I. Creative Environment

Cheng: The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) has commissioned and performed numerous works of yours and has even released an album exclusive of all others but yours. How do you feel about being appointed as the Composer-in-Focus of the upcoming season biennially from this year onwards?

Guo: It is an immense honour and a solid encouragement to me. The inspirations for compositions are still surging relentlessly in me to these days. In fact, I compose faster and more efficiently now than when I was young, thanks to the positive encouragement I have received and all the years of continuous composing. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that there is a senior colleague who has hugely inspired me: ZHU Jian'er. We are friends despite our rather massive age difference. He composed ten symphonies, but all after the age of 60. Nonetheless, I believe I would be able to achieve it too.

Cheng: Some contemporary composers tend to be indifferent to audience reception, but you have always kept the audience in mind and have even written your programme notes or came on stage to explain your works. Some believed we have not been able to keep audiences up to speed with avant-garde music trends and complex modern techniques ever since the Reform and Opening Up. If such a problem exists, do you occasionally cater to the needs of different commissioners and creative contexts when composing?

Guo: The so-called issue of which the audiences are out of sync with the development is non-existent. Firstly, I doubt the validity of this statement. Secondly, I believe a composition bears a mission: it is destined to harbour social significance. Since I started learning composition, I always hoped that my work could play a social role; hence, I have endeavoured to understand and communicate with the society through my compositions. After years of composing, I have learned that with a fully packed theatre or concert hall, it is extremely easy to indulge in mere flaunting, overlooking the audience offstage, being unable to move and engage them inevitably in return. Only by touching people's hearts can a work be truly meaningful, so my composition will not disregard the audience's feelings.

Cheng: As a representative figure in the development of contemporary music in China, from your perspective, how has the creative environment changed in comparison to the 1980s? What are the new challenges and opportunities encountered by the young composers of this generation?

Guo: There are massive differences in various aspects today. The 1980s were an unprecedented period, full of opportunities and challenges. I was fortunate to seize the moment of that era in my youth and unleash creative talents. Nowadays, young people are more well-informed in advantage of the advancement of technologies and information acquisition, which hugely facilitate learning processes. However, what is the problem in return? Compared to our generation, they know too little about Chinese traditions.

II. Traditional Folk Songs

Cheng: Speaking of the tradition, your Chinese Folk Ditties Suite has been frequently performed in recent years. Its popularity seems to be due to your efforts in extending these folk songs familiar to Chinese audiences through new performance methods. You once said that folk songs are flowers grown from the earth. At different ages, have you approached the selection and processing of the folk blossoms with different attitudes and methods?

Guo: There are innumerable ways for composers to use traditional materials in their compositions, almost one for each, or even having multiple ways possessed by one. I am one of those with multiple approaches. The methods of folk material treatment in the Chinese Folk Ditties Suite have not been used in my other works. It matched different folk songs to the four movements respectively. The use of folk songs falls into two categories: one is adopting their original forms, such as Happiness at Sunrise, Shepherd's Song, Gada Meiren, and HXak Yeet (Flying Songs of Miao). The other includes those composed by me and recreated based on the unique characteristics of ethnic music. For instance, in the last movement The Hawk and the Steed, "The Steed" uses the first compositional method, quoting the melody of Gada Meiren, while "The Hawk" is based on the Tibetan music style, for which I wrote a melody line consisting of an extensively wide range to depict the hawk’s flight.

Cheng: The string quartet version of the Chinese Folk Ditties Suite was premiered by the Amber Quartet at the NCPA at the end of last year. As they performed Debussy's string quartet alongside yours, it allowed people to hear and notice the contributions of both these exquisite pieces to the development of the traditional genre, string quartet. Fascinatingly, you have paid tribute to Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile at the end of the third movement Prairie. In recent years, you seem to be more nostalgic and yearning for the classic masterpieces than before. Are you also attempting to reshape your musical vocabulary by interpreting traditional materials?

Guo: Yes. Recently, I have paid attention to many composers whom I overlooked when I was young, such as Beethoven, whose ways of writing slow movements were the focus of my studies last year. Currently, I have been scrutinising the way he composed Scherzos. Being concerned about my lack of research in Western classical music, I will single out each of the movements from different symphonies and approach each of them as a problem statement to be pondered. The contemporary Chinese music is derived from both the West and Chinese traditions. Meanwhile, there are two diversions in the West: one is classical romanticism, and the other is avant-garde and contemporary. It is comparatively easier to take reference from the western contemporary arts, or in frank words, plagiarising the methods directly, than assimilating the classical oeuvres into our own musical language and approach. As challenging as it be, my endeavours go into this trail.

III. Exotic Colours

Cheng: In 2017, the National Ballet of China premiered Dunhuang, for which you composed the music. Coincidentally, two of your previous classmates had composed orchestral and vocal works on the theme of Dunhuang before this. QU Xiaosong composed Dunhuang in 2013, and TAN Dun created Buddha Passion right after you. Compared to the large amount of Buddhist content in their works, your Dunhuang has a more realistic colour. In your heart, what kind of existence is Dunhuang?

Guo: Dunhuang interweaves multiple cultures and is full of exotic colours. However, I am not quite drawn to pure exoticism and religion. I feel that exoticism is somewhat superficial to a certain extent, which is incongruent with my artistic ideals. However, I am particularly fond of the National Ballet of China's ballet Dunhuang, and I am willing to compose music for their work because they do not intend to express the world of gods but the guardians of Dunhuang—humans. As I prefer to depict realistic humans, bearing the sincerest reverence for the guardians of Dunhuang, I created the music of this ballet with ardent passion and enthusiasm, and I think this is the most romantic music I have composed in life hitherto.

Cheng: The year before last, the National Ballet of China featured Dunhuang alongside the two other ballets, Onegin and Giselle, consecutively on the stage of the NCPA, which allows the audience to directly experience the distinctly different colours of both the Eastern and Western ballet music. While watching Dunhuang, I was reminded of the ballet music Spartacus by the Soviet-Armenian composer Khachaturian. He gazed towards the west upon the elegance of ancient Rome and the tenderness of Spartacus, whereas your westward gaze landed on the vivid flying apsaras in Dunhuang Cave murals. When composing on such grand themes, do you consciously or unconsciously think about how Khachaturian or Shostakovich would do it?

Guo: When I was composing Dunhuang, I did not associate it with Soviet composers or music because my focus was on the guardians of Dunhuang. I once went on a field trip to Dunhuang with the National Ballet to collect first-hand materials, and we specifically went to the graves of the deceased guardians to pay our sincerest tribute to them. I understand the hardships of those who had guarded there for years only after visiting there. In terms of composition, I placed more emphasis on invigorating youth, enthusiasm and selfless dedication. To make the work not entirely exotic, I only used the panpipe.

Cheng: Over the past half century, musicians from the Bashu region have shone brightly on domestic and international music scenes. Some people have crowned you the leading figure of Ba-shu music. How exactly have the language and customs of this region influenced the spiritual world of composers?

Guo: I have always been against defining my music as Ba-shu style, and I can by no means be called the leading figure of Ba-shu music. I am probably labelled Ba-shu because of the titles used in my early works and some symbolic elements used. However, the ridges, peaks and rapids I mentioned in my titles are collectively a spiritual representation, a symbol enunciating the resilience of the human spirit. If you look closely at the musical elements, I have rarely adapted the Sichuan folk music over the course of time. As shown in the symphony SHU DAO NAN, I did not use any Sichuan folk music materials but only composed from the perspectives of dialects and spirits of regions across the nation, depicting the people working and surviving in that environment and their singing voices through pitch organization.

IV. Operatic Composition

Cheng: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the opera Wolf Cub Village, and it is about to welcome its sixth production. As a work with avant-garde techniques and rich sonorities, this opera has been growing in the process of production and performance over so many years. What new insights do you have about this work?

Guo: This year, precisely on June 24th, is the 30th anniversary of the opera Wolf Cub Village. Consecutively, the 10th anniversary of the opera Rickshaw Boy falls on June 25th. This year, Director YI Liming will perform the sixth version of Wolf Cub Village at the Beijing Dahua City Centre for the Performing Arts Opera Festival. I am glad to witness the scene where different directors making more discoveries about the essence of the script based on their kaleidoscopic understandings. Classics are made complete through recursive studies of it.

Cheng: Rickshaw Boy is considered by many to be a classic work of Chinese opera. In this work, your characterisation of each character is especially remarkable, for example, giving Fuzi the most lyrical aria in the whole opera, using atonal techniques to express Er Qiangzi's drunk scoundrel image, and so on. The stage play version of Rickshaw Boy by the Beijing People's Art Theatre has extensive descriptions on Er Qiangzi bullying the weak but fearing the strong, of his obstinate heart subtly imbued with desperation while selling his daughter, being stunned and staggered like a walking corpse Contrastingly in the opera, Er Qiangzi is portrayed as a complete scoundrel. Based on your experience, what are the unique characteristics of operatic composition?

Guo: Compared to stage plays, operas consume words slower due to the singing. An opera libretto typically contains only a few thousand words, at most ten to twenty thousand. When it comes to side characters, it is already adequate for an opera to highlight certain aspects of the roles. Er Qiangzi has a significant aria, which is the only passage in the entire opera that employs pan-tonality or atonality. I do not consider operatic arias as songs but collectively a major constituent of the plot structure. The foremost purpose of an opera aria is to formulate the personality of the characters. Since this non-tonal aria has successfully portrayed Er Qiangzi’s drunk and deranged state, it is through which my view is again verified.

Cheng: Unlike many contemporary Chinese original operas, your works, such as Rickshaw Boy, Wolf Cub Village and Poet Li Bai, all carry a strong sense of tragedy. Is this more of a result of your personal preference, or is there a sense of mission driving you to choose such themes?

Guo: Wolf Cub Village, Night Banquet, and Poet Li Bai were topics I chose out of my own decision. I am pretty selective about opera themes. Opera is an art form where literature deeply intervenes in music. It requires in-depth considerations beyond music. For instance, Wolf Cub Village explores the relationship between individuals. Lu Xun ultimately focuses on saving the children, while I conclude with the madman's self-reflection. When this work is performed abroad, people often ask what exactly the work is trying to convey. My answer is: this is not literally a story about devouring a person or not; it carries a deeper meaning. It refers to the morbid societal state that bears no tolerance to individuality: when an individual's ideas differ from those of everyone around them, if the surrounding majority cannot tolerate it, that person will be ‘devoured’. It is prone to occur throughout the world. Night Banquet unveils the fact that hedonistic gratification is the façade of fear and desperation, it depicts the main role Han Xizai’s disappointment and acquiescence. The Poet Li Bai mainly expresses the intellectuals' issues with self-perception. Apart from these, there are a lot more subjects that I would like to write about but are still pending, but the music for them has already emerged in my mind. The opera Rickshaw Boy is not an autonomous choice of mine, but I am fortunate to have composed an opera for Sir Lao-She’s novel. It seems to me that Sir Lao-She has proven the insurmountable importance of art, and its recognition as an eternal being.

Cheng: What do you yearn for most to write now?

Guo: It is The Little Mermaid. A fairy tale that gains worldwide recognition must be more than its mere being; it must have a profound meaning. I wish that I could write down the extraordinarily beautiful music I have heard.

Cheng: Compared to your other operas, Feng Yi Ting (Phoenix Pavilion), has comparatively fewer performances, but it is extraordinary. It employs numerous elements from traditional Chinese opera, having the chamber orchestra equipped with traditional Chinese instruments such as the dizi, sheng, pipa, and erhu. What were your initial thoughts on it?

Guo: I am obsessed with breaking through the traditional framework of the operatic scene which only consists of bel canto and conventional singing style intermittently in the past. Thus, I have included Chinese traditional opera singers in Night Banquet and Li Bai. Feng Yi Ting has even recruited an entire cast of Chinese traditional opera singers. The artistic purpose of Feng Yi Ting is to subvert the long-accustomed norm of treating traditional Chinese art and primordial art as source materials to be further processed and strive to retain their contours comprehensively while modernising them. I composed the prelude, interlude, and all the accompaniments for the arias in the Feng Yi Ting, but both the performers sing in the Peking operatic style with high fidelity to its origin. I have been picturing the voice of ‘Diao Chan’ but it turns out that the only singing style compatible with her image is that of the high-pitched Sichuan opera, whereas for ‘Lü Bu’, the Peking opera Xiaosheng fits his image best as a stunning and valiant military general. I have created a theatre of sounds, and subsequently embedded the traditional elements in this opera. Some claimed that the bel canto opera singers delivered the comparatively worst performance, being way inferior to those singing in Chinese folk styles, whilst the Chinese traditional operatic style is the best out of all. During the rehearsal of Feng Yi Ting in the United States, the performance and stance of the Sichuan operatic ‘Diao Chan’ and the Peking operatic ‘Lü Bu’ had left the director astonished and agazed.

Cheng: How does theatricality influence your opera composition, and what is the driving fundamental logic when you are dealing with opera music?

Guo: I genuinely felt that composing for the opera is less demanding, which is strange—without conceit. To shed light on the theatricality in operatic musical writings, the ability to meticulously delineate characters’ psychological states and sculpting with music are of utmost importance. This is what referred as theatricality. The association of theatricality with sound intensity or dramatic scenes is widely assumed, but it is very nuanced and in fact, also different from the symphonic quality. The formulation of theatricality depends entirely on personal perception. Furthermore, musical logic and structural dominance are mandatory in composition. The libretto should be logically incorporated into the music instead of intervening in the development of the music. This particular trait is evident in all the classics.

V. On Poetry

Cheng: The premiere of your work Journeys, for soprano and orchestra in 2021 unleashed the immense inherent power of Xi Chuan’s poem and left a lasting impression of nuclear fission in me upon listening to it. You have also written By Spring, All Ten Haizi for the same instrumentation. Could you talk us over how they are similar and different in your heart?

Guo: Apart from being the compositional sources of inspiration, poems often play the role as the composers’ representatives who speak behalf of them, whose works are means through which they articulate their thoughts more clearly, carried by the vessels of other art forms. For instance, Schilller spoke for Beethoven in his ninth symphony. Xi Chuan and Hai Zi were peers at Peking University, and both pursued poetry. Xi Chuan recommended Hai Zi’s poems to me. Owing to his friend Xi Chuan, Hai Zi’s name has remained intact in memories of generations. I am utterly intrigued by contemporary Chinese poetry, way beyond that in ancient poetry. Ancient Chinese poetry is undoubtedly astounding, but the outstanding contemporary poems resonates stronger with my heart. However, it is pathetic that the mockery of contemporary Chinese poetry and poets is ubiquitous. This is due to the low threshold for contemporary poetry, the materials they employed are closely related to daily life and thus pose a high difficulty in creative writing. In any art form, the further its language is from daily life, the higher the threshold, and the easier it is to impress the mass, or perhaps, will not be easily despised. Although it seems to have demanded no criterion to write a contemporary poem, it takes immense effort to write an excellent one. I still have many composition plans regarding contemporary Chinese poetry that are yet to be executed. However, NCPA has commissioned me to compose a symphony based on a poem of our time, which sounds compelling to me.

Cheng: I noticed many volumes of Xi Chuan's poem compilations on the top shelf of your bookshelf, alongside Mang Ke’s and Zhang Zao’s. You are also a music poet who simultaneously identifies as an idealist. How do you personally deal with the myriads of contradictions and agony from the real world?

Guo: In recent years, especially during the pandemic, innumerable tragedies have occurred, wavering between life and death. Inevitably, these tragedies perplexed me temporarily, I have thence immersed in a whirlpool of doubt about the value and significance of my composition. All the arguments seem absurd in the face of life and death. On this fine pivotal line, what should I do? At the end of the day, I eventually discovered the necessity of affirming goodness, so I decided to bring the most beautiful musical language into play to praise life, justice and compassion.

VI. Future Plans

Cheng: The composition class of 1977 of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing has always been regarded as the vanguard of the avant-garde music, and most of your peers have arrived at their twilight years, considering the worldly age stratification. Many 20th century western avant-garde composers tend to recover and extricate simplicity in their compositions. Do you experience similar transformation hitherto?

Guo: I do, my friends as well. However, I doubt that this tendency should be coined as a return to simplicity. I am against with the notion of return, as I thought I am incessantly progressing.

Cheng: Your previous classmate Qigang Chen has published an autobiography, YE Xiaogang has also recalled various little-known anecdotes in his book Hand-cooking Tea. In the light of the fact that you are known for your eloquent writing, do you intend to write your autobiography any time soon?

Guo: My friends have been urging me to do so, but “Perhaps I will do by the time I stop composing” has always been my answer, resembling my attitude. In a recent book by my good old friend Haojiang Tian, he revealed his winding journey through the international opera scenes teeming with strenuous efforts, alongside the past collaborations with artists from all walks of life. It flew off the shelves. I should write one for myself for sure!

Cheng: What are your upcoming compositional plans as the composer in focus of the new season at NCPA?

Guo: As I briefly mentioned earlier, I plan to compose a full-length symphony during my residency at NCPA, with a duration taking up half of an orchestral concert. By observing most of the composition students, I discovered that the music resulting from Chinese classical poetry tend to be more monotonous, but the inspirations from modern poems usually spark heterogenous characters in their music, simultaneously unveiling their personalities. This phenomenon has testified the value and purpose of contemporary literature and poetry from this eccentric perspective.

Cheng: We are very much looking forward to your new work. Thank you for your time!