Tian Yimiao Has Spent Years Popularizing Classical Music. Here's How She Thinks About It, and How She Listens | The Study

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When she isn't out giving a lecture, Tian Yimiao spends her weekends in a townhouse on the edge of the city. The house isn't finished — renovation drawings and leftover tiles are still lying around — but its owner's tastes are already unmistakable. A brand-new black Yamaha piano. A fireplace, the kind that is common now, running on electricity rather than firewood. Chandeliers cover the ceiling, one of them shaped like a birdcage. It must have been picked with care: from a certain angle it fits exactly around the long-billed bird in the huge mural on the wall.

On Sunday afternoons Tian Yimiao makes tea for guests in an English tea set patterned with small flowers. She has named the tea "Mendelssohn" — a blend she helped commission after she became well known. She often rides a vintage-style Forever C bicycle to an estate nearby, though the garden outside her own door is untended and full of weeds. Probably because she is too busy.

Tian Yimiao is a music writer, good at turning the experience of listening to classical music into literature. In her more leisurely early years she wrote music columns for newspapers and magazines and published several books on classical music — Songs of Time and Silence: The Solitary Chants of 20th-Century Western Composers and Tender War Songs — well reviewed but not big sellers. Before newspapers started closing one by one and book prices climbed, she came up with a clever line: "listen to classical music in a T-shirt." After that she became a well-known music writer, invited to talk about classical music — in a fresh way — in city after city.

Two years ago she began to worry the line was too clever for its own good. "The first time you hear it, it sounds cool and new, like a slogan. But shout a slogan often enough and people start to doubt it. It becomes another kind of pretension — pretension in the form of not pretending. I take myself to task over this a lot." The people selling classical music see it differently. Listening to classical music has, almost without anyone noticing, become fashionable; the scalpers crowding the theater doors and the reliably profitable trade in hired applause prove it. So does listening to people talk about classical music. Several major audio apps launched programs teaching you how to listen to classical music at almost exactly the same time.

Tian Yimiao got busier after the summer of 2017. Ximalaya FM was then fighting Dedao, the champion of paid knowledge, for listeners interested in classical music. Ximalaya came to Tian Yimiao, and in under half a month a daily audio program was on the air. Most people, she believes, came to know her through it. She also believes that talking rather than writing freed her from a style that used to be too self-absorbed — she once insisted on reading Bach through the poetry of Sun Ganlu; now it's different, she has learned to describe music more simply and to better effect. Still, she knows the programs are often made without much thought and present no real challenge, and that they eat up far too much of her time. From Tuesday to Friday she lives in another home in central Shanghai, busy keeping up with all of it. If she weren't doing this, Tian Yimiao might have gone on writing books.

In 2003 she moved from Hangzhou to Shanghai to take a master's and then a doctorate in composition theory at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She worked hard at it but never felt satisfied. What drew her was the city's openness and its scattered little circles. Her friends included musicians, composers and quite a few writers. She watched them, imitated them, and rarely criticized them.

Musicians and Writers Express Themselves in Completely Different Ways

Q: I hear your place in the city center has run out of room for books.

I think there's a problem with people of our generation, the ones born in the 1970s: we love buying things. You probably can't understand it. When we were small we had eight or nine picture books, tied in a bundle, and every morning we got up and went through the whole stack, top to bottom.

When you grow up with nothing, you can feel lost — you think you have to own everything you didn't have, that the things you didn't have must be the best things. They aren't. Maybe we all have to go through a phase of getting everything we once lacked before we learn it doesn't suit us, before we find what does.

Q: What were you like as a child?

Quiet, mostly, saying nothing. My mother was a Yue opera performer, very outgoing, quick-tempered, and she didn't pay me much attention. I was the opposite: the kid sitting in a corner reading. At school I never showed what I thought; angry, upset or happy, I never wanted it to show. That has become my biggest problem now. If people can't tell what state you're in, it's hard for them to get close to you.

Q: I thought you had a lot of friends. In your early blog you were always out — some gatherings with composers, some with writers.

I'd just arrived in Shanghai then, and I was thrilled. Shanghai had every kind of person; even the most niche professions weren't really niche here. All kinds of work, all kinds of ways of living. You could find companions and you could find rivals. So I was excited, meeting lots of people, eating hotpot every day.

After I started at the conservatory I began writing a column for Shanghai Weekly, and I got to know a lot of writers. I really did spend more time with writers. On weekends or at the end of the month everyone would get together for dinner. The writers as a group were in wonderful form; musicians didn't seem as good at talking. That may have to do with the nature of a musician's work. Think about it: the pianists at the conservatory face brutal competition, and if one of them gets on stage today, another one loses the chance. So I got on better with the writers. Mao Jian and I are both a bit boyish, neither of us fusses over things, and we did fine together. My first book, Tender War Songs, was published by Mao Jian's husband, who is a publisher. We were both in the same series.

You'll also find that musicians and writers express themselves in completely different ways. If a musician sends you a WeChat message about something happy, they'll use three exclamation points — it matters that much. A writer would never do that. Writers use language that has an effect.

Q: You've written a lot of essays analyzing film scores. Why are you so drawn to film music? It seems a little apart from proper classical music.

It has to do with my work, too. I'm in the composition department, and for composition graduates, writing music for film and television is the rice bowl.

I think it's very unfair. China's big films almost always bring the composer in from abroad, and Chinese musicians get no chance. A foreign composer makes a film international at once, and foreign composers have experience — they get the musical tone exactly right, and directors trust them more. That becomes a vicious circle: fewer and fewer students sit the composition entrance exam. These days I even tell my students, don't try to build a career in China, get to Los Angeles, get to Hollywood, join the studio of someone like Hans Zimmer or another big name in film music, and bring them Chinese elements. That may be the better route.

Alexandre Desplat, the Frenchman who won an Oscar this year for The Shape of Water, wrote 25 cues for Lust, Caution, and when we listen we feel nothing jarring at all — it sounds just as if a Chinese composer had written it. Chinese audiences tend to like that French lyrical style; it carries on the feeling of Chopin, and that Franck kind of music, the salon style. Composition students imitate that taste too, and they still don't get hired. I've also heard film scores by Chinese musicians, and honestly they don't work — overdone, too sentimental.

Q: Who have you been listening to lately?

These past few days I've been writing an episode of "The Code of Famous Pieces" about Zhao Jiping. He has so many albums; yesterday I played them all day.

I think his music is a good way into Chinese classical music. When we play people Chinese classical music now, it's suona blaring away, and honestly some of it is unlistenable. I won't say a thing is good just because it's traditional and canonical. I really do think some of it is too rustic, and if it doesn't develop it will struggle to survive.

If a contemporary composer wrote a piece for the suona, say, they might treat it purely as a timbre and push it toward the aesthetic of taiji and ink painting — that's the academy's taste. But when we hear A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix now, one instrument blowing a country tune, modern listeners seem to find it hard to take. If an instrument is going to keep developing, it has to carry a sense of its own time; you have to remake it with the aesthetic sense of the present. In Zhao Jiping's music you can hear the old thing, but he reinterprets it in today's language, and he brings deep humanistic learning to it. His is the kind of Chinese music ordinary people can understand.

Q: Do you rate Zhao Jiping more highly than Tan Dun?

The two can't be compared. Zhao Jiping writes film music, and film music isn't about carrying a huge amount of musical information or being highly original. Tan Dun plays with concepts; he's a contemporary composer. Zhao Jiping's music has melody, changes of timbre, themes. If you listen to Tan Dun that traditional way, you'll think it's a mess. So they can't be compared — it's like comparing Raphael with Picasso.

Q: You often write about playing with timbre. Reading Jacques Attali's Noise, you asked: if noise is no longer the background, how should we read music? What's your answer?

Timbre has all kinds of colors, some warm, some cold. There are new timbres and old ones. Sometimes a sound by itself can summon the imagination. China has an ancient instrument called the xun, and its sound is like weeping, the old lament of Yan and Zhao. The moment that sound appears it is already mournful. Write a very complicated melody for the xun and it won't work; you only need those few tones, and that's when the effect is strongest. That's what timbre is.

Q: In Bach's day the keyboard was the harpsichord — no change of timbre, no change of dynamics.

So Bach studied how notes work together. You see Bach's music moving back and forth in this narrow space, while Liszt plays here, then plays over there. That's also a difference in the aesthetic sense of an era. Instrument-making was different too — it was only starting to develop. At the conservatory, when I teach counterpoint, nearly every example is Bach; when I teach analysis, nearly every example is Beethoven. Because everyone feels students should be given the most classic examples — nothing else is worth looking at, nothing else has been tested by history. But there's a problem. After they graduate, in order to win international prizes, to be like Tan Dun, everything they write comes out clanging and jangling. That aesthetic has nothing to do with classical music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto Gets Cooler With Age — He Never Repeats Himself

Q: What have you been reading lately?

I'm reading Isadora Duncan's memoir, My Life, and I think it's wonderful.

I'm also reading a book I need for work, A Concise History of Music by the Japanese writer Akeo Okada. I want to see how they write about classical music.

For my own reading I've recently pulled a few together, like Banana Yoshimoto's Flower Bed, Afternoon Nap. I'm fond of Banana Yoshimoto — she writes the tiny feelings of ordinary life, and very sharply.

I also like a writer called Michael Ondaatje. I reread him every year. He writes novels the way a poet writes — I like poetry myself, and he really understands art. He'll write two people embracing as a piece of modern dance. He'll have a man meet a blind man in a forest, and the blind man asks him questions about fate, and he can write it so it looks like a Rousseau painting.

But writing novels as poetry creates a problem: the dramatic tension leaks away in the narration. That surging force is gone. So he chooses a lot of striking images instead. He'll write a lizard, or an old railway station, an old green building like a palace — and you remember it at once. He uses intensely dramatic scenes in place of dramatic tension, which I think comes from painting and photography as well. At the same time Ondaatje feels very heavy, a heaviness inside stillness, and that produces a passion of its own, the passion of gazing. That such passion can come out of quiet strikes me as remarkable.

Q: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient was later made into a very famous film.

The film exaggerated his lyricism, his romanticism. In the book he deliberately holds that quality down. But the fine detail of the book couldn't come through on screen.

The music in the film is very good. It's called "The English Patient," but he isn't English, he's Hungarian. Hungarians are by nature a nomadic people, so the man has loved travelling far from home since he was young, living alone in the desert, moving through it. Before he meets that woman he says: in the small desert towns I passed through, I was never lonely. The opening has a passage of Hungarian women's singing that hints he is Hungarian — a mysterious chant that sounds Bedouin, and it's marvelous.

Q: When did you first feel a connection between literature and music?

Music and literature — I think it's really hard... Literature can hardly describe music, but literature can borrow music's methods. Take Marguerite Duras. You must have read The Lover. The first time I read Duras as a child I thought, what is this, saying the same thing over and over from beginning to end, what's the point, isn't it tiresome. Later I understood why she says it over and over: to create that effect, to create anxiety, or to create passion. Endless repetition, endless variation on the repetition — that method comes straight from music. Music is exactly that: brewing something without stopping, piling up an emotion, like the movement of a force, adding to it and adding to it until suddenly there is a release. In music it's called sequence, or the repetition of a musical idea.

Q: If literature can hardly describe music, how is music criticism possible at all?

The method of analysis I teach at the conservatory is not what the public needs; they won't take it and they don't understand it. So to say why a piece of music is good, you may have to use the feeling of poetry. Or — you'll notice that most music writers write musicians' gossip. But sometimes the person and the work are not the same thing. The work may express the other side of a soul; or you could say the public image hides much that the person knows and doesn't want to show. Plenty of musicians have public images that are far too simple. They really aren't that simple.

Q: Or take Norman Lebrecht. How do you rate him?

Norman Lebrecht is the most famous music critic of our era. He made his name with Who Killed Classical Music?, where he exposed a lot of dark dealing inside the classical music world and offended plenty of people. But that is exactly what everyone most wants to know. Lebrecht's greatest strength, I think, is his sense of proportion. He doesn't let his own likes and values color his judgments; he narrates very objectively. As a journalist, his sense of proportion is excellent.

Q: You describe things with a poet's feeling, which is lovely — but when we actually listen we may not hear it. There's still a real gap between reading criticism and hearing music.

Then maybe you haven't listened enough. Classical music isn't like pop songs. Pop has lyrics; if you think Luo Dayou writes good lyrics, hearing them moves you right away. Classical music has no lyrics and it is long — 30 minutes — and by the end you've forgotten the beginning. It has to build up slowly. At first you can treat it as background music, leave it playing while you work. That's actually quite useful.

Take the security guards at our Grand Theatre. They have no musical training at all, but they watch and hear this stuff every single day. Once the theatre held a music competition and a guard was listening at the door, saying this one definitely won't do, that one's good, that one's good. He just knew. Because he's in there every day he inevitably picks up the tricks of it; he's heard the good ones, so when he hears a bad one he knows at once it isn't close.

Q: You've recommended some books for beginners — Chen Danqing's Notes on Music, and Yu Hua's How Music Influenced My Writing. Do you read them yourself?

Yes, I do. They both have especially sharp, rich sensibilities, and I want to see how they listen, what they hear that I don't. Because I studied composition theory, I look at how a piece develops in a very rational way. They have a lot of imaginative, sensory insight that holds up to scrutiny. For music, imagination is actually the more important thing.

Q: Do you mean the style of your columns was influenced by them too?

There was some imitation. But the programs I write now have a much clearer personal style. I can't bear to look at what I used to write; it feels unnatural, overdone. Back then I liked being lyrical. Now, making a program, I go for the most direct and forceful way of putting a composer's character across, and I think that is the kind of reading that holds up.

I have a friend called Xu Lei, the husband of the writer Zhang Yueran. He's a painter, and he made an art book titled Fugue. The fugue — isn't that the Bach thing I teach at school? That's how different fields set each other off, how you look for inspiration in other art forms. It was the same in the past. Liszt went looking for inspiration in writers' work. So did Schumann, who especially loved Jean Paul. Jean Paul was a very famous writer of that era, deeply Romantic, and they worshipped him because he could produce such unbounded imagination.

Q: Tell me about learning music early on and later entering the conservatory.

As a child I went to one of the top middle schools, but I never seemed interested in that kind of schoolwork. I only liked Chinese and music.

To become a professional musician you have to start training at five or six; to get into a conservatory you have to come here at five or six and board here. My parents thought there was no telling how the professional route would turn out. It isn't a safe path. They wanted me to grow up in a normal way instead. Later I got into both the law department at Zhejiang University and the music school at Hangzhou Normal University, and because my teacher Mao Jiefang taught piano there, and I'd studied with her since I was small, I went on studying with her. The first three years were all piano, but I felt I had started too late; however well I played, I could only ever be a piano teacher.

I'm better suited to being a student, a learner. I'm not a performer; I like being a spectator. My energy isn't especially abundant either. To be a player or a singer you need high marks across the board.

Musicians have to work with each other, and they're good at winning opportunities; they love throwing parties. They don't eat before a concert; they finish playing after nine at night, sign records, and after the signing everyone goes out to eat, stays out until the small hours, and has to get up the next day for a flight. Their days are tiring, but they enjoy it, because this is what they wanted — their charisma needs an immediate response. And because music reaches a new plane through collaboration, there's a deep friendship among musicians that language can hardly express.

Composing isn't like that. Composers in this era don't have much standing.

Q: Your father is a composer too.

My father studied composition theory. Later he started a music school back home, teaching piano, and later still he wrote songs of his own, turning our hometown's folk songs into art songs. He'd loved the flute and the accordion since he was a boy; later he went to help develop the frontier and spent ten years in Heilongjiang, playing the accordion every morning from 5 a.m., very disciplined. That was before I was born. As a child I'd go to the middle school where he worked; he lived in the staff dormitory, and the walls were covered with pictures of musicians. Every morning my dad would wash my face and tell me, this is Brahms, this is Mendelssohn, Xian Xinghai.

Q: What were the composers of your father's generation like?

He was the kind of writer who wrote songs. His generation didn't have the good chances we have. What they were after was different too. For them the most important event was the televised gala, which was also their main entertainment. So they naturally developed toward writing gala songs. Musicians of our generation don't seem to like writing that sort of thing.

We grew up during the golden age of pop music, so of course pop influenced us. When I was at university everyone was forming bands — before me Li Quan and Ding Wei, after me Chang Shilei, all of them forming bands and playing around, because pop's influence was so strong. In our era the person who shaped our values most was Faye Wong, not any classical musician. I just went my own way.

For those of us studying classical music in the composition department, Tan Dun's generation was our ideal. Even now I think the composition department's ideal is the same. But we'll never match the influence the older generation had. Everyone doing classical music in our generation feels lost.

Q: You often show a certain mood — a feeling that the era you live in isn't the best of times, a longing for passion and great meaning.

The 1980s, the era of Chen Danqing and people like him, is the era we envy. Everyone worshipped poets, worshipped artists. Look how madly Tan Dun and Chen Danqing loved art, staying up all night to study it. But look now: my own work is commercial, I'm not a pure artist. Some things aren't ours to decide. We grew up in a commercial age from the start, growing up as it grew.

Q: If you don't play with timbre, with sonic material, is originality getting harder and harder for composers of this era?

Playing with sonic elements, with timbre, is itself a kind of originality. What you mean by originality is probably originality in melody, in tunes. In fact our era is extremely free. You can write Romantic melodies, or play with timbre, or write spectral music, or write like Mozart, write like Chopin. You're completely free; several hundred years of musical material lie in front of you and you can pick whatever you like and write whatever you want.

But some musicians feel a responsibility to their era; they want their work to reflect its spirit. So they write more contemporary, experimental things. Ryuichi Sakamoto is that kind of artist, and so is He Xuntian.

Q: Why do you like Ryuichi Sakamoto so much?

Sakamoto really is good. Not that everything he writes is good — he has bad work too — but he is precious because he didn't reach his sixties and start repeating his old material, or tour everywhere playing his greatest hits for money. Most Chinese musicians do that: once they hit their fifties or sixties, a Li Zongsheng nostalgia concert, and the money comes in. Sakamoto only gets cooler; he keeps making experimental music. Even if his electronic experiments aren't his best work, I still think he's remarkable. The older, the cooler. Cool isn't a pose. Cool needs substance to mean anything. Glenn Gould is real cool, not a look he put on.

Keep Doing a Talk Show and You Start to Feel Your Own Work Getting Watered Down

Q: Do you still have ambitions as a composer?

I take Chopin and Bach as my idols. In my twenties I thought Stravinsky was the coolest. At 30, at 40, I've come to feel someone like Chopin is better. Bach simply wrote every day; you finish writing what you have to write, and that's it. I think everyone's fate is just to finish writing what is theirs to write.

These days I feel I'm writing études. To write a real work of classical music still takes some effort to build up to. I'm in no hurry to push these pieces out, because I've proposed a style I call natural minimalism, and I want it to mature slowly.

People say it sounds a bit like minimalism, like that passage in The Piano. It's different, of course, though the rhythmic patterns are a little alike. That happens a lot. Because my style is called natural minimalism, I need to strengthen the minimalist element, so it ends up sounding like the Western minimalists. If it didn't resemble that style at all, it couldn't be identified as minimalism. So over a certain stretch of time there may be some imitation — though this kind of imitation is never copying someone else outright.

Q: What do you make of doing audio programs?

I have three programs at once, so I have to make something nearly every day. Daily updates, recording every day.

Making an audio program is far easier than publishing a book. When I started in audio I was still getting another book ready, Listening to Classical Music in a T-Shirt, with Imaginist. The book was done more than a year in advance, but before it came out the audio program was already selling like mad. With a program you record one day and release it the next — much easier. It happened to catch the wave of paid knowledge, and I happened to be someone in music who could both write and talk, so the thing chose me. I never expected my speaking voice to be so pleasant; I suppose it suits audio.

But a talk show, you know, can't go deep. Too much information and people won't follow, and if they don't follow they stop wanting to listen, so you have to make it simple and direct. Yet I feel that anything that hasn't been examined won't do; it still needs thought at some intensity. Keep doing a talk show all the time and you start to feel your own work getting watered down.

If I weren't doing this audio program I might have gone on writing books. I might have gone in Jiang Xun's direction. My editor keeps pushing me for the manuscript, and he says, you know, Jiang Xun's speaking fee is higher than Sun Nan's. He likes to needle me with that, half joking.

This year I'm also going to write a book called The Sorrow of Revivalism. Classical music — I want to extend it outward, turn it into revivalism, a state of mind belonging to an era. Every era has its revivalists. Brahms was a revivalist, Chopin was a revivalist, Mendelssohn was a revivalist; in their own eras they were writing the music of the people before them. That isn't strange, because people always feel their own age is a bad one, that the rites are broken and the past was better. The book will argue that the pieces we write now are all new classical music, this era writing classical music over again. That's exactly what the style is.

Q: How do you think about being professional? When you write about Toru Takemitsu, or Schumann, you write with real feeling, and neither of them came from a professional background.

I've been thinking about this lately too, because if you want to achieve more at something, you have to be professional. If you want to be a better musician, you have to give yourself wholly to composing, and nothing else. That's how it should be. Historically that's mostly how it has been. Tchaikovsky, Chopin — the ones who really wrote well were extremely focused. Liszt, Schumann, they played at everything, and with so much output much of the work doesn't hold up. It depends on what you're after. It's like a competition: when you're young you pick the showpiece with the fireworks; at my age I'd choose the piece I actually want to sing.

Q: What are your listening habits?

I listen on NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music. I play it through the headphones or speakers people send me. It's very convenient now — Bluetooth straight to your phone.

I rarely listen to records anymore. I used to recommend records all the time, and post pictures of the sleeves, because Shanghai Weekly had that column. Now Shanghai Weekly is gone too.

Shanghai audiences really are something. Performers I'd barely heard of played the symphony hall and sold out completely, with almost no promotion. So a crowd like that exists, which is wonderful. Someone like "Uncle Lu" — I mean Ludovico Einaudi — tours China every year, every single year, and plenty of people still go to see him; you can even buy his scores on Taobao.

Q: Where do you buy books and records these days?

I buy books on Dangdang now. I used to go to Jifeng Bookstore and Fenglinwan; a few years back I even helped them run events. When we do a livestream I choose Jifeng specially, bring my fans along to watch, play the piano there. When Cohen published a book I did an event at Jifeng too, and when I publish a book myself I always choose their store. Now Jifeng has closed.

Long ago there was a record shop called Jiulong near the conservatory where you could find imported originals. A hundred, two hundred yuan a record, and we'd all go and buy them; back then a hundred-odd yuan for a record was quite a lot. I don't buy records now. The ones I collected are mostly at home on a high shelf, and I still can't bring myself to give them away. Jiulong seems to sell pianos now — mainly because nobody buys records anymore, while instruments only get more valuable. Professor Yang Liqing at the conservatory used to treasure his records; these very days are the anniversary of his death. He had several thousand at home. Back then all his colleagues put their money into apartments, and his house was full of records instead.

There's another bookstore, run by one of our conservatory teachers and his wife, but it was closed down later and moved into a small back alley. Right, you wrote about that bookstore — it's called Yuanlong. I buy music books there. If you go to buy books there, some conservatory kid will always tell you, don't buy this edition, this one's no good, buy the blue one, the blue one's good. He'll insist you buy that one. Very blunt about it.

Cover photo by Zhang Huangqi/QDaily