Scenes from the life of a composer and teacher
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Bright Sheng |
On
North Campus, in a small room with cream-colored block walls, are
an industrial strength metal desk, a Chinese scroll unrolled to
show its black and white figures, and what only can be described
as a beat-up piano. This is the office of award-winning composer
Bright Sheng.
Here,
encompassed
in an environment
Sheng says is
fertile both for faculty and
students, the
composer finds the balance
of academic and
mainstream styles
essential to his
craft. "I don't really need to
teach," Sheng
says. "If I weren't teaching,
I'd have more
time. But I don't treat
teaching as a
job. It is a great honor to be
with a major
university. I like the academic
side, the access
to libraries."
The
recipient of
a 2001 MacArthur
Foundation
Fellowship for his innovative
works, Sheng is a
composer who, the
foundation
writes, "bridges East and West,
lyrical and
dissonant styles, and historical
and contemporary
themes to create
elegant
compositions with a distinctive
signature."
There
are, he
says, only three reasons to
teach.
The
first is to
learn from the students. "It's
great to be
around young people and to
learn what they
are up to. Since teaching
requires
organizing one's thoughts, that's a
second asset,"
Sheng says. "You are
looking at other people's works, perhaps through
serving on a dissertation committee. You
have to concentrate on both the intellectual and
practical or theoretical side of the music."
The
third motivation for teaching is an obligation
owed to his own teachers—to pass on to his
students that which he learned from his teachers. "I
was fortunate to study with many great
teachers," Sheng says. One of those teachers was
Leonard Bernstein with whom he was
associated for about five years. "Bernstein was
foremost a teacher," Sheng says.
Sheng
shares the compositions he is working on with
his students. That includes his most recent
opera, "Madame Mao," which premiered at the Santa Fe
Opera July 26. "The students are
audacious," Sheng says. "I care more about what my
students think about my work than I do
about what my colleagues think. Students tell the
truth. I talked to my students about my
approach to 'Madame Mao,' including the story,
musical and dramatic approach to the opera.
They told me, 'That's cool or that's not cool'."
An
example of the close student-teacher relationship
Sheng engenders occurred in the winter of
2000-01. Taking advantage of the freedom offered by
the MacArthur award, Sheng took a
yearlong sabbatical, even though he missed the
student contact. The feeling was mutual. One
snowy night while Sheng was working late at his home
in the Michigan countryside, a group of
his students appeared at the door with a cake.
Supposedly they just happened to be in the
neighborhood.
Sheng
gave a staged reading of the first act of
"Madame Mao" last year at U-M's Festival of New
Works, a developmental theater designed to give
creative artists a means to obtain audience
feedback for new screenplays, plays and musicals. The
opera, in the format of Chinese opera
with some dancing, chronicles the life of China's
Jiang Qing, otherwise known as Madame Mao,
a naïve young actress who, after marrying communist
ruler Mao Zedong, came to have great
political clout. "We found out from that audience
what works and what doesn't," Sheng says.
"The first act ended in a place that was not logical,
so we had to move two more scenes into
that act. It was a rough run-through, but it was good
to get audience reaction."
Whether
"Madame Mao" is a success or not, Sheng says he has made
up his mind: "I will not write more than one opera every 10
years."--By Joanne Nesbit, News Service.
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