It's not uncommon for professional artists to travel across the globe for performances. But invitations for college orchestras to play in China don't happen every day.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Weber State University students and faculty were still excited as they recounted the symphony orchestra's recent good will tour to China."It started a couple of years ago, when some of the administration from the Shanghai Teachers' University were visiting here," said Michael Palumbo, chairman of the department of performing arts and conductor for the orchestra. "They stopped in and listened at rehearsal, and the next thing I knew, they had invited the orchestra from Weber State to come over and do a series of concerts."
For Shi-Hwa Yang, a native of Taiwan and violin teacher at Weber State University, it was a return to deep roots.
"My father was from mainland China," he said. "When the Taiwanese government and the mainland government split, my father went to Taiwan.
"Two years ago I went (to mainland China) during a tour, and I met some relatives. This time, I met even more. About 10 people came -- uncles and cousins, mostly -- to this performance. One had to ride eight hours on a night train to come to Shanghai to see me."
Shi-Hwa was the featured artist in the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto.
The concerto was performed twice -- once with a Chinese orchestra playing traditional Chinese instruments and once again with the Weber State orchestra playing Western instruments.
"One of the most difficult problems China has had over the last 70 years is the Western influence conflicting with the traditional," said Palumbo. "That's made a difficult transition, I know, for some people over there."
Shi-Hwa noted, "(Mainland China) looks very much like Taiwan did 30 years ago. It feels like going back through time. I always thought if the Western influence never entered China, we would see China as it was 500 years ago, the same, exact way. But the two worlds had to clash at some time.
"Now that they've opened the market, opened the country, some parts are very advanced. Some places in Shanghai look just like New York. They have a very mixed culture right now."
"We were in Beijing the same day of the Taiwan election," said Yu-Jane Wang, wife of Weber State piano faculty member Shi-Hwa. "And it was interesting, because the triangle relationship between the United States, mainland China, and Taiwan has been quite tense.
"I think it was amazing that because of this musical venture, we were able to unify the three sides of this triangle. We had a student orchestra from the U.S., a Chinese student orchestra from mainland China, and a soloist, Shi-Hwa, from Taiwan. It's interesting the things we can do with music. Even though we can't do it politically, we can do it with music."
Palumbo agreed.
"The students were able to relate with each other with a complete absence of ideological thought," he said. "The closest thing we had to what could have been an uncomfortable situation is when we were on the bus toward the end. One of the students on the bus said, 'Tell us about the students that were killed in Tiananmen Square.'
"The guide was very open. He said, 'We saw a different thing than you saw. On TV, we saw the soldiers being killed. I understand that you saw on TV the students being killed. We never saw anything like that, so we don't know that it really happened. But all of us are capable of making decisions for ourselves about what happened.' Other than that, everything was very comfortable and cool."
"Their students took our students around for various sight-seeing and shopping, and even a party," said Palumbo. "The students have different cultures and different language, but when you get past all that, then they're all just young people having a good time."
You can reach Rebecca Cline by e-mail at rcline@desnews.com