Chen Liang-Sheng

They look like a football team doing their warm-up calisthenics. One--the hands go down, two--they move together, three--out to the sides, and four--back up to the top, over and over again. Fifteen people in a classroom imitating the motions of conductor Chen Liang-Sheng.

And the imitation is not even close to perfect. Even in this simple beat pattern, the most basic part of a conductor's technique, Chen's movements reveal a grace and depth of concentration that make his students' hands appear tense and stubby by comparison.

Repeatedly he tells them, "You must understand the weight of your arm" but they are still struggling with recalcitrant limbs, faces tense with enigmatic phrases delivered in broken but richly allusive English. To help their hands go down slowly and evenly, he wants them to "Think of vertebrae going up," and to bring a sense of calm to their motions he suggests that at the end of each four beats "the will must be completely out." Intrigued by his half-sentences and mesmerized by his sinewy movements, the class seems to take on some of Chen's relaxation and command.

Chen is a small man, with the slight wiry build of a teen-aged boy. His face is animated and supple, often scrunching into a hundred creases to accommodate a large smile. He dresses simply, favoring the kind of baggy shirts that permit his arms to move freely.

He didn't become a conductor in the usual way, with school orchestras and competitions. In fact he didn't begin to study music until he was 19, an age when most musicians are ready to launch their careers.

Born in 1933 in Shanghai, Chen grew up under the Japanese occupation of China, a frantic time unconducive to musical studies. After his family emigrated to the U.S. to flee the Chinese revolution, he began to study music at Berkeley. He got a masters in composition at Princeton, then waited on table in New York for three years. So it wasn't until ten years ago, at the age of thirty-two that Chen began to study conducting at the Geneva Conservatory. "I stayed two years in the class and when I finished I still didn't know how to conduct. I was still beating time."

It wasn't until three years later that Chen really learned how to conduct, and then the knowledge came almost by accident. "I always felt wrong even though they might be singing right, and then one day, by mistake, I did something that was right."

Since that time, Chen has developed into a conductor of remarkable technical control. His cues are precise and his musical directions clear and comprehensible. But Chen doesn't concern himself with technique because it is now so deeply a part of him as to be forgotten. "I don't think of gestures anymore. I look at a phrase. I immediately hear what it should be and the hand is that way."

The disdain for mere mechanics carries over into his expectations for groups that work under him, including amateur groups like the Summer School Chorus, which he is conducting this year. Most choral conductors spend a lot of time going over the music slowly until each section has learned its notes. Only then do they begin to work on musical values. But Chen takes the music up to tempo from the very first. "If I let everyone carefully study their notes, when I want to go fast, they won't be able to go fast any more." He fears that his singers will get lost in minutae and obscure the larger shapes that he is trying to create. So he goes for the large gestures and expects his singers to pick up the notes somewhere along the way. "It's like a pickpocket school. They have these models running around at their normal speed and you have to pick things up. More and more by doing it you get the speed, so the speed ceases to be a thing that bothers you."

Part of Chen's lack of concern with technique stems from his never having studied an instrument. He has picked up enough piano to get around the keys, but he has never confronted problems of producing sounds on particular instruments. So when he wants a certain musical effect, he he won't take technical limitations as an excuse. "If you have a battle to fight and you need your reinforcements at such and such a date and such place, you can't say 'Well, because we don't have the trucks necessary we can't be there.' You plan it so that even if you have to walk you get there."

A professional conductor for only ten years. Chen has risen very fast in stature. He is an charge of musical activities at the University of Geneva and, in recent years, has performed and recorded with the Suisse-Romande Orchestra, one of the better symphonies in the world. Yet he has remarkable little ambition. A contented fatalism informs his attitude toward his own career. He seems sincerely unconcerned with struggling upward in the profession or competing for the prestigious jobs. "I have never worried how I look. When I make a record, the first condition is you don't put my picture on the cover. I think it's bad taste. Either you put the music on or the composer's picture. You have those dreamy looking performers--who are they kidding?"

Yet Chen has a strong belief in the vastness of his own powers. Underlying many of his remarks is a sense that he has not gotten all the recognition that is his due. He deeply resents Leon Kirchner, Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music, whose Summer School Chamber Players have received substantial support and fanfare from the University. He maintains, "You give me not the same players, but one class lower [than the Chamber Players] and I'll make concerts musically better than that, I assure you." And while he expresses no desire to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic or an orchestra like it, he also seems confident that he could handle it if he wanted to.

His self-confidence never becomes pompous or overbearing, but it is always present. Perhaps it is an essential attribute for a successful conductor. Chen says, "I knew Ozawa when he was walking around like a bum in the New York streets. Now you look at him with all the shining things all around him. It is illusory, but it is so."

Like a political leader, a conductor must have enough confidence to sell himself--to convince other musicians of the superiority of his ideas. And while Chen is no slick political type, he has an almost evangelical belief in the aptness of his insights.

An Intriguing sense of revealed wisdom pervades Chen's conversation, partly a result of the peculiar use of language- Spoken with a heavy Chinese accent, his words usually hover on the border between the incomprehensible and the profoundly suggestive. But as with the sage-like Stein in Conrad's Lord Jim, the half finished phrases, the almost aphoristic quality of his sentences, lend a mysterious weight to all he says.

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Never in Western music has there been so much concern with faithfulness to the written score as in the last twenty years. There is a feeling current in many conductors that dynamic markings and tempo indications must be as carefully observed as the notes themselves. Chen considers this kind of "honesty" the most basic part of a conductor's obligation. "You can build the most fancy skyscrapers, modern, artistic looking buildings, but you can't forget to put in the toilet. There is no illusion about all these dreamy, misty-eyed things. You put that crap-house in."

For all his reliance on analogies and poetic images to express his meaning. Chen is surprisingly tough-minded about musical interpretation. He is unmoved by "19th century poetic crap" and condemns those romantics who "use all that perfume and stuff just to cover them up because they don't bathe."

Chen knows that it becomes boring to swoon over each phrase of a piece without giving a strong sense of direction to the whole. So in his conducting, he takes extreme care to shape and mold the large sections. Last summer he did some work on Beethoven's Eighth Syphony with the Summer School Orchestra. The first movement of this piece is a big shout of excitement, energetic and very loud for the most part, with many fortissimo markings. However, at the beginning of the recapitulation, there is the only fortississimo marked, a distinction that is not easy to make and is usually left unobserved. But Chen made sure to gradate the whole movement so that that triple forte would be the supreme climactic moment. The result was a performance that clarified the structure of the movement while giving it a sense of slow and controlled growth that most performances lack.

"You construct the whole thing like planning a war. You can't win every battle. Even the best army has their weakness so make sure that weakness is used strategically so that the big battles you win."

Chen has a weakness for these military analogies. Perhaps the correspondence between war, with its manipulation of armies, and music, with its manipulation of tones, suggests itself to him through his study of Tai Chi, one of the Chinese martial arts. Through these exercises, which teach a stylized and highly disciplined form of self-defense. Chen claims to have acquired the self-control and profound concentration that he brings to his conducting. The bare hands are the weapons both for self-defense and for conducting, and Chen has trained his to function "with their own mind, and yet without mind."

The Tai Chi is one of the few conscious ties that Chen maintains with China. Although he still has relatives there, he has little desire to return to a country fundamentally different from he one he left. His musical training is thoroughly Western and he has very little knowledge of or curiosity about Chinese music.

Still, he does bear the mark of his 19 years there. While in Boston, he eats many of his meals in Chinatown, an opportunity for home-style cooking he doesn't often get in Geneva. And, on a somewhat more profound level, his thought pattern and artistic aims are clearly Eastern in origin.

He claims to have derived his acute sense of rhythm from Chinese literature, its uniform stresses making him sensitive to slight variations in meter. And his desire to immerse himself in the moment without guilt about the past or ambition for the future, is no less Chinese. "The most beautiful thing is the concentration. When children see an object like an insect, a butterfly or a fruit, they have complete absorption in that object. And if you can capture that, that is beautiful."

In Chen's description of his creativity, there is a sense of man as a vessel, a medium for a higher creative energy. "A person is expressive regardless of whether it's music or not music. I don't speak good English, but I know I am expressive. That's all, I get the idea across, because the idea is there. It's very much there and it gets across in spite of all the grammar you can talk."

And finally, there is an almost mystical quality that suffuses his relationship to music. Through it, Chen has found moments of seemingly transcendent illumination. "It's like when you are trying to focus a camera. So you strive to have that moment again, but you can't make it every time."

Chen is not shy in his bearing or self-conscious in his responses to questions. Nor is he at all condescending, yet he leaves the impression of a man aloof from others, immersed in his art, pursuing a solitary vision.

Amid the profusion of images and graceful movements, one still feels removed from the deepest concerns of this man. Perhaps this is because the thing he strives for cannot really be talked about at all. "It is spontaneous and inevitable, this feeling. It's a feeling: It is so. It is so."