Chinese Children Forced to Play Piano

Posted on Jun 20th 2008 10:00AM by James Sullivan
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The West, apparently, has ample reason to fear China, and not just for its economic giantism. According to a BBC documentary called 'The Red Piano Factory,' as many as 80 million Chinese children are being prodded to play classical piano, and manufacturers are producing keyboards at the rate of one per minute.

"If you'd ever suspected that Brahms could be used as a deadly weapon, then here was the proof," writes a shellshocked reviewer in the New Statesman.

It's a stark contrast to the days of the Cultural Revolution, when Western music was banned and Chairman Mao denounced the piano as "a coffin in which the hammers rattle around like the bones of the bourgeoisie." Isn't that what Nick Cave has been up to all these years?

Now, apparently, whole warehouses are routinely converted into practice spaces where vast oceans of school-age children bang away at Beethoven and Liszt while "smiling grannies sit patiently with steamed buns waiting for metronomes to halt momentarily." Talk about your visual images.

The whole culture, the writer claims, is fixated: "You can scarcely make it ten yards down the street before being forced to buy an illegal 'Goldberg Variations' box set." The horror!

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