Life and Leisure

You can't beat rhythm

By Chen Jie (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-30 08:02

Blossom Hall on the fifth floor of the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) turned into a crazy percussion party on Sunday afternoon. People hit, shook and scraped all manner of objects to produce unexpected rhythmic sounds.

Most of them were not percussionists but students from Peking University and the objects they played included empty drink cans, milk powder cans or other waste products.

Li Biao, host of the party and the only professional percussionist, taught them to make music with waste objects in addition to clapping hands or hitting parts of their bodies. Meanwhile Li displayed his impressive skills to play with six drum sticks. He even imitated people saying "hello" or "happy holiday" using his drum sticks.

Li says the performance was "a small part of the percussion world" that would be displayed for the NCPA International Percussion Festival, which will run from Oct 6 to 15.

"People usually think classical music is serious and hard to understand, but percussion instruments are different," says Li, who started playing the xylophone at 5. He studied percussion at Tchaikovsky Conservatory for seven years and then at Munich Conservatory for three years. Currently, he is the only Chinese professor at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler, in Berlin.

He says a percussionist in an orchestra may play as many as a dozen different instruments, depending on the music.

"It's really a magic world of sound," Li says, "Rhythm is the most primordial form of musical expression."

In addition to playing with symphonic orchestras, the percussionist explores modern music with jazz musicians. He also founded Li's Percussion in 2000, and has toured the world.

Hundreds of the group's instruments are stored in a 300 square meter warehouse in the village of Heizhuanghu, in the eastern suburb of Beijing, which also serves as a studio.

Touring around the world, Li has made friends with a number of the world's leading percussionists, which inspired him to hold an international festival of percussion at NCPA. "I remember Berlin Philharmonic hosted a big percussion concert in 2002. Musicians from all around the world, including me, hit the high notes that night. It's rare to have percussion concerts in China and I wish more Chinese people would know more about the magic instruments," he says.

The 10-day festival will host more than 40 musicians from 10 ensembles, including the Percussion Ensemble Atalaya of Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, the acclaimed Germany percussionist Peter Sadlo and Percussion Group of Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Eltonal Percussion from Hamburg, Yim Xue-Min Percussion Group from Hong Kong and The Ju Percussion Group from Taiwan.

Time: 7:30 pm from Oct 6 to 15, West of Tiananmen Square, Beijing, Tel: 010-6655-0730

China Daily