A bamboo flute master, Xiao-Nan Wang was born in Beijing in 1949. His career as a musician began out of a basic human need — he was hungry. At age eleven, during the worst privations of the Great Leap Forward, he noticed that funeral bands were fed after they played. He learned to pipe and joined one.
Soon, the music was exerting a pull of its own. The musicians of Beijing’s leading traditional orchestra began to notice that a certain boy was attending most of their rehearsals. Eventually, the master flutist Hu Hai-Quan took the boy under his wing. Hu would remain Wang’s teacher for forty years, writing him letters every week while Wang was in exile, and phoning from China when his student emigrated to Canada. The apprenticeship endured until Hu’s death in 2007.
At fifteen, Wang was accepted into the recently opened Chinese Conservatory of Music. The following year saw the onslaught of the Cultural Revolution; Wang resisted, and was labelled a ‘counter-revolutionary.’ Throughout his remaining time at school he was subjected to constant humiliation, and in 1969 he was sent into forced labour, in the mines.
In 1973, he was released from this service, only to be banished to Inner Mongolia. On his arrival, he petitioned the regional authority for work as a musician. An officer who knew his history arranged for Wang to become a teacher at the Inner Mongolia Normal College, a job he held until 1979. He taught flute, music theory and Chinese folk music history during the tenure. However, his status as a counter-revolutionary still dogged him, and after only one year he was sent into the desert for further labour.
These were black days for him. The constant toil, the brutal conditions and the isolation cast a cloud over his mind, blotting out his art, his aspirations and his future. Then one day as he sat in his room, a song of deep feeling drifted to him from outside. He followed it and found an old woman singing to a camel.
Bewildered, he asked the people around him why she was doing such a thing. Although he did not know their language, the people were able to convey the situation to him. It was a mother refusing to nurse her calf; the song was to remind the animal of its duty. The singing went on for over an hour before, bit by bit, the camel relented and approached her child. Overcome, Wang returned to his room and began composing what eventually became the work -
Camel Train.
In the 1980s, Wang was once again allowed to join an orchestra (there had been none at the Normal College), playing in both the traditional and Western-style ensembles of the Chinese military. During this time, his teacher Hu began a long series of petitions to secure the performance of a concerto, with Wang as soloist. The work had a dissident subtext, however, and while the two of them managed to evade the censors long enough for the work to be performed (in 1987), afterwards Wang was commanded to recant.
He refused. By this time, he was prominent enough that he could make an issue of it. He contacted the press to announce his retirement from music, and went off and got a job as the manager of a fertiliser plant. Freed at last from the watchful eyes of China’s cultural guardians, Wang thrived in his work; after a mere four years he was promoted to a leadership position in Chinese agriculture. Unfortunately, his success brought more trials, and after one last conflict with the authorities, he left for Canada.
Since his arrival in Winnipeg in 1995, Xiao Nan has been able to re-establish himself as a professional musician, In 2003, he was invited to appear in the movie The Saddest Music in the World, produced by Guy Maddin, in which he played a talented musician. In March 2004, he performed in a concert sponsored by CBC Radio and the Folk Art Council of Canada entitled "The Saddest Music in the World". In 2005, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra commissioned local composer Jim Hiscott to write a concerto for Xiao-Nan. This piece entitled “North Wind” was premiered by Xiao Nan in the 2006 Winnipeg New Music Festival. Gwenda Nemerofsky, the music critic for Winnipeg Free Press, commended that “Xiao Nan’s performance was the highlight of the evening”.
These successes have been made possible in great measure due to the advocacy of the composer Jim Hiscott, who in addition to arranging Camel Train for string orchestra, also composed the concerto which Wang performed at the 2006 WSO New Music Festival, and produced a short subject documentary on Wang for CBC Radio.
In 2007, he received a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council to build a set of chromatic bamboo flutes (thus wedding the melodic language of Western music to the timbre and technique of the traditional Chinese instrument). He has also received funding from the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Canada Council.
In spring of 2007, Xiao-Nan returned to China to complete the modification of the Chinese Bamboo Flute. He called this new instrument the “Chromatic Flute”. Xiao-Nan's artistic vision is to explore new musical ideas and create new music for his instrument.
He wishes to combine the old and the new, fuse the East and the West, and raise bamboo flute playing technique to new heights.
His first album "Chromatic Flute Selections Vol.1" debuted December 2008.
