China and the West

Brief von George Bernard Shaw an Edward Elgar ; 30 May (1933).
I recommended Peiping where you must go to the Lama temple and discover how the Chinese people produce harmony. Instead of your labourious expedient of composing a lot of different parts to be sung simultaneously, they sing in unison all the time, mostly without changing the note ; but they produce their voices in some magical way that brings out all the harmonies with extraordinary richness, like big bells. I have never had my ears so satisfied. The basses are stupendous. The conductor keeps them to the pitch by tinkling a tiny bell occasionally. They sit in rows round a golden Buddha fifty feet high, whose beneficent majesty and intimate interest in them is beyond description. In art we do everything the wrong way and the Chinese do it the right way.
At Tientsin they had a Chinese band for me. It consisted of a lovely toned gong, a few flageolets (I don't know what to call them) which specialized in pitch without tone, and a magnificent row of straight brass instruments reaching to the ground, with mouthpieces like the one I saw in the Arsenal in Venice many years ago: brass saucers quite flat, with a small hole in the middle. They all played the same note, and played it all the time, like the E flat in the Rheingold prelude; but it was rich in harmonies, like the note of the basses in the temple. At the first pause I demanded that they should play some other notes to display all the possibilities of the instrument. They pleaded that they had never played any other note; their fathers, grandfathers and forbears right back to the Chinese Tubal Cain had played that note and no other note, and that to assert that there was more than one note was to imply that there is more than one god. But the man with the gong rose to the occasion and proved that in China as in Europe the drummer is always the most intelligent person in the band. He snatched one of the trumpets, waved it in the air like a mail coach guard with a post horn, and filled the air with flourishes and fanfares and Nothung motifs. We must make the B.B.C. import a dozen of these trumpets to reinforce our piffling basses.
But the Chinese will reveal to you the whole secret of opera, which is, not to set a libretto to music, but to stimulate actors to act and declaim. When there is a speech to be delivered, the first (and only) fiddler fiddles at the speaker as if he were lifting a horse over the Grand National jumps; an ear splitting gong clangs at him; a maddening castanet clacks at him, and finally the audience joins in and incites the fiddler to redouble his efforts. You at once perceive that this is the true function of the orchestra in the theatre and that the Wagnerian score is only gas and gaiters.