Wang BingMan in Black, 2023
Man in Black, Wang Bing’s 2023 film examines the life of Chinese composer Wang Xilin.
My intention in this short film is to exhibit the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering, a “man in black” who is yet still capable of expressing a deep and sincere compassion; and with excerpts from his Symphonies, to revisit some of the horrifying real-life historical events that he has lived through and that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanisation of the entire Chinese nation. -Wang Bing, December 2021
Xilin was born in 1936 in Kaifeng, Henan Province, and now shares his time between Mainz (Germany) and Beijing. His musical gifts were nurtured from an early age at the missionary-run Chengguang primary school in Pingliang, Gansu, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. In September 1949, due to difficult family circumstances after his father’s early death, he joined the theatre troupe of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s 11th Division. On graduating from college in 1957, he was admitted to the composition department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Upon graduating he was then assigned to the post of resident composer for the Beijing Central Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra and by 1963 he had completed his symphonic suite, his “Yunnan Tone Poem” (Op. 3). This was later awarded the highest prize given by the Chinese government.
In 1963, shortly before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a lecture Wang was assigned to criticising the government’s art policies led to his persecution. As a result of this, during the cultural revolution Wang was the target of severe persecution, including beatings, imprisonment and torture. He was eventually rehabilitated and in 1978 returned to Beijing, where at the age of 42, he was exposed for the first time to the contemporary 20th-century world music that had been banned in China for decades. This had a strong influence on his compositional technique as he began to employ sequencing, minimalism and tone clusters, as well as to incorporate elements of local folk music into his symphonic works.
Wang Xilin is a key figure in the contemporary music of the People’s Republic of China. His career resembles a pile of mirror shards, and his music reflects this painful path directly and powerfully. The turmoil and persecution during the Cultural Revolution and the complete isolation from Western music made it impossible for his generation to pursue their own ideas and aesthetic approaches and critically engage with tradition. They saw their promising careers abruptly and permanently interrupted by forced evacuations, labor camps or exile. The deep wounds that the Cultural Revolution inflicted on writers and musicians left lasting traces. In the decades following its end, they found artistic expression in the so-called “scar literature” or “scar music”. Wang Xilin’s music in particular reflects these tragic circumstances. After his return, he dared to make a fundamentally new beginning in composition, regardless of the many years he had lost, and tried to give the suffering of his people a voice in his music: “I [...] point to the crimes straightforwardly, because I myself experienced the oppressive reality as a heavy burden” (epilogue to the 3rd Symphony, 1990).
-A Genuine Voice from China – Wang Xilin: Chronicler against the Power by Britta Schilling-Wang, musicologist, the editor of the German MMG Music Dictionary and author of Wang Xilin’s entry in volume 17
