Chinese music and CUCOS

I was also due to play my version as a solo at a 2006 charity concert which some students had arranged in aid of a blind school in Vietnam, but the concert ran overtime and they had to cut my item. I did however talk with the other performers, who were mostly Chinese, and I suggested they start a Chinese orchestra but I didn't expect to be taken seriously.

In 2007 they arranged a second concert at which I premiered a couple of my father's flute solos, and they did start a Chinese orchestra, calling it Cambridge University Chinese Orchestra Society (CUCOS), which I've supported since 2008.

CUCOS also collaborated with students from the University of Warwick at Coventry, who set up a small Chinese-instrument ensemble called WCOS from 2011 onwards.

Joint Chinese-Western ensemble

A CID item at the 2017 West Road concert

There is no funda­mental reason why Western and Chinese instru­ments cannot play in the same ensemble, as long as the composer/arranger is aware of differences in volume etc (think of Bach including both recorder and trumpet in his Brandenburg Concerto No.2)---so some works have been written to include CUCOS players from both ensembles.

CUCOS is an "all-comers" amateur orchestra with no auditions---its attraction to Westerners lies in the novelty of the music (and, in the case of CID, the instruments) rather than a professional standard---and it has to cope with the unpredictability of which instruments will be available in which terms. So when my father wrote a piece to unify the two ensembles in 2008/09, he made the instrumentation quite flexible and said feel free to rearrange as necessary. (His piece quoted the Chinese melodies from my earlier arrangement and expanded the textures.)

My father's piece was not played, but it did result in others being more inclined to the idea of performing a joint piece, and:

• in 2010 CID invited some WID players to join in for a piece called Golden Age (with lots of fun time-signature changes);
• in 2012 CUCOS commissioned a professional composer---Ruth Chan---to write a (modern-style) joint piece;
• and students composed and arranged three joint pieces in 2018, two in 2019 (one of which quoted my Xu Zhimo translation), and four for an all-joint 2020 concert before the COVID19 lockdown.

As for my father's piece, in 2014 he suggested it be reworked and submitted to a Singapore Chinese Orchestra competition he'd seen advertised in a music magazine, but he changed his mind when he heard Singapore is one of the very few countries in the world that still imprisons conscientious objectors---he wasn't religious but he was anti-war. Shortly before his death in 2016 he suggested reworking for a Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra competition, which had published over 2 hours of video explaining their instruments, but we weren't able to process all that information in time.

Other WID music

The view from my desk at the 2016 West Road rehearsal

You might notice this Lilypond printout of Taiwanese composer Teng Yu-hsien's 1934 song Rainy-night Flower says ``oboe+flute'' on it. They lacked an oboe for the concert so asked me to play passages from both parts, thankfully in time to typeset the combination.

• If a local student has rearranged a piece then they might have a Sibelius file, which can be printed with larger staves and octave adjustments without having to re-input everything from scratch. There used to be a copy of Sibelius on the UIS Teaching Room PCs (I'd suggested Sibelius's "Scorch" viewer and that apparently prompted them to check with the music department and license the whole thing), but these PCs were removed in 2022 (it might still be on some College computers). I still prefer Lilypond, both for its lack of awkward mouse work and its better use of space in the printout, but if we already had a Sibelius file then it was sometimes quicker to adjust it directly.

CID usually uses Jianpu notation---they tend to handwrite it but have occasionally used XunScore, Ziipoo or my Jianpu in Lilypond script.

Some of the music CUCOS has played has been political etc, and I try to avoid participating in those pieces, but it's not always obvious and I have occasionally been caught out by playing something that I didn't realise had such connections until receiving programme notes after the concert. It's better to remember to 'look up' each piece yourself. (I've also been known to drop out if they give the whole concert a title that feels uncomfortable---thankfully this isn't every time.)

Part of the 2023 joint orchestra with graduate composer Jingyu Chen

Concert pattern

CUCOS end-of-year concerts have sometimes featured soloists from outside Cambridge, either playing separate items (e.g. guzheng player Lin Li from London in 2016 and 2017), or playing a concerto with the orchestra (e.g. harmonicist Jia-Yi He from America in 2009). In 2015 WCOS visited Cambridge as a group and played an item in the CUCOS concert. Most items however have been produced by CUCOS's own members.

Anecdote