I have got to say my expectations for the discussion last Thursday were really low. I figured it was going to be a waste of time, but it was actually really enlightening and interesting. A couple things really struck me in particular.
I always thought of the traditional music of China as a homogenous genre; chordophones and pentatonic scales. While there was some of that, the forms were widely varied. The music played from the western part of China sounded more Arabic than Oriental, while the folk music from the south of China was much more like what I had expected. Not only that, but it was impressive how much even the use of the voice varied from region to region. The lyrical storytelling sounded completely different from the southern folk singing which was totally different from the Peking Opera style. It’s not shocking to me that there are different genres of music, only that in China folk music itself has so many different forms. It’s quite a vast difference from say western nations, where the folk/traditional music tends to be fairly similar.
It leads to an even more macroscopic idea, which is how fascinatingly diverse China seems to be. The students who came were of MANY ethnicities, not just what we think of as “Chinese”. Their cultures and traditions are so different and varied, and yet they are all part of one cohesive nation, and seem to have a shared identity. I had really thought the United States was the only country that was so diverse; seems I was wrong. It’s fascinating how much an hour can teach you…
(and for what it's worth, amazing how talented their business students are...those guys were good!!!!)
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