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Featuring Mei Han, Aiyun Huang, and Lee Pui Ming. A Vancouver New Music production, in association with explorASIAN and Asian Heritage Month. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Saturday, May 6.
Downtown was nearly shut down last Saturday night: due to an apparent power failure, cars shuffled nervously through unlit intersections, and on Granville Street, early drinkers sat glumly in the dark. Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi was in the middle of explaining that his featured artists would perform acoustically, and that only one piece needed to be struck from the program.
Then the power came back on—and a good thing, too, for the score that would have been lost proved one of the evening’s highlights. Bamboo, Silk and Stone, a 1994 collaboration between electronic composer Barry Truax and multi-instrumentalist Randy Raine-Reusch, is an early and enduring example of Vancouver’s musical multiculturalism, and having Raine-Reusch’s wife, zheng virtuoso Mei Han, in the soloist’s seat only added to its pleasures. Marked by the ritual pulse of an electronic gong, the work’s prerecorded component blurs the boundaries between “real” and sampled sound, and in her spur-of-the-moment response Han similarly integrated elements of traditional Chinese music with the radical techniques of free improvisation.
Of the three Chinese Canadian musicians featured in Strings and Strikes, Han delivered by far the most compelling performance. Her opening set included a delightful, if slight, Asian fantasia by California composer Lou Harrison; an appropriately stormy Fisherman’s Song of the East China Sea, by Zhang Yan; and the rather stunning, episodic The Greening, by Japanese composer Minoru Miki, in which Han’s Asian zither aped the sound of the shakuhachi and essayed some brisk, Steve Reich–like arpeggios.
Sadly, it was all downhill from there. Or, more precisely, downhill and then halfway back up again. Toronto-based Lee Pui Ming, the last of the three artists on the bill, is an intermittently gripping pianist and an interestingly theatrical performer, but her two passages of wordless, anguished babbling were simply one too many.
Percussionist Aiyun Huang, who appeared second, is clearly skilled. But the scores she worked from on Saturday did not showcase her abilities in any really useful way. Roger Reynolds’s Autumn Island, in particular, proved a time waster: austere, formless, and interminable, it might look good on the page but fails to connect in performance. Stale text-sound experiments by the otherwise estimable Frederic Rzewski and Vinko Globokar did not help Huang’s cause.
A mixed bag, then, but at least Han’s brilliance helped dispel the gloom, Alexander Varty, The Georgia Straight, May 11. 2006
Musical Duo Strike the Right Chord with Zheng
"The Concerto for Zheng and Orchestra" ("When Cranes Fly Home") in the second half of the Sunday concert at the Poly Theatre by the China Philharmonic Orchestra will present an innovative experience of zheng, the traditional Chinese plucked instrument with 21 or 25 strings.
With four movements, the concerto conducted by John Sharpley of the United States is cyclic and bustling with complex texture. There are fundamental, and generally submerged, musical materials that permeate through the work. The orchestra and the zheng's tuning are delicately intertwined. Sharpley scored the 25- minute concerto for the Canadian-Chinese zheng player Han Mei, soloist at the concert.
The concerto's origin came about a few years ago, when Sharpley first met Han and her husband Randy Raine-Reusch at a music festival in Sarawak, Malaysia. "I was deeply inspired by the couple's extraordinary music-making," said Sharpley. Recognized internationally, a virtuoso on the zheng, Han presents music deeply rooted in over 2,000 years of Chinese culture mixed with ground breaking contemporary styles. After learning ballet and violin briefly in her younger years, Han turned to the zheng when she was 10. "Before my first zheng teacher, renowned zheng master Gao Zicheng showed me the instrument, I had never seen it. But after listening to him play the piece 'Lofty Mountains and Flowing Rivers,' I was fascinated by the sound and immediately asked Gao to teach me," she recalled.
That began Han's exploration of the zheng, which spanned more than 20 years in China. She studied with a number of famous zheng masters including Gao and Zhang Yan. From the age of 16, she began playing as a featured soloist with her performances broadcast on national radio in China. "Though my technique was improving quickly during those years, I gradually sensed I was lacking a deeper understanding of the music," she said. "I couldn't shake this feeling of emptiness and asked myself if I would just play these several zheng pieces for the rest of my life." So she enrolled in a master's degree of Ethnomusicology at the Chinese Academy of Arts in 1993. Her dedication took her to some 28 remote ethnic nationalities in Southwest China to collect folk songs.
In 1996, Han went to Canada for an ethnic music programme in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a teaching assistant while performing Chinese music to Westerners. "In Vancouver, I gradually found it a home for various people, languages and cultures. I could hear a fusion of music types and I realized how shallow my knowledge about music was," she said. What is most meaningful to her music and life is that in Vancouver, she met Randy Raine-Reusch, Randy, the composer and multi-instrumentalist, who became her husband in 2001. An improvisational based composer, Raine- Reusch, 50, shows great interest in extending the boundaries of music. He has created distinct new performance styles on a number of instruments including Chinese zheng, Japanese ichigenkin (one-string zither) and the Thai khaen (16-reed bamboo mouth organ). Raine-Reusch has also been heralded as a "dexterous multi-instrumentalist" due to his ability to play about 50 of his collected 600 world instruments.
The co-operation and romance blossomed one day in 1998. After hearing that Raine-Reusch was good at playing zheng, Han called him out of curiosity. At first, he politely rejected her. Han later learned that Raine-Reusch had been eager to co-operate with some Chinese zheng players but was always met with a negative response. The players he asked could not fathom his musical style and preferred to only play "Lofty Mountains and Flowing Rivers" or "Three Variations on the Theme of Plum Blossoms." But Han was determined. Raine-Reusch finally invited Han to his home, where he played a CD of his jazz for her. He had never expected that the Chinese woman would take to the music, "but she immediately understood and enjoyed it," said Raine-Reusch. Then he asked her to play the zheng. "Don't use your mind and forget the melody, just play with your feelings," he inspired her and she played for more than 15 minutes. The amazing result was "I felt the wall which had stood in front of me suddenly crumble," she described the sensation, "I inhaled the fresh air and saw a bright broad world which I had never seen before." They appreciated each other's talents.
Since their meeting, Han and Raine-Reusch have redefined the zheng, and challenged the world of traditional Chinese music in general. Together they have invented new tunings, developed new fingering techniques, expanded old structures and created radical new forms of expression on this ancient instrument. They have created a new repertoire, attempting to combine the Chinese musical traditions with those of world music and jazz. Their first CD of zheng "Distant Wind" reached the top of the charts on the Canadian College Radio Charts, and was nominated for a Juno Award (Canadian Grammy) and two West Coast Music Awards. They also often performed improvisational works with other artists at major international jazz festivals and concerts.
They have stepped from the past to the future, trying to construct exciting new forms of expression for the new millennium.
China Daily, Beijing, Feb 28th 2003, by Chen Jie
Vancouver New Music Festival, 2002 - Eat Me Offers Much to Sink Your Teeth Into
Part of the mandate of Vancouver New Music's Eat Me festival, billed as "a feast of pan-Asian sonic delicacies" was to present music that mixes the latest technical and aesthetic advances with the musical and meditative heritage of various Asian cultures. None of its performers were more successful than Vancouver's Mei Han, whose Thursday (October 24) program at the Scotiabank Dance Centre included both an ancient tribute to the beauties of spring and an equally gorgeous but more technological look at some of the materials used in Asian instrument making.
Huan Yi's Three Variations on the Theme of Plum Blossoms was written sometime between AD 265 and 420, and it's typical of the Taoist works of the era: the material calls for a performance infused with pensive thought and infinite patience, and the Chinese-born zheng master delivered. Han gave each note its own shape: some rose up, others dove down, and still more shimmered with delicate vibrate, all controlled by subtle pressure on the strings behind the harp-like instrument's floating bridges.
Han is an ethnomusicologist as well as a virtuoso, so it's perhaps natural that she should excel in bringing China's ancient repertoire to life, but she is also very much a woman of the 21st century, and this was revealed in her renditions of Tribute to Ling-ling: Music Inspired by Works of Visual Artist Chong Ling-Ling, a brand new work by Toronto pianist Lee Pui Ming, and Bamboo, Silk, and Stone, by Randy Raine-Reusch and Barry Truax. With its ever-morphing electroacoustic counterpoint, the latter was particularly captivating, but Han's fierce concentration on Lee's dense and demanding score was no less impressive.
Alex Varty, Georgia Straight
Mei Han produces everything from whispers to growls from a Chinese zither. Delicate as an orchid, the Chinese zither (zheng) sings with a steely voice. Ancient Chinese herdsmen, who popularized the zheng 22 centuries ago, knew its voice well, and yet even they might have been astonished at the variety of sounds Mei Han drew from it at a compelling concert by Fear No Music Friday night. Twenty-one strings arch over the zheng's fragile-looking body, which rests on two pedestals. Mei used artificial fingernails to pluck the strings, creating resonant tones that grew from a whisper to a growl.
The concert, called "The Many Faces of China," wasn't really that, but more an exploration of ancient and contemporary uses of one instrument. The zheng is resilient enough to sound authentic in both eras, even in jazz and free improvisation.
Mei is an ideal interpreter. Straight-backed and elegant in a high-necked sheath dress of red and gold, she brought a quiet intensity to her instrument that suited the music. Her arms moved in fluid strokes as her right-hand fingers plucked notes and the fingers of her left hand pushed down on the strings to bend the pitches, adding expression to the music.
Like other West Coast ensembles devoted to contemporary concert music, the Portland-based Fear No Music took advantage of its Pacific Rim connections for the program. Music ranged from third-century China to Canadian composer John Oliver's "Purple Lotus Bud" (2004) for zheng and string quartet. This kind of program, a refreshing alternative to Western chamber music, is precisely what makes Fear No Music and other groups like it valuable.
Friday's concert, held in the Wieden+Kennedy atrium, even offered a work for dueling zhengs, when Canadian composer/performer Randy Raine-Reusch joined Mei in "Dragon Dogs." Just as in jazz, they traded fast, forceful riffs --there's no other word for it -- that evolved in fascinating currents and eddies. It all made perfect sense.
Mei's tour-de-force came in "The Greening," a Japanese solo written in 1967 by Minoru Miki that required intricate plucking patterns from both hands. Deep bass and high melody wound their way through the work, finishing up on an open-ended chord. A deeply satisfying piece. A string quartet and a percussionist joined Mei for the final piece, Oliver's "Purple Lotus Bud." Instead of functioning as melodic instruments, the string players -- violinists Ines Voglar and Erin Furbee, violist Joel Belgique and cellist Adam Esbensen -- contributed sonorities though sustained notes and chords. Percussionist Joel Bluestone punctuated the piece with atmospheric bells, gongs and cymbals.
Those ancient herdsmen would have loved it.
David Stabler, The Oregonian, Monday, April 24, 2006
Reinvenenting Tradition, the past, present, and future of Mei Han. PDF. Musicworks Magazine article by John Oliver.
Improvising Mythoi and Difference in the Asian/Woman More-Than-Tinge LINK in Sound Changes, Improvisation and Transcultural Difference, Eds.: Daniel Fischlin, Eric Porter. By Michael Heffley
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