What's On Your Bookshelf: Eli Marshall, Co-Founder, Beijing New Music Ensemble

The book on my shelf with the most sentimental value is Trees of Maine, by the Maine Department of Conservation. Reminds me of home.

The composer whose bookshelf I’d like a peek at is Zhou Long, who just won the Pulitzer for his opera. We recorded his piece “Wild Grass” in 2008, in which he narrates Lu Xun’s introduction to the book of the same name. Would be nice to know what musico-literary synthesis he comes up with next.

If you only ever read one book about music in China, make it Liu Sola’s You Have No Choice (你别无选择). An indispensible guide to understanding anyone who studied at the Central Conservatory between 1977 and 2000. And a great novel of that era, in its own right.

As a kid, a favorite bedtime story was Arthur Waley’s free translation of Journey to the West [retitled Monkey]. Only after coming to China did I realize how much I cherish its Englishisms.

Which composer might have written the soundtrack to that? To Monkey? Had Nie Er been saved from drowning, it would have been a midlife team project with Benjamin Britten after WWII. Actually, the cartoons from China – I think in the ’50s? – are excellent, both the animations and the music.

The book I’d like to see adapted as an opera is The Quiet American. A great blend of the personal and the political. I have a whole cycle of small operas in mind – the common thread uniting them is the collision of the English language (through England and America) with other cultures in various periods of history. Now I just need to find the backer for such a project.

The book I wish I hadn’t read is Ayn Rand, whichever novel it was.

The books I’ll bring on my next travels … After collaborating with outstanding Burmese musicians recently in Beijing, I want to learn more, so it will include Orwell’s Burmese Days, works by Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, and Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning.

The fictional “world” I’d most like to be part of is anything by Tolkien, of course. I refuse to see the films.

This month, my favorite line from a book is from the Wife’s Lament, in Old English: “Wa bith tham the scealof langothe leofes abidan.” Woe be he who out of longing must abide love.

For more about the BMNE, check out www.beijingnewmusic.org.

Photo: Sui