The novel was well received by both readers and critics, and its popularity led to numerous adaptations, including the 1960 film and a 1959 opera. It is an episodic adventure novel in the style of The Water Margin or Journey to the West, in which a group of heroic soldiers roams the Northeast rooting out nests of bandits loosely tied to the Kuomintang (KMT) during China’s civil war. These novels included Railroad Guerrillas, Martial Artists Behind Enemy Lines, and Wild Fires and Spring Winds Struggling in the Ancient Capital.1 The most successful of these was a 1957 novel by Qu Bo recounting the exploits of a small detachment of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers named Tracks in the Snowy Forest (林海雨原 Linhai xueyuan2). In the mid-1950s, mystical old men, demonically evil villains, and valiant martial artists traveling through legendary landscapes populated a group of works known as revolutionary popular novels (革命通俗小说 geming tongsu xiaoshuo). It examines the use of traditional Chinese as well as European musico-dramatic elements in this piece in order to illustrate that the particular forms musical modernization took during the Cultural Revolution were in no way the exception but more of the rule for compositional practice in modern China-except for the degree of semantic overdetermination to be found in the model works. The paper takes one of the earliest and most well-known model works, the revolutionary Beijing opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as an example. Instead, they are manifestations of a hybrid taste which calls for the transformation of Chinese tradition according to foreign standards, a taste which for more than a century has determined compositional practice in China. Contrary to the common assumption that the model works were characteristic products of Cultural Revolution ideology, this paper contends that they were anything but the product of an iconoclastic and xenophobic era, as the Cultural Revolution is so often described. Repercussions of the model works can be traced in China's recent rock music, in light popular music as well as in her serious music. No matter whether one follows the now orthodox political interpretation contending that they were products of the ultra-leftist mind of Mao's wife Jiang Qing or whether one considers them worthy pieces of art, they are an element in Chinese cultural history that cannot be-but (for ideological reasons) often is-overlooked. The so-called model works (yangbanxi), ten operas, four ballets, two symphonies and two piano pieces monopolized China's theatrical and musical stages for a decade.
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