This is a delightful book. It opens up a Cultural arena much neglected in scholarship on China. Nine engagingly narrated chapters take us through the history of Sino-foreign musical contact since the late 19th century, with one digression. Much goes back to encounters since the 16th century (chapter two). The hook follows the life story of three important institutions (the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, the Shanghai Conservatory and the Central Conservatory) and three important men: violinist Tan Shuzhen, who was the first Chinese to join the orchestra in colonial Shanghai: conductor Li Delun, who was trained in Moscow and managed to serve the government before, during and after the Cultural Revolution: and composer He Luting, one of the most outspoken protagonists in China's music world and long-time principal at the Shanghai Conservatory. The authors' approach of choosing "white elephants" to present the history of classical music in China, although unfashionable since Jauss, brings much cohesion and structural elegance to the volume.
The book is at its best when using material from interviews conducted by the authors. Based on this evidence, the book comes to one important conclusion: contact between Chinese and foreign musicians in China was generally not antagonistic, either before or after 1949. Foreign musicians did not behave in a condescending manner, as "imperialists" and Chinese musicians hardly ever perceived them to do so. For obvious reasons, few Chinese (and, surprisingly, few foreign studies) on China's classical music scene have acknowledged this fact.
The authors have done a beautiful job in telling their story. They must be lauded for having gone through a great variety of sources including contemporary newspaper articles, propaganda magazines, Party documents, as well as films, recordings and some of the very recent, and mostly biographical, secondary literature on the subject published in China. Since the book is conceived as a collective biography, it lacks detailed musical and historical analysis and it would have benefited from a few closer readings. For example, what precisely is the meaning of %u201Cnational style%u201D for people as different as Tcherepnin, Mao Zedong or Guo Wenjing ? Musical analysis would have provided an answer. Why do the authors not make more of the fact that Jiang Qing advised the musicians writing a model symphony to watch - and, more importantly, listen to - music in Hollywood films in order to improve their composi-tional skills? A more explicit engagement with the technical and musical styles of the model works (the term model opera should really be reserved for the operas in the set and not all of the pieces which also comprised ballets and symphonic compositions) would have been illuminating here, for it would have shown how indebted they were to the same principles of music-making as Hollywood film music on the one hand and the Butterfly Violin Concerto on the other - both officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution. It is sad, too, that the balanced account of the Cultural Revolution years - which describes both the pain it caused to many an intellectual and the benefits it brought for Chinese musical life generally - focuses almost entirely on the first set of eight model works and leaves out the second, equally important set of ten produced later (chapter seven). There are a number of non sequiturs in this book that are inevitable in any pioneering work of this size.
A few more serious caveats need to be kept in mind when reading this book. Its powerful personalized narrative, even in sections where the authors could not rely on interviews, comes at a price: it is not always clear whether the beautiful narration, full of intricate detail, is in fact reliable (especially when it is drawn almost entirely from a single source as in chapter two, or when it occasionally takes propaganda writing or standard rhetoric (tifa) at face value, as in chapter six and seven). This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that some of the information on Chinese history is indeed flawed - for example, the discussion of the Shanghai park sign, "No Dogs or Chinese," which never existed (see the essay by Bickers and Wasserstrom in The China Quarterly. No. I42, pp. 444-466) - and by the fact that some original sources are quoted from rather inappropriate secondary sources (such as Liang Qichao from Witke's biography of Jiang Qing).
Although the authors wish to get away from black and white termi¬nologies, they sometimes forget this when it comes to their own heroes. He Luting, for example, who emerges here as an outright and honest defender of classical music for music's sake was much less enlightened when it came to contemporary styles of music. Indeed, descriptions of him as a tyrannical principal by those who were attempting to compose in contemporary styles in the mid-1980s abound. Yu Huiyong, for example, the de facto composer of most of the operas in the model works, appears as the villain in this book for his unacceptable behaviour during the Cultural Revolution, although many now acknowledge his great contribution to the art of Peking Opera and even forgive his behaviour, which he himself deeply regretted%u2026.
There is much to be learned from this book%u2026.

This book is the result of husband-and-wife collaboration, one a journalist from Washington DC who majored in international studies and the other a music professor and conductor at Stanford who is from Beijing. A very rich study of China, Rhapsody in Red not only focuses on Western classical music, but also covers the events related to the importation of Western culture to China, from Matteo Ricci in the Ming dynasty to the present craze for building opera houses and symphony orchestra halls in Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities. Well informed and engagingly written, the book is a real treat for those who are interested in China and music in general.

Readers will be amazed as well as impressed with the depth of analysis and informative details in the book. Examining the lives of a number of significant Chinese musicians of the 20th century, the authors succeed in connecting independent biographies into a fascinating story of some coherence. In so doing, most of the major historical and political events relevant to music-be it Western classical or Chinese-in the last four centuries are vividly presented. Drawing upon an insider's detailed knowledge and a Westerner's perspective, the book is free of unnecessary orthodox clichés endorsed by the Chinese government and at the same time remains true to historical and cultural facts.

Two Westerners featured prominently in the book are Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who brought the first clavichord to China, and Mario Pact. a pianist who transformed a German band into the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and made it "the best orchestra of the Far East" during the 1920s. Matteo Ricci is less significant in terms of the development of Western classical music in China than his compatriot Paci. Rhapsody is particularly valuable in recounting the activities of Paci, in particular his contributions to the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and his training of numerous Chinese musicians. Given the fact that it is still rather embarrassing to mention how the Communists treated Paci after they took over Shanghai, it is not too surprising that little has been written on him in Chinese, which makes this book even more welcome.

In addition to Ricci, the book highlights other Mlanchu-era Catholic priests including Johann Adam Schall von Bell, Tomas Pereira. Teodorico Pedrini, Matteo Ripa and Joseph-Marie Amiot. Other Western musicians briefly featured in the book include Alexander Tcherepnin and Aaron Avshalomov of twentieth-century Shanghai. The book is extremely informative on early missionaries in China and on music institutions, such as the Shanghai National Music Conservatory and the Shanghai Municipal Symphony orchestra. What is even more revealing are the stories of Chinese musicians like Li Delun, Xian Xinghai, He Luding and Tan Shuzhen, all of whom held important posts in the music establishment of Communist China and were vital to the shaping of the pre- and post-1949 music culture of China.

Emperors Wanli of the Ming dynasty, Kangxi and Qianlong of the Qing dynasty and later political leaders like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing and Richard Nixon all make appearances in the book. Anyone who is interested in the politics and music of the PRC should not miss it. Once you start reading, it is difficult to stop. To a certain extent, the issues raised by Melvin and Cai remind one of those in Richard Kraus' Pianos and Politics in China: Middle­-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (1989), of which some of the factual misinformation is corrected in Rhapsody. But in general, this book is less critical and tends to be more fact-oriented and journalistic than that by Kraus.

An experienced writer, Melvin portrays the musicians in the book vividly and humanely, writing with much passion. Nevertheless, the work is marred by errors for which she cannot be held responsible, though Cai, as a musician, could have caught and corrected them. Several do not make musical sense. The statement that "The little (Chinese) music that was notated used different systems, perhaps the most common being a word based system known as gongchipu that did not indicate rhythm and provided no visual clues as to pitch" (p. 65) is both ill-informed and inaccurate. Chinese traditional gongchipu is a kind of pitch notation in which Chinese characters are used as solfege names. Although the rhythmic indications are not as detailed as those in Western staff notation, there are dots and circles in gongchipu indicating pulses and how many notes are to be finished within the same pulse (or clapper beat). A footnote would have helped here to alert the reader to the differences between the Western and Chinese systems.

In general, the book reveals that the authors' understanding of Western music is much stronger than that of traditional Chinese music. However, these few minor flaws do not diminish the charm of the book. As the most recent report on the Chinese musical scene, the book should be on the bookshelf of all who are interested in Chinese music, history and politics.

%u2026An important study. To understand the nature of China as the sole growth market today for Western classical music- not just as producers on the competition and recital circuit but also as the world's single largest consumer base - one must also look at the political battleground that was Western music in China in the 20th century.
This requires reporting from the front line while keeping historical perspective - a tricky balance in a culture where one generation is strongly encouraged to do the very things that had gotten members of a previous generation imprisoned and often killed. China may indeed have a rich history, but selective memory has been the key to its survival. Not even in the former Soviet Union were culture and politics so entwined. a nation's artists held captive to the whims of their leaders. To its credit. this is a book where Chen Yi the composer has fewer citations than Chen Yi the Communist Party figure.
Simply put, just getting the record straight is no small accomplishment in a country where official policy on Beethoven was often a state matter and musicological research essentially considered espionage. Written records are few, and accounts of the Cultural Revolution - that great, violent purge...