hostility in the air both here in the U.S., and I should hasten to add in China, has going to be woken up some people to the urgency of getting behind cultural exchange for lack of anything else we can grab onto.
Alison: I think you’ve both put it perfectly. At times when it’s the hardest, these are the times that you need to find any route available to you. Logistics perhaps get more challenging, but I find on both sides there are enough people that actually want things like this to happen. In this case, you do say that the tensions, the U.S.-China tensions are rife on both sides. I feel it very strongly here to the point that in some of our early discussions about having this concert be so heavily China-focused, my concerns had very little to do with any sensitivities with the China side. It was whether or not the North Carolina legislature might suddenly have sensitivities about being focused on China. That’s a change in leaving China and moving here, I wasn’t expecting those kinds of dances to start.
Kaiser: Wow.
Alison: So, everything’s gone smoothly. Everything’s wonderful. Some of those, I think, we do ourselves a disservice by feeding into some of the anxiety and the drama around it. Because this was often my response when I was working in China, and people in the States would ask about censorship or ask about, “Oh, aren’t you nervous?” The broader context is they’re not paying attention. I would like to think we’re that important that we’re under the microscope, but the reality is there are much larger fish to fry that if you can just get on with it on a very grassroots daily level, there’s so much momentum and support at that level that wants to keep going. A friend of mine put it quite well — musical exchange isn’t necessarily going to solve massive geopolitical problems, but it will continue to create environments in which the people that need to solve them will have a more favorable environment to do so.
I think that’s where the work that we’re doing is almost like seasoning the pot with the right seasons so that it doesn’t overboil into something really ugly and that we can’t come back from. That’s where we need to, with all of our collaborators on all sides, China, the U.S. elsewhere, to continue this kind of work that just keeps the pot seasoned with the context that we’re all swimming in to be more conducive to other discussions.
Kaiser: Wise words. Fei, it’s been, what? Getting on 10 years now since you and Jeremy and the kids moved to Tennessee, moved to the States. You have been so active in the U.S.-China cultural space. To the point where I’ve lost track of the number of times where I’m speaking at some event and you are performing there. I want to ask, in the last few years as things have gotten so hostile between China and the U.S., has the interest in U.S.-China culture exchange started to fall off from what you can tell just based on the demand for your art?
Fei: I think it has kept strong, not even intentionally. My roots are from Beijing, and so I don’t even think about, “Oh, how do I maximize that?” I don’t ever think about it, but that’s just who I am. My focus has been art is individual first. Even if you think of a large orchestra, it is made up by each person. Every drop counts. It’s all one person to person. One composition was written by one person that has been played by thousands of people, or millions of people around the world. It’s every one person’s story. I think about that. If I keep going, not thinking about what kind of mission I have, I can’t control what people think of me. But I already know. I carry, I come with that big picture.
And I look for beauty, I go after beauty. I want to. That’s it. I think if all the people can think of is we are all humans, and that whatever the political, the thing that they stir up a little, we can eventually separate ourselves from there. We all want beauty. That’s it. It’s simple, so easy. But I don’t think about it constantly, intentionally at all.
Kaiser: Alison, what’s it been like for you navigating the politics of this particular community of the Chinese diaspora that is here in North Carolina? I guess it’s no surprise that there are a lot of Chinese people here because there’s a large university cluster, there’s a really active tech community. But as I discovered, soon after landing here, there’s a lot of political polarization within the Chinese community. What has it been like for you navigating that? Has that caused any problems for you at all?
Alison: So far in just under two years that I’ve been here, not at all. I think some of that is related to what we’ve been discussing in terms of the appreciation for bringing culture to Chapel Hill. I wasn’t sure if I would experience that, for example, bringing Hong Kong Ballet. It was very specifically Hong Kong. Thanks actually to your introduction. Hongbin Gu. Gu Hongbin, our former council person of Chapel Hill, connected me to the China-America Friendship Association of the community. And the overarching response has been gratitude to see more representation here in Chapel Hill. Give it time, I’ve only been here two years, and depending on what we’re working on, it potentially could have different perspectives come up. But so far the China Undergraduate Student Association has been a great partner. The China-America Friendship Association did a whole Lunar New Year celebration in front of Memorial Hall right before Hong Kong Ballet. We had lion dances, little kids doing drumming, retired aunties with their fan dances.
Kaiser: Gosh. I’m really bummed to have missed that.
Alison: Oh, it was wonderful. It was such a fun celebration. About 200 people showed up just to check it out. And it just felt easy. It didn’t feel fraught or tense. Again, I think it depends what you’re dealing with, but perhaps what I’m finding moving to the U.S. and moving to Chapel Hill in particular, is there is a growing representation. You mentioned the research triangle and the more tech jobs and the conglomerates that are coming here. You do have growing immigrant populations across sectors. But I think from a culture and arts perspective, you haven’t seen as much of that represented. So at this stage, I’m finding mostly just excitement and appreciation to see it on the stages in the streets of Carolina.
Kaiser: Inshallah, it will remain this way.
Alison: Hear, hear!
Kaiser: Matias, the community around the Philadelphia Orchestra, the musicians themselves, and most of the Orchestra’s stakeholders too, would tend, I imagine, to be very cosmopolitan with liberal outlooks, really international, really diverse, and as such, they are probably predisposed to like the kind of exchange that began 50 years ago. But this same kind of person who’s artistic and sensitive and knowledgeable and aware is also likely to be pretty alarmed by the closing of doors that’s happening in China and by the increasingly restrictive space for artistic expression and by expressions of this ugly ethnonationalism that I think it would be just antithetical to the Orchestra’s cosmopolitan spirit. Are you finding that there’s any falling off of interest on the part of the orchestra or its directors and the major donors to continue with the kind of engagement with China that helped make the Philadelphia Orchestra just such a household name in China?
Matias: No, because I see the opposite.
Kaiser: Ah, thank God.
Matias: And it’s not our first rodeo. Back to your earlier question, it’s been 50 years. So there’s real deep familiarity with China. And not just Beijing and Shanghai. I mean, this Orchestra has traveled places. Our supporters, the Philadelphia Orchestra family, let’s call it that, believe that music and arts, as represented by the orchestra, is one of America’s greatest exports. That’s what we can do. Music is about sharing joy, beauty, connection, compassion. This is what the Philadelphia Orchestra does and can do to help make the world a better place. That’s what our supporters, our musicians care about. It doesn’t matter what’s happening out there, so to speak. It’s gotten bad and is getting worse. We were there last time in 2019, I think it was in the middle of the ASEAN Summit. America was at another low point in diplomacy. It was in the Trump presidency, and Sino-American relations were really bad — really bad. We get to meet senior politicians, senior diplomats on both sides. We go there apolitically, obviously, and they all said, please keep doing this.
Kaiser: Amen. Matias, let’s talk a little bit about the program. I am, unfortunately, not going to be able to see both nights. I’ve got a ticket for a Thursday night, but what am I going to be missing on Wednesday night, the first show?
Matias: Well, we can help you out with a ticket.
Kaiser: Okay.
Matias: What you’re going to be missing is a sort of introduction to the world of the Philadelphia Orchestra. These programs were created in collaboration with Alison. She was very clear with us that this wasn’t just about bringing the Philadelphia Orchestra, plunking it accidentally on the days that happened to be 50 years later. This was about how we are going to create and curate two concert programs, a series of events that tell the story. And so Alison connected us with Wu Fei, which is amazing — thank you. It’s a great honor to be able to play your music, but you’ll already be at that concert. But Alison also said to us, “It’s not just about China, it’s also about the Philadelphia Orchestra of now.” So, the main work on tomorrow night’s program is Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3.
The Philadelphia Orchestra musicians and their music and artistic director, Yannick, have been doing deep work about reframing the repertoire and context for classical music. The conversations that we have now around representation and access to classical music, which the composer Florence Price did not have, she was a black woman, and she said she would’ve had a lot more success as a composer, were it not for the issue of her race and her sex. She died, I think, in 1953. And her music has been rediscovered. Yannick has been an extraordinary advocate for it. Won a Grammy. The Orchestra Yannick won a Grammy for a recording of her music. So, this is an introduction to the current thinking, answering the question, if we’d had these conversations 50 years ago, you would’ve seen William Dawson, Florence Price, and many more alongside Brahms and Beethoven in the everyday repertoire. This is our response to Alison’s question of, “What’s the orchestra of today?”
Kaiser: That’s fantastic.
Matias: In the first half, you have a wonderful piece by the great British composer, Anna Clyne. All the new music is by women, by the way, Wu Fei and Anna, this introductory piece called This Moment, and the Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto played by our very own concertmaster, who’s an international star in his own right. So, you have this precious, beautiful introduction to the Philadelphia Orchestra Music by Wu Fei and Florence Price — Wu Fei on the second night, Anna Clyne and Florence Price on the first.
Kaiser: The second evening, which opens with Wu Fei’s Hello Gold Mountain, which we are going to talk about in a bit, also includes Beethoven’s 6th, the Pastoral Symphony, which has a significance, again, that ties it to 50 years ago. Can you talk a little bit about that piece and what it means to the orchestra’s history in China?
Matias: Absolutely. And again, I mean, this whole thing could be like a sort of a pint to Alison’s brilliance, but this is also a way of really thanking you for having this idea.
Alison: I’m blushing.
Matias: Well, yeah. You can see it on the radio. No, but truly, this takes thought. Alison said, “Okay, and then something to celebrate the 50 years.” The piece that Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed 50 years ago in Shanghai and Beijing was Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the Symphony No. 6. There is a story that is so good that if it’s apocryphal, so be it, but I think it’s not because it was told to me by the great diplomat, Nicholas Platt, who was running, I guess it was the China office in Beijing then. Nick said, was it Madam Mao, I think, wanted Beethoven 6th Symphony.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Matias: Right. So, you all know the story. You should read it in Nick Platt’s book, China Boys. But Eugene Ormandy didn’t want to perform it. And Beethoven’s Symphony called The Pastoral is a story about nature and the famous slow movement, which has various story heading scenes from a brook, the wind rustling and the leaves, and then there’s a storm. Nick convinced Ormandy to perform it, really against Ormandy’s wishes by saying, “The pastoral symphony of Beethoven really represents China’s agrarian past and presence, and the struggle of the people in the fields.” I mean, he made up this whole thing, but clearly, he’s a diplomat. And whatever it took it got it across the line. And what an extraordinary piece to have brought in that first visit. Hearing Yannick and the Philadelphia Orchestra perform Beethoven’s Pastoral, there’s nothing like it.
Kaiser: Can’t wait. I’m really, really looking forward to it. Fei, let’s talk about your composition, Hello Gold Mountain. On hearing the name, I think many Americans, especially those who know a little bit of Chinese or know a little bit about the history of the Chinese in America, might have assumed that it had something to do with San Francisco. But it’s about another diasporic community entirely, the Jews who fled Europe and found lives in Shanghai. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration and the ideas behind this piece? Since you originally wrote it for a relatively small chamber ensemble for the Chatterbird ensemble, which is a modern chamber ensemble based at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where you guys live. What was involved in reworking it for a full orchestra and one with the power and the virtuosity of the Philadelphia Orchestra?
Fei: Well, the inspiration came from, after moving back, for me moving back to the States for many years, as a mother, also the second year after Jeremy, my husband, whom I’ve tried to convince for many years to move to the States, when Trump got elected, it was a very dramatic time that in my entire life as a musician, I never thought I would be inspired, I would go, search inspiration from really a great land.
Kaiser: Patriot.
Fei: You know, like that. But somehow, just my body really felt ache, like a physical ache. It happened a few times in my life when I felt that, and some of my best works came out of it. So I knew there’s something like, I didn’t even need to think about it. I would just need to find the…
Kaiser: Visceral release, yeah.
Fei: Yes. And then the thing is already there, they’ll just be birthing out. At the time, I was already also trying to figure out how I could be helpful either as a citizen because I took voting very seriously. Then I also started working with the local refugee and immigrant organizations.
Kaiser: Oh, cool.
Fei: And then one led to another, and it led to another. The more I learned about the immigrants and refugee community, and at the time, I had been married to Jeremy, the South African Jew, so I knew about the history of the Shanghai Jewish refugee from at least 15 years ago. I never thought, “Oh, one day I’m going to write a big piece, dah, dah, dah.” But somehow those things just grew in me. And then having relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. Before I married Jeremy, it was just in the documentary films in the book, and now we have children. So, it’s all becoming much more real, and it came just naturally. And then through the very divisive time of Under Trump got elected, all the attacks, and so somehow I just boomed.
And then working with Chatterbird at the time. They were brilliant. They were already applying for grants, and so they knew one of the grants called the MAP Fund from New York City that asked, “Can we read the description?” And I was like, “Oh, wow. I got it.” We basically mapped out the thing in two weeks, and I had everyone on board to be community supporters. That’s how it boomed. The composition was already 60% there, just needed to write out the notes, basically. And then after the premiere, so many people had the same kind of mission that were just onboard. No one was like, “Oh, well, let me think about it.” Everyone was, “okay, how can we help?” It was like that towards the premiere.
Then, as soon as the premiere happened, there was COVID. We had a plan, I was hoping maybe this year would be 2020, some sort of the moment and then grew. And then we paused. And I had all that time, but when you write composed for chamber orchestra, the bone structure is there for symphony. It’s the same parts, you just add like maybe 20 more violins and then that’s all. 20 more violins and 18 more basses and stuff. Because that was also my training. Since I was a young teenager, that was my specific training, it was to orchestrate for orchestra. Besides playing, that’s all the fun part. But the real training was writing 24 staff lines like that.
Kaiser: Wow.
Fei: I had all this time and I was practicing. And then the work just got recognized more with orchestras, thanks to my agency, a brilliant team. Then with the Lehigh Orchestra University, that was also another institution. They were so on board. The conductor, Paul Salerni, encouraged us, said, “Fei, we have this whole orchestra. We would love to have every student to be involved.” I’m like, “I am there.”
Kaiser: Oh, wow. So, you’d already done an orchestral…?
Fei: I hadn’t, but I knew they were into it.
Kaiser: Ah, okay.
Fei: We had a meeting. At the time, I hadn’t even learned how to write music on the computer. I was still writing with my hands. And I trained myself how to do it on Sibelius the entire summer from zero knowledge to entire orchestral work. I submitted in January, and then premiered, and then yeah, made the testing basically the first piece, four months.
Kaiser: Wow. That’s fast.
Fei: I was like, “I’ll do it.” So, that’s the orchestral version.
Kaiser: I know you were collaborating with this guy, Shanir Blumenkranz, who plays the oud. By the way, I was listening to some of this stuff, and man, Shanir Blumenkranz also plays some serious freaking heavy metal.
Fei: Oh, yeah.
Kaiser: Oh my God.
Fei: Yeah. He’s a wizard.
Kaiser: I don’t think it should surprise anybody. Because that kind of music with the Fregean mode, it just lends itself so perfectly to some metal shredding, right? Dude shreds.
Fei: He does, yeah.
Kaiser: Oh my God. It was so fun. Anyway, tell us about your collaboration with Shanir Blumenkranz. He’s playing, right?
Fei: Oh yeah.
Kaiser: I can’t wait.
Fei: Yeah, he plays in every Hello Gold Mountain concert.
Kaiser: Oh, great, great.
Fei: I’ve known Shanir since 2007 or ’06, or ’08; long before I met Jeremy, actually.
Kaiser: Also a Nashville-based musician?
Fei: No, he’s from Brooklyn.
Kaiser: Oh, okay, cool.
Fei: Yeah, he’s been in New York City. I was a curator at this venue called The Stone in the East Village in New York. He’s one of the very active New York downtown jazz scene, or the Silk Road as well, Silk Road ensemble. And I had the privilege to invite everybody who I wanted to play with just for a whole month in the East Village. Shanir was one of them. And Shanir is just one of the musicians, we don’t talk. He doesn’t like to talk, but on stage, he just knows exactly where I want to play. And then I become someone that I haven’t played before. I rediscover myself every time I play with him. He’s like that kind of wizard.
Kaiser: Wow.
Fei: Doesn’t happen very often in music at all in my whole life.
Kaiser: Yet another successful Chinese-Jewish coupling.
Fei: In music, yes.
Kaiser: I mean, what is up with that? Somebody’s got to write a book.
Alison: That’s a different podcast you’re going to do, I think.
Kaiser: Whole series. Actually, a whole different podcast. It will be like all about the connection. Alison, tell us about your first exposure to Hello Gold Mountain.
Alison: Absolutely. Well, I have to give full credit to my colleague, Amy Russell. I’m grateful for Matias and everything he said about the vision for this concert, but my colleague, Amy Russell, who’s been with Carolina Performing Arts for many years and was deeply involved with the partnership with Wu Fei and Abby Washburn when they’ve been here, I know she was in discussion with you about this work and definitely wanted you to come back to Carolina to continue this partnership and this evolutionary relationship that we’ve had over the years. So, again, 缘分 [yuánfèn], it all just sort of aligned. Because, obviously, I knew you from my Beijing days, and then to have it all aligned here now in this new world, I’ve been very surprised about how unknown it is here in the States of this Jewish history in China. Spending the time that we’ve spent in China, I just assumed it was common historic knowledge that there’s, not huge in numbers, but a very significant Jewish refugee population in relation to China.
And here, for most of my colleagues, it was a total revelation. No idea that that was even a thing. It felt almost anathema. Like, “What? Jews in China? Huh.” And so that’s been thrilling because, to me, success is when a very narrow worldview gets nudged open a little to make room for things that didn’t fit before. For better or worse, sometimes that sounds negative, but often it’s just, “Oh, that’s in the world?” I think your work, in addition to being a spectacularly soaring, beautiful piece of music, to now be able to tell that story of world history, not just Chinese history, not just Eastern European or Jewish history or World War II history, but truly, world history is thrilling.
Kaiser: That’s fantastic. I just can’t wait to hear it. Well, this has just been such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Matias, Alison, and, of course, Fei for taking the time to come in and chat. I am just so psyched to see this. Just two days. I’m wondering what to do when the house collapses. I mean, you’re going to bring down the house, right?
Alison: That’s what the Philadelphia Orchestra does, and that’s what Wu Fei does.
Kaiser: Let’s move on to recommendations. Just a very quick reminder first, our Next China conference is just about two months away. Have you gotten your ticket yet? If you have not, it is going to be a full-day conference on November 2nd and includes quite a few guests who have frequented Sinica before that you listeners might remember, not only our keynote speaker Yasheng Huang, who I interviewed here two weeks ago, but also people like Lingling Wei and Evan Feigenbaum, and way more than that. So, get a VIP ticket to not only get priority seating at any of our speaker sessions and workshops but also to join our team and several of those speakers for the night before. That’s on November 1st over dinner, and a live Sinica taping where we have Eric Olander from the China Global South Project and the amazing Maria Repnikova. They will be in conversation with Jeremy Goldkorn and me about China in the Global South.
So, go to www.nextchinaconference.com for more info. All right, on to recommendations. Matias, is there something that you’ve read recently or that you’ve enjoyed that you could recommend to our listeners?
Matias: You know, this is a very confusing time in the world and it’s a very confusing time in the world of arts and culture. We’re relying deeply on great institutions. You’ve talked about some, University of California, Berkeley, University of North Carolina, the Philadelphia Orchestra — institutions that have been around 100, and 150, 200 years. It is those institutions and artists that are getting us, the world, through this moment because I’m seeing way too many connections frayed. It actually causes me sort of despair sometimes. In those moments, I do think about music. There’s always the music of J. S. Bach or the music of Mozart. There’s music being created today. Wu Fei sitting on my left here, and I’ve spent my life advocating for the music of living composers. But there’s a piece of music that I keep coming back to, and it’s the trio from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte, it’s called Soave sia il vento. It’s a trio flap major. And it is just a moment, a brief of peace and serenity that has been a touchstone of mine for forever.
Kaiser: It’s a marvelous recommendation. I love Così fan tutte. It’s really fun. Okay, Alison, what do you have for us?
Alison: Besides the obvious one that everyone now needs to listen to Shanir Blumenkranz’s music, if they haven’t already, both his traditional and shredding heavy metal. That’s an obvious one. The other one, I’m going to take a bit of a departure from China and head over to Greek mythology. I’ve been enjoying Natalie Haynes’s podcast on the BBC world. She is a Greek mythology scholar, scholar of antiquities, but she also calls herself a recovering standup comedian. She is brilliant.
Kaiser: Oh my God, that sounds great.
Alison: The podcast is from a couple years now. It started before the pandemic, it continued through, but Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. They’re about 20 to 30 minutes long. And she’s got a brilliant one. The one to start with, she does the entire Odyssey in 28 minutes.
Kaiser: Holy moly.
Alison: It’s brilliant. She brings on different experts to be her guests and they’re hilarious. They’re bite size. She focuses primarily on leading women in Greek history and Greek tragedy and Greek comedy. But she’s fabulous. Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics.
Kaiser: Fantastic recommendation. I can’t wait to check that out. All right. Fei, what do you have?
Fei: Wow. I have a couple of things. One is one of my favorite bands reunion next year. It’s called The Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
Kaiser: Gosh, I’ve never heard of them. Wait, I think we need to tell a quick story about them. Right? So, I’m in my apartment with Fei and Jeremy over one evening, and we’re sitting around having a drink. I have music playing in the background, and suddenly Fei looks at me and stares at me intently and goes, “Is this Sleepytime Gorilla Museum?” And, of course, it is. I said, “How did you know?” And so we both know them.
Fei: Yes. I went to Mills College in Oakland, California. That’s where the band was born and when they were living. I also not only knew the whole band, their violinist…
Kaiser: Carla.
Fei: Carla Kihlstedt is on my first record, Distant Youth, with Fred Frith and me. She’s been a huge influence. Huge talent.
Kaiser: She’s amazing. Check out her other band, Charming Hostess.
Fei: Oh, yes.
Kaiser: It’s Bulgarian. It’s like Balkan music, which is crazy.
Fei: Her solo record as well, just her violin. She has this incredible ability of playing extremely technical, her voice will be half a quarter beat behind her violin, bowing, and that is still incredibly beautiful. It’s technically extreme and beautiful. She has got this whale sound. She can sing super high, like, sound like a whaling, so like a sawing sound. It’s really incredible. Yeah, so that’s my recommendation.
Kaiser: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. They have three albums, which I just think are three of the best records. My favorite of, well, they’re all great, but of Natural History, Grand Openings and Closings. Those are the two that you should start with. They’re astonishing. The whole family, they have an earlier incarnation that I actually included Jin, I don’t know if you knew Jin Yun, but it was called Idiot Flesh before that.
Fei: Oh, idiot Flesh. Yes, of course.
Kaiser: Yeah. Before that, they were Acid Rain, and they were in Barrington Hall, which is one of the infamous co-ops in Berkeley. Bands like The Dead Kennedys came out of there. It was a really, really famous place. We used to play shows with them when they were Acid Rain and Idiot, or I guess before Idiot Flesh, but when I was in college. Yeah. Wow.
Fei: Good old time. Yeah, so interesting. The Bay Area groups really go there.
Kaiser: They were the best. All right. Okay, so my recommendation. Alison, Jeremy interviewed you for Ask to Tea, and at the end, you recommended a hot pot restaurant in the area. I could only just shake my head, sadly, at your recommendation because there’s one that is so much better.
Alison: What? Bring it.
Kaiser: Okay. So, you talked about So Hot. The really good one, it’s not that far away from there either, it’s called Good Harvest or 大丰收 [Dà fēngshōu]. I will take you there. We will eat a lot, and it’ll be so good. One of the things about it that’s best is they have a really, really well-stocked condiment bar where you can just really make dipping sauce to your own quite exacting specifications. Anyway, that’s good if you’re in the Triangle. I have to give another less geographically restrictive recommendation, which is that a good friend turned me onto this very young Sicilian guitar virtuoso named Matteo Mancuso, who plays FingerStyle Electric, but he hues very much to the best period in electric fusion in Jazz fusion. His stuff reminds me of John Scofield or John McLaughlin or Allan Holdsworth or Frank Gambale or Scott Henderson, the excusing guitarists from the ’80, the heyday of that.
But very distinct, very much his own style. Just super versatile and just an amazing tone. Lots of his stuff is on YouTube. He’s just amassed a huge following there. So, check Matteo Mancuso. All right, you guys, thank you so much. What a blast.
Alison: Thank you.
Kaiser: Can’t wait to see you guys again. I’m really, really looking forward to it. Thanks once again, Matias.
Matias: A great pleasure for me and an honor to be with Wu Fei and Alison Friedman here. Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Kaiser, for having me on the show.
Kaiser: You’re very welcome, and I really look forward to it. Congratulations, and thank you for bringing the orchestra here.
Matias: Well, thank you for the important work you do. Thank you.
Alison: Thank you, Kaiser.
Fei: Thank you.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter, as it’s now called, X or something, or on Facebook, or on any of the other renowned socials at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
