Doing Tai Chi with “American Music”

I thought I was imagining things at first.Shortly after I moved to Durham, North Carolina, in March 2020, I began hearing The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto whenever I walked around the neighborhood. It was always only the first ten or so minutes of the first movement: the trilling flute, then the oboe tenderly soloing over lush strings, the violin's glissando into a D—I could almost feel my left hand sliding into third position for that note, even though it had been more than a decade.In my professional life as an ethnomusicologist, I think and write about how people listen to the din of everyday life in Sinophone Toronto. I spend a lot time treading the conceptual edges of “Chinese” and “sound.” But even with the saturation of sound bites about China in early pandemic days, it still seemed odd that I would be hearing (or dreaming) the Butterfly Lovers in my neighborhood. Eventually I figured out that the sound came from the neighborhood park, where a multiracial group of older people was practicing—and still practices—tai chi together in the mornings.With less mystery, I have continued to hear the Butterfly Lovers emanating from the park for the next two years, through variants and waves of not just the virus but also politics of difference and diversity in the United States. Sometimes I stop to watch the group's slow, meditative movements. Other times I only manage to catch what has started to feel like a staple of the neighborhood by ear as I dash away.Ask any student of East Asian, and particularly Chinese, descent at a Western Art Music school in the United States, and they will probably know the Butterfly Lovers all too well. The violin concerto was composed in 1958 by two students at the Shanghai Conservatory, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, who experimented toward a syncretic style for China's own Western Art Music. Perhaps its popularity and legibility in the West since the 1970s have to do with how it basically continues the trend, ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century, of squeezing Chinese melodies into Western idiom, instrumentation, and epistemology of music.1The concerto's sound—what Barbara Mittler describes as “pentatonic romanticism”—haunts the pathways of classical music's racial essentialism.2 I am thinking specifically about Grace Wang's analysis of how classical music practices and discourses contain Asian and Asian American presence by enacting longstanding racial stereotypes. In so doing, they bolster existing terrains of U.S. racial politics.3 The palatable difference signified by the erhu-like glissandi of the concerto do not constitute real diversity, but rather rehearse the imperial fantasy of conflict-free absorption of Others. In its various iterations (transcribed for other conservatory instruments, analyzed in theses toward graduate degrees in music performance, played on the erhu in subway stations), the violin concerto is also often performed with a spirit of auto-exoticism that is, at best, maybe strategic. Whether its performers, listeners, or music intellectuals like it or not, the flute trill and the opening melody on the violin—elements drawn directly from a regional style of Chinese opera known as yueju—have been embroiled in the politics of Asian racialization vis-à-vis classical music in the United States.I didn't have the language to say all of this when I first played it in an American school for expatriate youths in Beijing (the White British orchestra director arranged it herself), or when I hacked it on erhu with other Chinese international students for a university function in upstate New York, or when I was asked as a graduate student in viola performance to arrange it for a wind quintet about to go on tour in China. But I've long felt the stranglehold of race through the sound of the violin concerto.I can't remember the last time I touched any of the bowed string instruments I used to play, but it's probably obvious that I still have complicated feelings about the Butterfly Lovers.A few weeks ago, on a whim, I asked if I could join the tai chi group in the park. Geraldine (pseudonym), a White woman in her 70s, welcomed me with glee. “It's for the whole neighborhood!” she said, as she introduced me to Ola (pseudonym), a Black woman who had been waiting, and explained how the group came to be.“It was all Ola!” Geraldine said, “I would practice at home by myself anyway, but it was really Ola who kept the group going until we had momentum.”Ola laughed and added: “We had all been doing tai chi with our master—she's not here today—at the Center for Senior Life, and when the pandemic hit, they cancelled everything. And I . . . I just wanted to feel connected again! And we have this great park right here, so I thought, why not?”“We are all very dedicated.” Geraldine added, and Ola agreed. In bits and pieces, the two of them told me the backstory while several others trickled in. The “master” turned out to be my very nice neighbor, Lu (pseudonym), who had learned the twenty-four-pose group exercise routine, developed in Beijing at around the same time as the violin concerto, as a child in China. Also a retiree in her late 70s, Lu had stayed in Durham after her husband passed away. She doesn't speak much English, but the tai chi practices she has led bring together the neighborhood's senior transplants from all over. Geraldine has lived up and down the East Coast but is originally from Ohio, for example, while Ola hails from, and still misses, Brooklyn.Ola called the start of the session. She played the Butterfly Lovers on her phone and put the device in the center, between people, explaining to me that sometimes she brings a Bluetooth speaker. We moved through all twenty-four poses facing south to the trilling flute, the oboe solo, the violin's entrance with the glissando and melody. Then Ola picked up the phone and played the exact same track from the beginning again, and we repeated the poses, this time facing east. Then again to the north, and then the west. Each time we'd listen to the same ten minutes of the violin concerto. Everyone (except for me) knew the whole routine by heart and executed each pose in synchrony.I asked Ola what she thought of the Butterfly Lovers. “The music, you mean? I am not sure! It's just what's played on the tai chi videos on the internet!” Ola laughed, neither dramatizing nor minimizing the concerto's simmering orientalism. She hummed the violin line and performed the first form again. “But now I can time my poses to the sound, you see. And I can do it with my friends. And we do it again and again, you see.” I wanted to ask and to talk some more, but Ola was ready to start another round of practice. The point, it seemed to me, was to sustain a routine, and to allow other things—sociality, joint flexibility, sense of place—to emerge between the repetitions of form.My first encounter with the melody of violin concerto was in the mid-1990s in Taiwan. I did not know of the violin concerto's existence, but I had obsessively watched every TV rerun of Tsui Hark's film adaptation of the story of Liang Zhu. With the unbridled enthusiasm of a ten-year-old, I belted along with the movie theme song every time.4Liang Zhu is a household tale that was also the narrative of the Chinese opera from which the violin concerto borrows its programmatic content. The story goes something like this: preferably in a time ancient enough to excuse gender inequity, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, Zhu Yingtai, cross-dresses as a man in order to attend school. Among her all-male classmates, she finds connection with the poor-but-brilliant Liang Shanbo, and their friendship quickly blossoms into a “brotherhood” teetering on homoeroticism. Zhu is summoned home, but of course she cannot let go of their doomed love. So, she devises a ruse for Liang to marry her “sister,” or rather, herself, in a normative gender presentation. Upon realizing Zhu's assigned biological sex, Liang is overjoyed and professes love. But soon they find out that Zhu's classist family had already arranged for Zhu to marry rich. Resistant to no avail and feeling powerless against the oppression of society, Liang dies of despair and heartbreak. On her wedding day, the bereaved Zhu breaks out of her bridal palanquin to weep at Liang's grave. Her grief literally shatters the earth, and she falls into Liang's grave to reunite with him in death. No longer encumbered by the hardship of living, their spirits fly away as a pair of butterflies in the afterlife.Tsui Hark's 1994 movie rendition was a major hit across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diasporas. Partly, I think, because of how subtly but poignantly queer—as in, rendering the normative strange while gesturing toward possible otherwise worlds—it is. Beyond their illicit love and gender-bending, Liang, Zhu, and the butterflies embody an unapologetic idealism that refuses to be contained by conventions and social stratification. And who wouldn't want to feel a little bit of that idealism from time to time?The movie's award-winning theme song, as it turns out, was an arrangement of the violin concerto with new lyrics by a renowned Cantopop songwriter. In this rendition, the oboe and the violin were replaced with a campy synth and hyper-sentimental voice. Twenty years after the movie, the song would soundtrack my ethnographic fieldwork across Toronto's Chinese diaspora. I sang it as karaoke with residents in an ethnic geriatric care center and with queer Asian Canadian activists. I listened to it broadcasted in DVD stores and performed at cultural centers. If the violin concerto charts one Asian American and Canadian story of pigeonholes and constraints, the movie theme song seems to sketch another: one perhaps marked with boundary-crossing and struggling against conventions across Sinophone Toronto.I walked Geraldine home after another tai chi practice, and I asked her what she thought of the violin concerto.“It's nice,” she said, “It's like the horse and the crane and the monkey.”“Wait, what?!”“Oh, you know,” she stopped in the middle of the street, planted her feet, hummed the violin melody while raising her two hands to eye level and then moving them in opposite directions, palms facing out: “This is ‘parting the horse's mane.’” She took a step to the left, demonstrating the “tai chi walk” she had just taught me, and held up her left hand in front of her face while pushing down the right, “. . . and this is ‘repulse the monkey.’”Each tai chi pose has a poetic name, Geraldine explains, and the names double as instructions for the movements. “Obviously, you don't need a real monkey or a horse to do tai chi. The point is to imagine that you are parting the horse's mane—like this, with my hands—and there you go, you just performed the pose.”The music, she said, helps pace the movement routine, which in turn orients her and the others to the neighborhood. With an uncanny resonance with phenomenology texts, Geraldine pondered in motion: “Bodies take on orientations through repetition, and each time we practice, we orient ourselves to a tree,” she said, humming again as she pivoted on the ball of one foot and turned to one side, “or a house,” and turned, “or that street.”The evocative title of the violin concerto invites her to imagine the lightness and grace of butterflies, which is probably a good way to move about in the world, she said, but then again, it's not about actual butterflies.It occurred to me that Geraldine may have been thinking about people who enjoy butterflies, rather than the epic tragic romance, the world-making potentials of its queer undertones, or Asian racialization in Western Art Music. Like the butterflies of her imagination, her audition of the violin concerto is untethered from the overdetermined significations I hear through my personal and professional history. She listens not for semantics or representation, but rather for acoustic characteristics that help her practice of becoming emplaced. The Butterfly Lovers orients us both, even if our paths differ drastically.I am sure Geraldine would listen to the two stories I have to tell about the violin concerto, in part because she and I and Ola all live and feel the interconstitution of multiple races in U.S. racial imaginations, and probably also because of my profession. But I think the more interesting question here is not who gets to say what the violin concerto is. I would rather ask: How do Geraldine's projections and imaginations move her, and how do mine move me? And what new ways of listening and knowing might exist in the differences between our movements?Let me make my polemic explicit. There are many ways to understand The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto as Chinese sound, not American music. The tai chi group listens to it as sound, and its recognizability as music inevitably calls on a history of assimilating for legibility in the ear of the West.5 And it is not American by most definitions. I could, of course, argue for its inclusion in an expanded conception of “American,” given its entwinements with Asian America and diasporas—and how it rings in my neighborhood. I could also ignore the violence in the kind of musical synthetism it exemplifies. Moments of reckoning—as music studies has seen in recent years—tend to ask us to be more inclusive and to expand our definitions of “American” and of “music.” But doing so would be like adding to a tai chi pose name, insisting on something like “parting the manes of all the horses regardless of hair color.” It would sound inclusive by naming more but would not change the pose performed. Wouldn't a more radical—as in, from the roots—response be to actually change the pose, by making apparent the necessary foils against which the concept of “American music” can appear coherent? The figure of “China,” after all, has long been the necessary counterarticulation that bolsters the imaginary of the United States as a democratic nation.6 It might not be inconceivable that a concerto composed in celebration of Maoist China has something to do with “America.”I am suggesting a kind of epistemic tai chi with the concept of “American music.” Doing tai chi with “American music” would mean to ask not what American music is or can be, but rather to interrogate how, to account for the field's ideological conditions of possibility, and attend to the ways in which such imaginations move, orient, and legitimize. In short, it is a continuous and regular practice of critically reflecting on the production of knowledge about American musics, north, south, east, and west.Perhaps I was and still am imagining things when I hear the violin concerto, as is Geraldine, or anyone else who might listen in yet other ways. But as I have learned in tai chi in the park: imaginations do a lot of work, but at the end of day, what matters is how they move people.

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