About the album
YANG Jing was born in China at a time when the so-called Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, had a profound impact on her childhood. It wiped out all traditional bourgeois culture to an extent that is still hard to believe today. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, postulated that only proletarian art and literature were acceptable, which for her only really began in 1963, with everything created before that to be considered reprehensible and decadent. As one of the four leaders of the Cultural Revolution, later dubbed the Gang of Four, she was largely responsible for the attempt to eradicate China's cultural heritage. Only so-called model pieces, six Peking operas and two ballets, rewritten for the purpose of educating the people, were permitted.
Although Mao Zedong had described tradition as a “living stream” just a few years earlier, he allowed the Cultural Revolution organized by the Gang of Four to take place. In addition to intellectual impoverishment, this also brought about material impoverishment through the cruel liquidation of a large part of the so-called elites, as well as all those who were perceived to be or actually were dissidents; the chaos accompanying the social transformation led to famine. Almost all artists and musicians were deprived of their actual abilities as part of the “superstructure” and were to be “re-educated” through field work organized in camps, so that the historical heritage that had been passed down until then, as well as any foreign influence, would be erased.
Perhaps this explains YANG Jing's interest in Chinese tradition, which is revealed through her instrument, the pipa, and her musical notation. Like hardly any other Chinese composer, she succeeds in creating an amalgam of Western and Eastern musical language, which is further intensified here by the confrontation between the pipa and the string quartet. This instrumentation is almost symbolic of the clash between different worlds, which is all too often negated in the standardized cultural industry.