The past few weeks have not been good for China’s image abroad, with the protests surrounding the Olympic torch relay. But the country did bring home one prize.
At the recent Radio 3 Awards for World Music, the best musician in the Asia/Pacific category was Sa Dingding. The Chinese singer fended off competition from artists better known in the west, including the Tuvan throat singers Huun-Huur-Tu and sitar player Anoushka Shankar.
Dingding, 25, found music at an early age. From 3 to 6, she lived with her grandmother in the grasslands of Mongolia. “We raised sheep, and we would sing to the ewes to help them feed their lambs. Singing is daily life, there — you can accomplish anything by singing.”
Moving to the city to rejoin her parents came as a shock. “In the grassland, I had been so free. I played all the time. I did what I wanted. Then suddenly, at school, I had to raise my hand if I wanted to go to the bathroom.”
In Mongolia, Dingding had learnt to play the zheng, the Chinese zither, and the horse-hair fiddle, developing these interests further when she studied music and philosophy in Beijing. When she was 18, a music producer invited her to sing on a children’s record, which excited the interest of China’s dance music community.
“But I realised that I didn’t want to sing other people’s songs. I had the potential to write my own.” She spent two years, making her first proper album, Alive. “I worked on it all: the lyrics, the programming, the arrangements.”
Traditional instruments
Alive, released in China last year and re-released in the UK recently, is an astonishingly assured debut album. The instrumentation blends traditional Chinese instruments, from the zheng and the horse-hair fiddle to pipes and metallic percussion, with western sounds from string orchestras to bass and guitar, as well as a medley of electronica.
At times, the glossy chinoiserie comes too easily but there are many moments of limpid beauty. “That mix of cultures, western and oriental, for me it makes harmony.”
Dingding listens widely: she name-drops the Chemical Brothers but also joyfully recognises a picture of Sting in the stairwell of Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, where we talk through an interpreter. She refuses to be pigeonholed by genre. “Because I am a musician, I think of a style of music as just a tool for expressing one’s feelings.”
Alive is full of settings of ancient texts. “The lyrics are a mantra that’s 2,500 years old. Passing it on to a new generation, it’s very typical Chinese culture.”
She parries a question about whether this looking backwards is contrary to the forward march of China-as-Olympic-host. “It’s not just history. In recreating it, I want to give it new life. Young people live in the modern world but they shouldn’t forget about history. There’s lots of wisdom there we shouldn’t forget. In the Olympics, we’re using a modern spirit to celebrate ancient culture in the same way.”
The album also uses a range of languages, including Tibetan and Sanskrit. “Language is a carrier of culture. I wanted to use modern means to review ancient cultures in China and give them new life. But by using different languages I realised that music is beyond the limits of language in the way it carries emotions.” For a couple of songs, Lagu Lagu and Oldster by Xilin River, she created her own language. “I’ll continue to use it: it’s my own art form.”
She backs away from the religious symbolism of the mantras. “The album isn’t Buddhist, it’s full of different ancient cultures. What I want to express is Chinese culture and Buddhism is an important part of Chinese culture, so maybe that’s why it has that kind of feeling.”
“To every musician who is doing their own music, the biggest hope is to have more people listening. I hope my music can enlighten people about what’s happening now in China.”
The version of Chinese culture that Dingding presents on Alive is, in the end, idiosyncratic. The title track contains everything but the kitchen sink: jaunty chanting male choirs, shivering zheng glissandi, menacing trip-hop beats, Dingding singing in angular Chinese scales. Qin Shang, by contrast, sets her singing against minimalistic jazz piano of crystalline simplicity.
“My whole album is full of my own imagination. Other people’s music has more and more detail. I’m trying to describe a more abstract, more spiritual world.
I hope people in a hurry will have a chance to enlighten their imaginations and care more about themselves. I want to remind people to keep calm inside. Leave yourself some space. Look into yourself more rather than paying too much attention to this world.”
And just for a moment, solemn and insistent, in earrings made up of long chains of beads ending in woollen pom-poms, she is once again that little girl in the Mongolian grasslands.
