Bright Sheng
Bright Sheng is a world-renowned composer, pianist and conductor who received the prestigious MacArthur fellowship in 2001. During the second edition of The Intimacy of Creativity, a project at HKUST for which he serves as Artistic Director, the Shanghai-born, Chinese-American musician talks to Penny Zhou about the Cultural Revolution, disadvantage, and his mentor, the legendary Leonard Bernstein.
My father was a radiologist and a doctor, and my mother was an engineer. Father likes classical music, like all doctors do! We had a small but nice collection of classical music and a piano at home because my mother played it. I was pretty much forced into learning piano and I hated it at the time.
Then the Cultural Revolution came when I was 10, and the piano was taken away. I was happy for a while, until a year later when I heard piano music on the radio. The sound of it was so nostalgic. Without a piano, I drew a keyboard on a piece of cardboard and practiced on it. Ironically, it was then when I really became obsessed with it.
The education system was torn down during the Revolution. There was no high school for me to go to after graduating junior high. Most of the young people had to work as farmers in the countryside according to Mao’s policy. But luckily, my amateur musical skills spared me, because Madame Mao [Jiang Qing, a former actress and Mao’s last wife] thought artistic youngsters could be good for government propaganda.
When the provincial song-and-dance propaganda troupe of Qinghai [an underdeveloped northwestern province] came to Shanghai to recruit, I jumped on board immediately. I didn’t know how far it was from my hometown or how tough the environment was. I remember on the 48-hour train ride, I looked outside the window and it just got yellower and bleaker as we moved west. There were no trees, no vegetation, just bald mountains.
As a 15-year-old piano player from a big city, I knew very well that I wasn’t remotely good enough, but there wasn’t anyone in Qinghai to help me improve.
