Although based in Southern California, American composer and ethnomusicologist Jonny Pickett has an international focus. Pickett has lived in Ireland, Spain and China, and this diversity of culture and experience forms the bedrock for his work. Writing back in 2018, we described how his EP Time & Place drew upon this geographic heterogeneity and applied it to the music, resulting in a style “organic and flowing, yet ambitious enough to channel this course in various and surprising directions.”
His latest project, a song series titled Made in China, homes in on a more specific point in terms of geography, but is as ambitious and far-reaching as anything Jonny Pickett has done to date. Consisting of a series of compositions released over the past year, the project explores the last hundred years in Chinese history by focusing on figures who shaped it. Releases on the politician and revolutionary Chiang Kai-shek, his nationalist wife and First Lady Soong Mei-ling, and her communist sister Soong Ching-ling highlight Pickett’s ability to locate the personal within the historical, a drama both familial and national.
The latest single turns its attention to Wang Nan and his role in the Tiananmen Square protest. “I understand upon releasing this song, I will most likely not be able to return to China,” Pickett says. “When I was in Tiananmen Square last year I was crushed by a profound pain and cried for Wang Nan and the others whose names we’ll never know. There was no plaque, no remembrance for what happened in that space. This is my own way of remembering Wang Nan and the others who disappeared in this time.”
Further highlighting the international spirit of the music, the track sees contributions from around the world, with Irish composer Gareth Quinn Redmond lending violin, Salvadorian composer Daníel Domínguez the viola, and a Chinese musician listed here as Francis N (for the sake of anonymity) playing the erhu. These players come together to create something that sounds as grand as it does mysterious, the mournful quivering of the erhu evoking a uniquely Chinese grief.
Artwork by Oscar Pearson