China has been going through enormous cultural shifts ever since the beginning of the 20th century, trying to break free from a legacy of five thousand years of unbroken cultural tradition. We are still witnessing the struggles of these cultural changes now, and possibly even the birth pangs of a new culture emerging from the debris of a century of perpetual revolution.

When China found itself helpless to repel invading foreign powers in the 19th century, it was a rude awakening for a country that still believed itself to be literately at the centre of the universe. The humiliation of being ransacked and held to ransom by foreign countries brought about a chain of unsuccessful revolutions that tried desperately to earn back China’s dignity. But it was Mao Zedong, leading his Communist forces to victory in 1949, who finally gave the country a new and united identity.

Whilst politicians and warlords generally saw modernisation as a process of learning new technology and political ideology, China’s intellectuals saw the root of China’s problems lying in its traditional culture, since culture was the system by which all thought was generated. New thinking could only have been possible by changing the parameters of its synthesis. Nobody believed this more than Mao, who after taking power instigated a series of movements calculated to change fundamentally the way people thought. The final and most devastating episode of this programme of change was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which lasted from 1966 to 1976, when universities and schools were closed, intellectuals and artists were sent to the countryside or driven to suicide, and anything representing traditional Chinese culture had to be destroyed (although luckily most of it wasn’t). The entire value system of Chinese culture, held sacred for thousands of years, was turned utterly inside-out. After five thousand years, China’s culture had been brought to a state of deep uncertainty.

Mao’s death in 1976 was an opportunity to reappraise the successes and failures of nearly thirty years of Communist revolution and to bring about vital reforms needed to bring China back into the international community. New freedoms brought about by these reforms created an explosion of artistic creativity in the 1980s that tried to make up for decades of lost time in just a few years. A new generation of artists absorbed the 20th-century art history in one breath and combined their pent up creative energy with their political, cultural, and emotional backgrounds to create explosive statements in literature, poetry, music, art, theatre and film. But after this initial period of excitement died down, fundamental questions still needed to be addressed regarding what contemporary Chinese culture meant after all that had happened. China is still in the throws of this struggle to find a cultural identity for itself that makes sense in the 21st century.

Although none of this has anything to do with sound art, it does give some indication of the cultural context in which this project was taking place. After all, the artists taking part were asked to create work that responded to the specific context of the city they were invited to.This leads naturally to questions regarding the responsive nature of the commissioned work. The context in question is not some neutral art space or concert hall in their native land, but an entirely alien cultural landscape with vast complexities only tentatively grasped by even the deepest thinkers in China itself.And on top of all that, the musicians were asked to create work that could communicate with a general public by placing their work in open urban settings. How could the musicians conceptualise a sense of place, identity, and society if they had only a few days in which to absorb all this information?

This is the essence of the experimental nature of the Sound And The City project. Asking musicians to approach a problem in a setting where none of them could afford to feel comfortable could possibly force a change of habit or pattern. From this point of view, it was also important to take them outside of the global home-from-home of the concert hall or exhibition space, and throw them unceremoniously into the total unfamiliarity of the Chinese city.