Zhang: Vocal Dedication to Motherland

By Qi Yongye

One of Zhang Chengjuns best career moments as a singer occurred on August 2, 2009. That night, a vocal concert was televised in a channel of Zhejiang Television. Zhang Chengjun sang three patriotic songs. His impassioned performance resonated with the audience and brought down the house. Many people were deeply impressed.

Zhang Chengjun is more than a successful singer. Born in 1954, he has studied under the guidance of great vocal masters such as Gao Zhilan, Wen Kezheng and Ge Chaozhi and is a major figure in creating a Chinese vocal style. A professor and master instructor with Hangzhou Normal University, he has helped cultivated a large group of singing talents. He is also a member of Zhejiang Peoples Political Consultative Committee for many years, dedicating himself to cultural and artistic undertakings in the city. His daughter, Zhang Li, was a high-profile participant in Super Girls, a sensational nationwide talent-finding singing competition.

I recently had an interview with Zhang Chengjun. It was a cool summer day on the citys section of Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. At the beginning of the interview, he hummed one of his best songs. We bean with the subject of teacher-student relationships. He had a lot to say on the subject. He gestured toward the canal outside and observed, “Art is like this long canal. I am just a small part of it. My success is derived from teachers, who are like the upper streams. My responsibility is to carry the academic values and art concepts to the lower streams.”

Zhang Chengjun grew up in Jinggang Mountain, a key cradle of the Chinese revolution in the first half of the 20th century. The stories of the people fighting for a better China touched his young heart. His mother, a woman with ethnic Korean ancestral roots, injected the idea of serving the people into his son. She encouraged him to grow up to be a man useful to the people. And his mother loves to sing and dance and brought happiness to people.

Zhang Chengjun started his singing career as a singer with Nanchong Dance and Singing Troupe in Sichuan Province in January, 1972. He studied with many masters. These masters, he recalls with emotion, gave him more than vocal training. They taught him how to be a man of moral integrity, a man who gives back to the motherland and strives to make music a valuable part of peoples lives. He believes the latter part is more important than things from books.

Nine years have passed since he began to teach at Hangzhou Normal University in October, 2000. In the eyes of his students, he is a venerable professor. He never follows books strictly. More often than not, he teaches from his performing experience.And moral integrity is a key part of his teaching and a key part in which he evaluates his students studies. Today, many of his students are promising singers on the rise to national fame.

His Daughter

Of all the students he has coached in singing, Zhang Chengjun is most proud of his daughter Zhang Li. He looked extremely happy when our conversation turned to the topic of his daughter. He became highly concerned one summer when a national debate broke loose after a newspaper reported what had happened in a summer camp. The debate was about parenting. Zhang followed the debate closely and made up his mind that he would never make the mistake as committed by the parents mentioned in the report. It was the year when his daughter began the first year in the primary school.

From then on, he did not stress academic scores single-mindedly. Creativity, moral integrity, independence, concern with public interests, and academic brilliance were well balanced in his parenting. He gives his daughter a free space for growth. He followed some general principles while he respected the daughters choices. In 2005, Zhang Li signed herself up in the Super Girls, an entertainment program catching the attention of the whole nation. She used a pseudonym in order to prevent her father from finding out. She did not take it very seriously and all she wanted was to have a good time. But after preliminaries, she was one of the top 50 in Hangzhou. A friend saw her on television and told Zhang Chengjun about his daughter. The father inquired and the daughter confessed it was her in competition. The father and the daughter had a talk. Zhang Chengjun pointed out that there was a big difference between entertainment and art. He said there was overnight success for an entertainer but there would never be overnight fame for an artist. Zhang Li kept her fathers teaching in mind and treated the competition just as performing experience. She made a lot of friends and learned a lot about life.

In 2007, while many other super girls were still enthusiastic about the game, Zhang Li dropped out of the game and took a postgraduate course at Sidney University for a master degree. In 2009, she took another postgraduate course in New Castle University in Australia for her second master degree.

Chinese Singing Style

For decades, Zheng Chengjun has adhered unswervingly to his career goal: singing of motherland and singing for people. The determination came from his experience. After his graduation from junior middle school, he went to a village in Sichuan Province to live and work just as millions of young graduated did in these days. It was during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The village life was hard and drab while the whole country was caught in the political turmoil. He had nowhere to go and there seemed no future in the village. One late morning he put on a rain coat, carried a hoe and went to dig up some sweet potatoes in the hill. He sang to hills. After a song, he felt good. Then he sang one song after another. When he finally went through his singing repertoire, he found a crowd of villagers had gathered silently behind him. They had stood there in the rain and listening raptly to his singing. The memory has been with him since then.

In the 1990s, Zhang Chengjun first hit upon the idea of developing a Chinese singing style. He noticed a large crowd of excellent Chinese singers of international renown sang foreign arias in a foreign style on foreign stages. In 1995, he put forward his idea in a research paper delivered at a national forum proposing to establish a vocal style with Chinese characteristics. The highly acclaimed paper discussed the idea thoroughly and resonated with a lot of vocal masters. Jin Tielin, a professor with China Conservatory of Music and authoritative figure in Chinas vocal teaching, thought it was a valuable and significant new concept.

Since 1995, Zhang Chengjun has staged nearly 100 concerts with his students. Most of them were not held for elite audiences in concert halls at all. Zhang and his disciples have sung to people in everyday life and they visited villages and colleges. In 1998 they even visited the spot where the Yangtze River had broken the dam in Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province. They sang for the military people who had been working there in emergency to rebuild the dam and block the overflowing flood.