Xiang Jin Jin, Xiang
Xiang Jin (b. 1935): composer, conductor, music critic, and music educator.
Jin began studying piano at seven. In 1947 Jin entered the junior program of the National Conservatory of Music in Nanjing, graduating in July 1952 from the youth program of the Central Conservatory of Music in Tianjin; over those five years Jin majored in cello and piano, receiving thorough foundational training and building solid technique. In September 1952 Jin became a trainee researcher at the Institute of Folk Music of the Central Conservatory of Music, spending two years collecting, organizing, and studying folk and traditional music. Through this extensive contact with folk music, an aesthetic outlook rooted in Chinese aesthetic tradition gradually took shape. In September 1954 Jin was recommended for admission to the undergraduate composition department of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, spending five years in comprehensive study and mastery of the craft of composition and graduating with honors in July 1959. Having been wrongly labeled a “rightist” in 1957, however, Jin was immediately sent down to Xinjiang for twenty years—years of hard labor and hardship, of experiencing the warmth and coldness of human life and seeing every side of society—which laid a solid foundation of lived experience for the creative work that began in middle age. After being rehabilitated in February 1979, Jin was conductor of the Beijing Song and Dance Troupe’s symphony orchestra for five years, resuming a musical career interrupted for two decades. In December 1984 Jin became an associate professor in the composition department of the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing and head of its composition teaching and research section. From 1990 Jin traveled abroad to visit and study: in July 1990 as a visiting scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle for one year; from September 1991 as composer-in-residence at the Washington Opera in Washington, D.C., for one year; and from 1992 for a year and a half of study at the Juilliard School in New York. From 1994 Jin was professor of composition at the China Conservatory of Music, and from 2004 and 2006 respectively, a doctoral supervisor at the Chinese National Academy of Arts and the China Conservatory of Music.
Jin’s works span a wide range of genres and styles. Nearly one hundred works have appeared, from large-scale operas, symphonies, concertos, and cantatas to chamber music of all kinds and music for film and television; many have been published as scores, released on CD and cassette, and performed and broadcast many times by opera houses, concerts, radio, and television. With their distinct individuality, strong contemporary aesthetic sensibility, and varied fusion of the finest Eastern aesthetic traditions with modern Western compositional techniques, Jin’s works have won wide acclaim from audiences in China and abroad. Major works include the operas “The Savage Land” (原野), “The Hegemon-King of Chu” (楚霸王), and “Love Song of the Rawap” (熱瓦普戀歌); the symphonic cantata “Requiem for Jinling” (金陵祭); the symphonic song cycle “Five Songs from the Book of Songs” (詩經五首); the sinfonietta “Shaman” (巫); the symphonic ballade “Tasiwayi” (塔西瓦依); Piano Concerto No. 1 “Snow Lotus” (雪蓮); the pipa concerto “Qin Se Po” (琴瑟破); the symphonic tableau “Glimpses of the Taklamakan” (塔克拉瑪幹掠影); and the tone poem “Cao Xueqin” (曹雪芹).
The opera “The Savage Land” in particular, after its hugely successful premiere at the first China Art Festival in Beijing in September 1987, was again a success in a “staged reading” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in August 1988. In December 1989 it received a Special Certificate of Honor at the 3rd International Music Theatre Symposium in Munich, West Germany. Its US premiere by the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in January–February 1992, its performances in Taiwan in February–March 1993, and its European premiere in Germany and Switzerland in August 1997 all won unanimous international acclaim. At home, it was named one of the “Chinese Classics of the 20th Century” in 1993 and received the Wenhua Grand Prize in 1999.
Jin’s conducting is passionate, with a strong sense of structure. From the 1970s Jin worked with symphony orchestras, opera houses, film orchestras, and song and dance troupes in Xinjiang, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changchun, and elsewhere, giving many performances and recordings. Since the 1990s Jin has frequently conducted performances of Jin’s own works internationally.
Jin’s music criticism is incisive, original, and clear in its views. “A Composer’s Perplexity” (作曲家的困惑), published by China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing in Beijing in 1990, collects nearly twenty of Jin’s representative essays on music from the 1980s. “Perplexity and Quest: Reflections of a Composer” (困惑與求索──一個作曲家的思考), published by Shanghai Music Publishing House in 2003, builds on the earlier book and adds more than thirty representative essays from the 1990s onward.
Jin’s teaching is rigorous and conscientious, and highly pioneering. Jin insists both on thorough, solid training in fundamentals and on inheriting and studying the finest Chinese traditions, sharing with students a sixteen-character motto: “solid foundations, lively thinking, roots in China, broad horizons.” Respecting each student’s individuality and drawing out each student’s talents, Jin teaches according to ability and draws on many sources. Over more than twenty years Jin has trained a large number of outstanding composers now active in music circles in China and abroad.
Since the 1990s Jin has also devoted great effort to international musical exchange, traveling around the world many times to study, visit, perform, and lecture, and taking part in arts and opera festivals in more than ten countries and regions across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. In particular, since becoming president of the East-West Music Exchange Society in New York in 1996, Jin has organized concerts of all kinds (opera, symphonic, chamber, and Chinese orchestral) and lectures in New York, Washington, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere, sparing no effort to advance musical exchange between East and West. Alongside this, Jin has worked to build the theory of a “Chinese School” of music and has actively promoted the “New Century Forum on the Chinese School of Music.”
Jin is a council member of the Chinese Musicians’ Association, a specially invited council member of the China Film Music Society, a juror for the national Wenhua Grand Prize and the National Fine Arts Project, and a recipient of the State Council Special Allowance. In 1989 Jin was named a “Famous Chinese Musician” by the China Music Yearbook; in 1992 Jin was named a “World Notable of 1991–1992” by the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England, and was included in “Outstanding People of the World” and “2000 Notable Americans.”