It is a May evening in 1999, and Singapore's Orchard Road shows no signs of going to sleep. In a large, luxurious theater not far from city hall, a huge crowd has showed up to see a play about the singular life of Buddhist Master Hongyi, the talented musician and scholar who became a monk at mid-life in 1918. Most of the actors on stage are in their 30s and 40s. They appear in a wide variety of clothing, including the long loose Chinese skirts of the early 20th century, full-length Chinese tunics, Japanese kimonos, Western business suits, and Buddhist robes. The play relates the main character's brilliant youth, the ups and downs of his love life, his decision to turn his back on worldly cares and temptations, and his development into one the most noted Buddhist masters of his time.

Nanguan fans used to be limited to the Chinese community, and to the older generation at that, but the Siong Leng Musical Association, one of the oldest nanguan groups in Singapore, has surprised everyone by putting on a major nanguan play that has succeeded in filling a 1500-seat theater to capacity three nights in a row.

Master Hongyi is the fourth major work that Siong Leng has put on since 1993. The story line departs significantly from the typical love stories featured in most nanguan works, and Siong Leng also breaks significant new musical ground by moving beyond the standard four instruments (pipa, dongxiao, sanxian, and erxian) to include an entire Chinese orchestra. The group also parts from tradition by incorporating folk dances into the play. The fresh new style has gotten many a youth interested nanguan.

Change of focus

There has always been a split in the Nanguan community. Musical purists who play for their own enjoyment and believe in "music for music's sake" draw a clear distinction between themselves and entertainment-minded nanguan practitioners who are willing to mix music and theater. In stage performances by amateur groups, the four musicians split up on the left and right sides of the stage while the singers sit in the center. The purists would never get involved in this type of performance, but the Siong Leng Musical Association has broken boldly with tradition. According to the group's deputy director Wang Pheck-geok, a woman in her early 30s who still wears her hair short and straight like a high school student, the main reason for disregarding these unwritten rules is that "young people like action, and theater is what will attract more people to join our troupe."

Says director Teng Hong-hai, a man in his 40s, "We're making changes in order to stay relevant to a new generation. Nanguan is not so popular, and it is an ancient type of music from Fujian. In a multi-cultural society like we have in Singapore it is all the more necessary for us to reach out to other groups if we are to survive."

Since Siong Leng started to initiate changes, the group's membership has gotten much younger and audiences have grown considerably. The music group has changed into a theater troupe, and Siong Leng has also established a Buddhist nanguan choir and a folk dance group.

In the Philippines as well, nanguan groups are on the decline and rely on mainland China for new blood. Nevertheless, the Kim Lan Musical Association has managed to attract over 60 young students. Although they are learning to play instruments not used in nanguan, including such stringed instruments as the guzheng, nanhu, and yangqin, their teacher Su Zhixiang is eager to instill a taste for nanguan in the young people at the school. Toward this end he has quietly incorporated nanguan songs into their curriculum.

Five minutes per song

A lot of groups in both Taiwan and the mainland are actively innovating nanguan. In Taiwan there is the Jiangzhicui Shiyan Juchang Nanguan Yuefu (an offshoot of the former Wei Hsiao theater troupe) and the Han Tang Yuefu Ensemble, which has come to fame for its reconstruction of Tang-dynasty nanguan and its productions of liyuan theater, a style that dates back to the Song dynasty. Nanguan groups in the mainland, in the meantime, have taken the sedately seated performers and set them walking about the stage, giving the art a much more outgoing and informal feel. This innovation got started in Singapore's overseas Chinese community, where it was pushed forward primarily by the late Ding Macheng in his capacity as director of the Siong Leng Musical Association.

Although he passed away in 1992, his memory lives on. It was often said of Ding: "If you know Ding Macheng, you know half of Singapore." An enthusiastic person with a wide circle of friends, Ding was a self-made man who ran rice milling and rubber businesses that made him one of the richest men in Singapore.

He first learned nanguan from the workers at a rice mill where he labored as a young man, but it wasn't until after his mother died that he truly fell in love with it. He knew people at the Siong Leng Musical Association, and after his mother's death his friends came to sing funeral chants over her coffin well into the wee hours for nights on end. Deeply struck by the beauty of their soulful tunes, Ding got seriously involved in nanguan and determined to rescue the ancient art from extinction.

Zhuo Shengxiang, who collaborated with Ding in composing new nanguan songs, says that Ding blamed the decline of nanguan in large part on the slow rhythm. Says Zhuo, "Young people don't care to listen to singers stretch out a single word half way to infinity." Ding decided to limit the length of songs to about five minutes. He also felt that nanguan had gotten into a terrible rut with hackneyed, sentimental lyrics that did not speak to the concerns of modern society. He wrote lyrics for over 200 new songs which Zhuo then set to music. Among other themes, his songs described Singaporean scenes, delivered satirical commentary on social ills, and expressed the author's own feelings. Zhuo used Ding's work to put new lyrics to all the ancient songs in the nanguan repertoire. The resulting body of work was published in a three-volume book.

At the same time, Ding used his broad network of friends and acquaintances to project nanguan beyond the Minnan-speaking Chinese community and onto the international stage. In 1977, he organized the first Asian Nanguan Festival in his capacity as honorary director of the Siong Leng Musical Association. After he became director the following year, nanguan in Singapore metamorphosed from an entertainment for a few old folks into something more resembling a Broadway musical. All of a sudden the troupe was playing to packed houses and endless curtain calls.

In 1983 the Siong Leng Musical Association traveled to Wales for the 37th Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, where Ding's wife Ong Guat-huah appeared on stage in a black full-length Chinese qipao gown to sing one of Ding's new songs. She won third place in the folk solo category, and her accompanists took fourth place. A judge had the following to say about Ong Guat-huah: "Her performance was effectively coloured with a wide range of tonal colour. She showed outstanding vocal range, and in her performance fully demonstrated Chinese singing style and techniques."

Settling old "scores"

A reform movement is also afoot in the Philippines. Nanguan singers and musicians were not traditionally supposed to read from scores during a performance. Furthermore, beginning students have always had to play along with the teacher from a gongchipu score, which is very difficult to memorize. After the extremely long musical score has finally been memorized, they then start in with the lyrics, repeating one line at a time after the teacher in order to pick up little subtleties not noted in the score. Self-study has always been out of the question.

Su Zhixiang does not subscribe to this style of training. One change he advocates is abandoning the ancient gongchipu scores in favor of the simplified scores that people are more familiar with today. In addition, notations concerning such things as volume, pace, beat, and grace notes are typically left out of the gongchipu scores, but Su argues that they should be included in scores in order to make it easier for young people to study on their own. At the same time, he strongly argues that musicians should be allowed to use scores during performances so that they don't have to completely memorize every piece. The capacity of our memories is limited, says Su, and not allowing a musician to read from a score necessarily limits one to a very small repertoire. It also puts a musician in a nervous state in which he or she will make a lot of mistakes.

Both Ding Macheng and Su Zhixiang have stirred up a lot of controversy. Older members of the nanguan community feel that memorizing a piece helps the performers attain the mastery needed to take to the stage with confidence, establish a musical rapport with each other, and concentrate on "interpreting" the music instead of just "playing" it, which they feel is the highest plane to which one can aspire in music.

As for the new works, the old guard argues that there are already more old ones around than anyone has time to master, so why should they have to go learning new ones? They further feel that the modern colloquial language of the new lyrics totally lacks the poetry of the old works. Ding once wrote in rebuttal, "Ancient lyrics may be fun for the performer, but I'm interested in modern lyrics that are fun for the listener. To create art takes skill. If you've got what it takes, then go for it. As long as you know you're on target, don't worry about the naysayers." It is clear that his innovations have met with considerable opposition.

In light of the need to attract young audiences to nanguan, Ding hoped to see someone young and creative succeed him as director of the Siong Leng Musical Association, and he spent his later years cultivating young Ms. Wang Pheck-geok for the post. After Ding died and Wang became the first woman ever to serve as director of a nanguan troupe, it was more than some older practitioners could take, and they left the organization to found their own troupe. Says Zhuo Shengxiang, "We were right to innovate, but you can't take these things too fast. It was a shame to lose some of the older generation."

You say tomato, and I say. . .

With the older generation dying off and few accomplished younger musicians stepping in to take their place, nanguan troupes in Southeast Asia now get most of their teachers from mainland China, where both the singing and acting techniques have become much less formal.

As for the vocals, their voices are beautiful and resonant. According to Li Kuo-chun, a Taiwanese nanguan scholar, "There is a quick, hard, high, and resonant flavor about mainland nanguan that exudes a sort of Cultural Revolution aesthetic." Furthermore, all music in mainland China now uses the twelve-note Western scale, and everyone receives a modern musical education. All their vocalists are trained using the same standardized musical notation system, and their performances lack individuality. From the Taiwanese perspective, mainland China's nanguan is "too mechanical." From the mainland perspective, their Taiwanese counterparts are "always off key."

As for stage performance, although dance plays an important role in both Taiwan and the mainland, the overall atmosphere is quite different. Mainland troupes no longer stick to "the four main instruments" (the pipa, dongxiao, sanxian, and erxian) or their traditional arrangement with two musicians positioned stage left and the other two stage right. Instead, for the sake of a more powerful performance, mainland troupes often use twelve pipa (a type of Chinese lute), or perhaps a twelve-piece orchestra. Whereas the vocalists have traditionally sat in solemn composure at center stage, they now stand, move about, and even ham it up with the audience, which is beyond anything their Taiwanese counterparts are prepared to accept.

The government, academia, and private-sector groups in Taiwan have shown keen interest in nanguan over the past decade or two, and many nanguan troupes have been established, resulting in a new burst of nanguan activity. Two of the more notable troupes to spring up are the Han Tang Yuefu Ensemble and the Jiangzhicui Shiyan Juchang Nanguan Yuefu, both of which prefer a theatrical approach to nanguan and have incorporated some of the stylized movements of Peking opera into their stage performances, and dance routines as well. In the area of clothing and dance, however, they seek to reconstruct the ancient past, and their vocal style also retains the soft, understated manner that has long been the hallmark of nanguan.

According to Wang Ying-fen, director of the Graduate School of Music at Taiwan National University, "Nanguan performers in Taiwan are very determined to preserve tradition. This is true even of the younger generation. The nanguan community in Taiwan does not feel the same way as its southeast Asian counterparts about innovating the art in order to attract younger fans. After all, the social environment in Taiwan is different." Says Wu Su-hsia, a nanguan vocalist who often teaches at colleges and universities around the island, "Young people today aren't dummies. Things don't absolutely have to be new to pique their interest. Where nanguan needs innovation is in the area of methods, not in the actual content."

Nanguan has been a vital part of the music scene in southern Fujian, Taiwan, and southeast Asia for several centuries now. Today's rapidly changing society is testing the adaptability of nanguan communities everywhere. In southeast Asia they are composing new works and pushing for a switch to simplified scores. In the mainland the trend is toward a more ebullient stage manner and more instruments. In Taiwan, the emphasis is on preserving tradition while presenting it in a more modern way. In their separate ways, performers in these three regions are all breathing new life into this living musical fossil.

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The highly innovative Siong Leng Musical Association played to full-house audiences with Shakyamuni, a major new musical. (courtesy of the Siong Leng Musical Association)

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In the Philippines, the Kim Lan Musical Association runs a Chinese music school in order to draw young people one step closer to nanguan. (courtesy of the Kim Lan Musical Association)

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Do young people today really consider the ancient nanguan so passe? Just take a look at the excitement on the faces of these kids from the Canadian school in Singapore as they dance at the Siong Leng Musical Association! (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

In the Philippines, the Kim Lan Musical Association runs a Chinese music school in order to draw young people one step closer to nanguan. （courtesy of the Kim Lan Musical Association）

Do young people today really consider the ancient nanguan so passe? Just take a look at the excitement on the faces of these kids from the Canadian school in Singapore as they dance at the Siong Leng Musical Association! （photo by Pu Hua-chih）