THE first time I head Kimho Ip playing the yangqin, the Chinese hammer dulcimer, was in February, at the official opening of the ongoing China Now in Scotland festival at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.
There, in the presence of the First Minister, the Chinese consul and other assorted great and good, the Edinburgh-based, Hong Kong-born musician and composer launched into… not a traditional Chinese melody – that would come later – but a strangely fa
miliar-sounding tune. I checked with him later and it proved indeed to be the plaintive old Scots air The Winter It Is Past, which Ip had learned from the Glasgow composer and Whistlebinkies folk band flautist Eddie McGuire, who takes an active interest in Chinese music.
Tomorrow Ip, McGuire and a bewildering assortment of other artists and cultures converge on the gardens for Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo, a Midsummer Night’s promenade performance which Ip describes as “a night’s journey exploring themes inspired by the connection between plants and people”. For Ip, director of the event, wind symbolises change, while bamboo represents not only traditional Chinese culture, but also continuing renewal. Whatever visitors may expect tomorrow night, they’re likely to be unprepared for quite such an intriguing collision of cultures and performance styles – or for the fact that some of the players aren’t even human.
As the audience moves between the RBGE’s Temperate Palm House and its lushly planted Chinese Hillside – below which sculptor Susie Brown has erected a meandering palisade of black bamboo stakes – they will encounter music, song and dance provided by a disparate selection of artistes. There will be the Shanghai Jazz Project, two New Yorkers who specialise in the jazz of 1930s China; Korphai, a bamboo percussion orchestra from Thailand; the experimental pop band FOUND (yet another product of Fife’s ever-fertile Fence Collective); and Glasgow’s Harmony Chinese ensemble (including guest Chinese singer and lutenist Cheng-Ying Chuang), co-founded by McGuire – who, promises Ip, will make an appearance as a “wise old man” playing bamboo flute – Glasgow muso become Zen icon.
Add dancers Anne-Marie Culhane and Chang Zhang, Bob Lowey’s Tai Chi team and Ip’s own dulcimer and cello work, and the stage seems set for an intriguing evening – but that’s only the human performers. Back at the Palm House, Ziggy Campbell of FOUND and Simon Kirby of Edinburgh University, whose Found Electronics company develops “experimental expressive machines”, have created an interactive soundscape of tuned chimes and, half hidden among the palm fronds, a “robotic yangquin”, rigged with bamboo beaters which, like the chimes, are connected to electronic sensors.
These, explains Kirby, as I find him crawling through the undergrowth trailing wiring, are finely attuned to air temperature changes caused by the presence of people but are also sens-itive to moisture changes in the surrounding soil and plant life. People passing through the palm house will be “ambushed” by chimes and the resonant clamour of the dulcimer, the mood of the “playing” changing, as he puts it, “according to the interactions between plants and people, robots and trad-itional instruments, composer and audience”.
He continues: “The sensors will ‘see’ if someone walks in, sensing the heat from their bodies, then soil sensors will also register how much water the plants are taking in and these will determine whether to play and what is played. If not, there will be silence … unless, perhaps, a robin hops by.”
One can’t help thinking of some of ambient guru Brian Eno’s experiments with “earthworm music”. Kirby and Campbell haven’t quite stretched to recording invertebrates yet, but one suspects they’re up for most things. When I ask jokingly what the Musicians’ Union might think about robot players, Kirby points to the yangquin rigged up the undergrowth – “Kimho doesn’t know yet we’ve replaced him,” he smiles.
Ip, however, is hugely enthusiastic about the whole project, which was initiated last year when the RBGE was looking for a site-specific project for the China Now In Scotland festival. The Garden’s links with China are long and strong, as it boasts the largest Chinese plant collection outside that country, much of which adorns the Chinese Hillside, the main site for Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo. “We wanted to put the music there, where they have all these plants brought from China, and create an atmosphere similar to China,” says Ip. “So we started thinking of music that will help people not just to see the garden, but to hear it.”
The project – the bamboo sculpture and sound installation remain at the RBGE until 29 June – is one of several in which Ip has worked as creative director of iMAP (Intercultural Music and Arts Project), which he started four years ago with two other south-east Asian composers and Edinburgh University graduates. They were inspired by composer Professor Nigel Osborne of the university’s music department, well known for his work in using music therapy in rehabilitating children traumatised by conflict in areas such as the Balkans and the Middle East.
“I’m very excited about the project, certainly,” says Ip. “I think this is the real meaning of the word ‘composer’ – you put things together to make them work, but not just writing musical notes on paper. I’m trying to choreograph a composition where people go from one space to another, starting with the palm house, which I call ‘the reality of modernity’, then moving into the Chinese Hillside, which is more about nature. Making these things happen in the garden here is a dream come true for me.”
• The Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo performance starts at 7pm tomorrow night at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (meet at 6:45pm outside Temperate Palm House). For further details, see
imapimap.com/windandbamboo and
www.rbge.org.uk