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China is a formidable presence in the contemporary world, and if one considers where the Chinese live—in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and in the Americas, then China and the Chinese appears multiple in nature and even more expansive in their influence. The embrace of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao under the umbrella term, “Greater China”, is recognized for its cultural ties across the geographic region. Moreover, the connections among the four nations by way of commercial and economic enterprise are its own phenomenon, and while political unification is not evident, the increasing financial integration in the Greater China region is undeniable. Economic power not withstanding, the nature of the creative arts, education, and culture in Greater China is worthy of study for what it reveals of the Sinophone world as well as what it offers by way of a more global understanding of the critical importance of artistic expression in society and in the schooling of our children and youth. I will give explicit attention to music as a prime artistic-expression form, its role and function in Chinese life, the transmission system critical to its sustainability within society, and its real and imagined “good fit” within the content and curricular streams of public school education; the other arts are consequential but outlying to my intent here and will be paralleled by those readers with particular experience. This contemplation of principles of Chinese musical culture is directed towards a probing of the universal principles that are apparent and worthy of consideration in defining and designing education in and through music. While the weight of Greater China on the world is widely acknowledged in political and economic arenas, Chinese musical practices are worthy of study for what offer to a global understanding of the human means and modes of artistic and cultural expression. For those committed to the creative arts in education in various locations worldwide—as teaching musicians and artists, policy-makers, and curriculum designers, an embrace of the Chinese perspective of music, its elemental features and functions, and its process and product, may serve to illuminate pathways of relevance and meaning to professional activity now and in the future.

1 Positioning “Greater China”

To some, Greater China seemed to rise up overnight to become common parlance in the news media and as topic of meetings of social scientists and humanists. It joined with other phrases of our era, including “the new world order”, the “clash of civilizations”, and “the Pacific century”. Beyond the connotations to those in politics and commerce, dazhonghua (Chinese for “Greater China”) seems to summarize the linkages among the far-flung international Chinese community—especially within the geographic realm of eastern Asia. While the phrase is fairly recent, it is related historically to similar phrases of earlier times used by geographers, such as the associated phrases “China Proper” denoting mainland China and “Outer China”, the latter of which included dependent nations and territories such as Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet (Cressey 1940). Reference to “China within the Great Wall” (China Proper) and its “frontier zones” was prominent in the mid-twentieth century, and together, the mainland and surrounding areas were also referred to as the “Chinese Empire”.

Plans for economic cooperation arose in the 1970s, and while reunification of the mainland with its neighbors into a greater China confederation was in the air and under consideration, the reality of cross-national ties was associated to a far greater degree with an integrated Chinese marketplace (Brick 1992). Cross-national investment was emerging, and not only was the Taiwanese investing in mainland China, as was mainland China investing in Hong Kong and Macao, but overseas Chinese entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia and North America were identifying prospects for their investments in what they viewed as a promising and soon-to-be burgeoning market. The economic complementarities of the four nations of Greater China were present, and cross-national (and international) ties have continued to grow to the present-day.

Yet even as manufacturers moved to re-make a transnational Chinese economy, a recognition of the cultural ties among Chinese societies were growing, too, with an assertion that the nations shared a common language (Mandarin) and a fundamental philosophy and framework for living. Family ties across the nations, as well as ancestral roots, were very real, given the rich history of travel and trade in the region (Ho 2010; Rees 2009). Recent cultural flows are considerable, including the increased volume of visits by people across the four nations, the flow of mail, telephone traffic, and electronic communications. Appadurai (2005) articulates cultural activity within the realm of imagined communities, and emphasizes the role of “-scapes” (such as mediascapes and technoscapes) in cultural flow that is based less upon geographic location and more on the new global order. There is recognition by all parties of a shared history and heritage (even as there are also distinctive features to each region), and cultural exchanges of literary and artistic figures has rapidly increased since the turn into the twenty-first century (Colson 2012). The implications of these exchanges are considerable for preserving culture while also seeding new ideas for expression by professionals and amateurs alike in music and the arts.

2 Positionality of an American Music Teacher

My personal position is one of an outsider to Greater China, an avid follower of “things Chinese” (from arts to politics), and an enthusiastic fan of musical expressions emanating from the region and from Chinese communities in North America. In study of music of the world’s cultures as a university student in 1980, I was introduced to Chinese music alongside the study of other East and Southeast Asian cultures. I recall just two lectures of 45 on music in China, with emphasis on Peking (Beijing) Opera and jiangnan sizhu “silk and bamboo” music of Central China, and they were wedged between five lectures on music in Japan and another seven lectures on Javanese gamelan music, dance, and puppetry. In fact, there were at the time few print resources or easily accessible recordings on Chinese music in English language, even while scholars and educators were writing reams and releasing numerous recordings and video-recordings on Japanese theatre music forms and the Javanese gamelan. Music in China remained a mystery to many of us who yearned to know more, and so we sought and found the sounds of zheng, erhu, and pipa on a few 33” LP recordings on the Nonesuch and Lyrichord labels.

It is relevant to note that although I had owned a set of silk Chinese pajamas as a young girl, I knew nothing of China or the Chinese in my youth. I grew up in the mid-twentieth century in a mid-sized city in the American Midwest where our Asian district consisted of two Chinese restaurants, a laundry, and a tiny all-Asian grocery jammed to the ceiling with a mix of rice crackers, chow mein and fried noodles, moshi cakes, cans of water-chesnuts, packages of dried seaweed, and the popular pan-Asian styrofoam ramen cups. We covered China in a geography class through map-work, photos of workers in the rice paddies and blue-suited bicyclists on the streets of Peking, and a Chinese folktale (Qi Xi) of a cowherd and a weaving maid. Before school, we playfully improvised our “Chinese music” on the black keys of the classroom piano, amusing ourselves. In my girlhood, there were no other references to China, its culture, or creative arts in our education.

Some of us had to go “there” to hear the music and to see the dance and theatre productions unfolding before us, in order that we could gain a toehold of understanding of the music in China. We heeded the wisdom that the Greek playwright, Euripides, offered in the fifth century BC: “Experience, travel—these are as education in themselves”, and considered the advisory of the American author Mark Twain who observed that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”. So, since 1990, I have visited mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, playing out various roles as cultural tourist (seeing sites, visiting museums, attending concerts, sampling cuisine), clinical teacher (giving workshops to practicing teachers), and scholar (with an earnest interest in knowing the nature and status of music as defined by the government and the media, and a curiosity of the curricular offerings in music and the related arts in primary and secondary schools). My numerous visits to Singapore reinforce Chinese sensibilities beyond the boundaries of the four proximal nations of Greater China, too, and while Chinese artistic expression is somewhat spiced with the regional flavor of its Southeast Asian location, it is undeniably Chinese. More locally (and more regularly), I continue to be drawn to Chinese-American communities on the American west coast, particularly in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where there are considerable opportunities to enjoy music and dance performances at festivals and as programmed alongside museum exhibits of centuries-old Chinese paintings and ceramics.

Through many years of a professional relationship with a Taiwanese musician and scholar Han Kuo-Huang, I became drawn to ways in which Chinese music could come alive in American classrooms. Han had been directing the Chinese Music Ensemble at Northern Illinois University (as well as the Balinese gamelan angklung), and we workshopped together at meetings of The College Music Society and the Music Educators National Conference. His electric delivery of a Chinese percussion workshop, and the enthusiastic participation of the teachers present at that session, prompted us to write together The Lion’s Roar: Chinese Luogu Percussion Ensembles (1992). We took the show on the road, separately and together, enticing students and teachers alike to perform gongs, drums, and cymbals for music of the lion dance, dragon dance, and festival parades. Even today, North American teachers who include Chinese music in their music classrooms—typically at the time of the Chinese New Year—often feature music from this project, including “Huagu Ge” and “Liuyue Moli” for singing voices and percussion instruments. It was through this project that I learned this immediately accessible genre of Chinese participatory music, the luogu, as one that is very much present in Chinese communities worldwide and which is invariably appealing and even contagious to all who enter its sonic boundary.

This backdrop is intended to clarify my positionality on the subject of the creative arts in Greater China. Clearly, mine is a limited experience, such that my “map of consciousness” is framed by a family history, race, nationality, and situated location that have allowed me only sporadic experience and knowledge of China and Chinese culture (Robertson 2002). I articulate these limitations in order to acknowledge that the dynamics of the writing is always affected by the perspective of the writer. Positionality is not entirely fixed, of course, and is relational, a constantly moving context that constitutes our reality and the place from which values are interpreted and constructed. Still, it is noteworthy that I write from the position of an American educator whose specialization in music is long and varied but with rare windows of opportunity to know the music of Greater China (let alone the broader spectrum of creative arts practices). I write with from the perspective of one whose interest and experience falls within the scope of the musical and cultural identities of children and youth, of issues of cultural diversity as they shape the design and delivery of music in schools, and of pedagogical processes in the facilitation of a multicultural and global understanding of the expressive practices of cultures.

3 On the Music of the Chinese

An encyclopedic description of the music of Greater China, and of its role and function in Chinese life, can be found in a wide array of English-language monographs, textbooks, and online sites. One standard source of elemental sonic structures and cultural features that characterize Chinese music is Frederick Lau’s Music in China (2008), a short introduction to the subject with attention to issues of identity, modernization, and ideology. Lau traces his own early experience to his childhood on Cheung Chau, a small island off the coast of Hong Kong, when he would attend performances of Cantonese opera with his grandmother. His later studies of Chinese Music, as scholar and performer of dizi and xiao, afforded him a framework for articulating the landscape of China’s national music, or guoyue, and to construct a narrative of solo and ensemble music within and beyond institutions, across regions on the mainland, and as it has interfaced with Western influences from the sixteenth century onward. Attention to the diaspora of Chinese music is centered further afield from developments in the region, highlighting instead Cantonese opera in Honolulu, amateur Chinese music clubs in Thailand, Singaporean-style Chinese orchestras, and Chinese choirs and karaoke singing in American cities. For many non-Chinese seeking an orientation to the rich traditional heritage of music in China and Chinese communities, and for whom the variety of long-standing traditions can appear daunting, a guide to general topics of instruments and genres, philosophical foundations of music’s role and function, and of traditional and changing practices, an opening of the sort offered by an introductory text (with selected recordings) is necessary.

In American music education practices, a quick factual “tour” of Chinese music offers students in schools, and in a surprising number of tertiary-level courses, the standard list of elements to listen for: five- and seven-tone scales, duple meter, straight and surprisingly syncopated rhythms, and a contrast of “northern-style” angular melodies that sound more loudly and more energetic than the “southern-style” lyrical melodies that flow gently and gracefully (Anderson and Campbell 2010). Because schoolchildren are intrigued with instruments, the focus of a class session on Chinese music is often the identification of standard instruments such as guqin, erhu, pipa, dizi, sheng, and various percussion instruments. Little attention has been paid to Chinese regional opera of any type by American educators, largely due to a lack of knowledge of the featured languages, although several Chinese folk songs are standard fare in American schools: the Chinese New Year’s song, “Gong Xi Fa Cai”, and songs known by their English translations (“The Eldest Daughter of the Jiang Family”, “Jasmine Flowers of the Sixth Moon”, and “Flower Drum Song”). Over implications of the music of the mainland and of the neighboring nations abound, and stereotyping is a natural result of limited exposure offered by a teacher who does not speak the language nor play the music. While well-intended, American students frequently emerge from minimal- exposure lessons with impressions of all Chinese music as consisting of “black-keyed” melodies that are decidedly march-like, and which feature instruments that they only know as appearing and sounding like (or unlike) those with which they are familiar.

An understanding of Chinese traditional music is incomplete without attention to music and ideology. Knowledge of the functions of music in Greater China offers a meaningful understanding of its place in cultural life, whether as self-expression, as entertainment, as integrated within ritual and ceremony, and as accompaniment to festivities. The linkage of music to specific philosophical perspectives is of import, including the Confucian ideal of “proper music” that promotes social harmony and proper personal behavior as opposed to “vernacular music” with its sentimental sonorities that might promote immoral behavior (Thrasher 2000). In particular, music of the seven-stringed zither, the guqin, was long revered for its association with royalty and scholars who recorded in treatises and persona (Yung 1985). Beginning in 1949 with the onset of the Chinese Communist Revolution (CCP) on the mainland, a socialist framework prompted the establishment of the arts in service of national unity and a collective identity. New compositions arose in China and were supported by the government if they were aimed at the glorification and support of the CCP, and revolutionary opera as well as the mass singing of revolutionary songs like Dongfang Hong (“East is Red”) were celebrated. Traditional Chinese music was sustained in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao even as the dominant communist position held sway on the mainland, thus ensuring a type of marginal survival (Myers 1993; Rees 2009) of musical heritage even as it was challenged by efforts on the mainland to “disappear” significant instrumental and vocal genres during the period of dramatic political upheaval. Exchanges across Greater China have been fruitful in determining the survival of traditions and in fact have inspired restoration and rebirth of these traditions on the mainland. Whether philosophical or political, and wherever it is performed, the Chinese association of music with ideology has remained strongly intertwined.

Alongside the wide variety of expressly musical practices today in Greater China lie also important Chinese cultural expressions in literature, the visual arts, drama, dance, martial arts, and folklore—much of which is musically entwined. The Han Chinese have maintained (or, as in China, have recently resurrected) their regional cultural traditions, even European (and American) cultures from the mid-nineteenth century onward have forged further expressions that feature western instruments, popular music and dance forms, and a burgeoning film industry. Minority expressions are intriguing to musicians and artists, and government funding is ear-marked to celebrate and create an awareness of these artistic identities, too. Across Greater China, music of the Confucian-period guqin runs parallel to the continuing interest in classic works such as the Four Great Books of Song, a massive collection of poems offered during the historic Song Dynasty during the tenth through thirteenth centuries (Colson 2012). Museums throughout the region preserve and display the traditional visual arts of porcelain pottery, paintings, murals on parchment, and paper-cuttings, as are musical instruments of which many are exemplar works of masterful craftsmanship. Music—both traditional and contemporary—is integral to the performance arts of dance, drama, and the martial arts (such as Kung Fu), the latter of which, while rooted in warfare, has evolved into a sophisticated artistic practice in its renderings on stage, at monasteries and temple yards, in various public arenas. Films and the internet have effectively communicated to the world the cultural practices of Greater China in music and across the arts, from the ancient to modern, and with Chinese, Western, and carefully hewn features that fuse the best of all worlds.

4 Chinese Music in Transmission

Critical to the sustainability of music within society is the extent and nature of its transmission process. In my first visit to mainland China, I was intent on discovering the processes and practices of music and the creative arts. In subsequent visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese communities, the manner and mode of teachers and students has continued to intrigue me as much for its quite particular techniques as well as for the facets that overlap processes in Western settings—from studios, to classrooms and rehearsals, to the rich community traditions beyond formal settings of learning. The philosophical and cosmological arguments in Greater China for the vital presence of music in human life are strong, and the usefulness of music education to the individual dates back to the belief by Confucius that music is an essential element of human nature in which all should partake (Lau 2008). Rising above and before the pedagogical pathways meant to develop musicians to their ultimate and artful selves, then, is the inherent belief in Greater China in the sociological usefulness of music for balance and well-being.

The great art music of the Chinese, preserved in pockets throughout Greater China, adheres to a complex system of notation that began to develop over two millennia ago. “Tone movements” of sung poems dating from 92 A.D. are extant evidence of early notation, as are music scrolls from the Tang Dynasty with indications for pitch but not rhythms (Kaufmann 1967; Jones 1989). The notation for guqin players offer melodies in a tablature notation called jianjipu, with vertical columns to be read from right to left, with commentary between the columns in smaller characters. Note symbols direct players to the string number to be plucked by the right hand, the position along the string to be stopped by the left hand, and the particular manner of execution relative to tempo and articulation (Kaufmann 1967; Zhang and Meng 2002). Notation communicates only partial information, however, and master musicians teach the meaning and appropriate mood of a tune, along with particular finger and finger techniques, so that the true musical qualities can emerge in communicating the ideology of the music and its tradition (Campbell 1991a, b). The transmission of traditional music—whether on guzheng (zither), pipa (plucked lute), er-hu (fiddle), or dizi (flute)—continues today in a manner which combines oral transmission and written notation. The music lesson provides answers to matters of rhythm and interpretation, however, so that a composition is learned phrase by phrase in imitation of the teacher’s performance.

While direct imitation of the teacher is standard practice in learning Chinese traditional music and musical instruments, there comes a point wherein creative-expressive possibilities emerge for the soloist musician. Particularly in the case of the guqin, a process known as da pu is practiced to reconstruct guqin works preserved only in writing (Yung 1985). The student who has been thoroughly trained in the performance of the guqin reads the tablature, researches the literary content of the composition, and makes personal decisions regarding the expression of the mood and spirit of the composition. Da pu is the privilege of the highly studied musician who, following years of training with a teacher, has reached the stage of independent musicianship. That achievement allows the musician the ultimate creative process of interpreting the score.

Individual tuition in music is a privilege—whether the circumstances are private lessons on piano or guqin, violin or er-hu, and relatively few in the population are afforded such opportunity. On the other hand, formal music instruction is widely available in Greater China to masses of children and youth in school. It appears that children take well to music instruction of a vocal–choral nature, on instruments, and in “general music” settings that offer listening, composition-improvisation, eurhythmics and dance experiences. School and after-school music programs are available to students, the latter of which include auditioned and non-auditioned wind bands, Chinese traditional and Western orchestras, and choral groups that perform a wide variety of styles. While there is no genetic strand indicative of a musical trait among the Chinese that is somehow missing in other populations, there is nonetheless a high level of musical achievement among children in these classes. There is, however, a cultural valuing of music and the creative arts that emerges in some Chinese communities, and in families who raise their children to apply themselves to the fullest extent possible to the work of their schooling experience, including the music they can learn (Campbell 1991a, b). While most will not become professional musicians, their families view musical experiences as raising the quality of their lives. Respect for learning, adherence to parental wishes, and adaptation to the group (as in classrooms where teacher-led activities are provided for group involvement) are notable cultural characteristics of the Chinese, and while generalizations are always risky business, the evidence is strong that children in Greater China fare well in their development of musical skills as performers and intelligent listeners.

Beyond school-age, advanced musical education and training is available to those with interest and a growing musical expertise. Tertiary institutions in Greater China, from conservatories to colleges akin to normal schools where music specialist teachers are trained, hold high expectations for the musicianship of their students. Almost invariably, these standards are met, as the rigour of years of disciplined practice results in an enhanced musicianship on which students can then build further understandings. Not only is there notable performance technique among advanced students, but also a high level of aural skills and solfege technique. My observations indicate that the intense desire that parents have to enhance the education of their children from an early age is internalized and acted upon the children themselves as they mature, and there is thus the motivation and earnest effort by them to meet and even exceed expectations of the institutions in which they are studying. Thus is music preserved and continued in Greater China by those who will perform and teach, and who will know music well, whether of Chinese or Western forms, repertoire, and technique, and who will understand through experience the means for “passing it on”.

5 Universal Principles of Chinese Music Culture

The common creative spirit knows no cultural boundaries. Across Greater China, and in Chinese communities worldwide, there are shared artistic-expressive practices, even as there are also common ideological principles and transmissional practices. This can be explained through study of the grand history of a people, and of the historic and more recent migrations of the Chinese to various places in the world beyond their geographic origin. The human penchant to preserve identities and heritage includes also the intentional continuation of aesthetic sensibilities, such that no matter where in the world the Chinese have established themselves, music plays a role now as it did in the past in affirming social ethos and achieving a Confucian ideal of enlightenment and harmonious relationships. While the pipa has given way to the guitar, and pianos have been emblematic of a century-long radical transformation of Chinese society (Kraus 1989), there is nonetheless a deep commitment by the Chinese to Chinese sensibilities in music.

Much of what happens in Greater China is internationally relevant, from the creative arts, to social and political liaisons, trade agreements, and the health, education, and welfare of citizens of every nation. The world of many cultures in increasingly interdependent, and thus the geographic borders that once bounded us are disappearing. Despite the dreary doomsayers who decry the clash of civilizations, the evidence is strong that the walls of separate and isolated cultures are coming down. Opportunities to understand one another are enhanced by images, sound-bytes, and accessible channels for immediate exchange. Relative to the creative arts, there is a sense that the more that can be known of the cultural expressions of people in music, dance, drama, and the visual arts, the more likely it is to develop an understanding of our humanity—our cross-cultural similarities as well as the distinguishing features that define us. The digital technology of today both fires up and satisfies the curiosity for far-flung cultures, and offers responses to questions of the interests, expressions and needs of people across the planet.

In a consideration of the broader view of music and the arts in education, there are lessons to be learned from the Chinese with regard to components that are either already shared in a transcultural (even pan-human) sense, or are awaiting application. Indeed, as Turino (2008) has posited, the study of expressive cultural practices can help in the achievement of “a balanced between cultural difference and recognizing our common humanity” (p. 3). Thus, the following four facets are particularly notable relative to music’s sonic properties, function, transmission practices, and the creative process:

  • Even in an initial earful of Chinese musical expressions, the universal elements of pitch, duration, and forms emerge (as they do in genres and forms worldwide). Likewise, traditional Chinese string, wind, and percussion instruments have their corollaries elsewhere in the world. Quite naturally, there are culture-specific distinctions to these elements and instruments, but the bottom-line commonalities are undeniable.

  • Beyond the very presence of music as a necessary human need, the functions of Chinese music in refined (yayue) or vernacular (suyue) forms, for ritual and religious purposes, for elegant and stately events, for its weave into dance and theatre, for its social-bonding capacity, for its healing power, and for its mass-and-crowd popular appeal have their parallels in the music of cultures throughout the world. In ancient and modern times, these functions continue to find their ways through traditional and changing musical forms.

  • The transmission of music as oral, or at least partly oral, is a sustainable practice in Chinese art, traditional, and popular music. So, too, are the various forms of music across the world deeply embedded in oral transmission, or in the aurality that must be present to inform and interpret the deeper meaning of printed symbols that stand for but can never completely communicate the sound? Even as Chinese guqin players credit gongche notation as a useful technological device for the preservation of repertoire, master performers and teachers fill in the missing pieces so that aspirant performers can know all that is unwritten and which can only be attained through oral-aural transmission. Likewise, musical expressions from Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and in Europe are transmitted either in completely oral ways, or through notation that requires expert musicians to interpret and translate the symbols to sound.

  • The creative-expressive process is integral to Chinese music. Despite the standard and stereotypical image of Chinese musicians in “lockdown”, perpetuating precisely what they have been taught without variation, there is an expressive element that characterizes performances of the best players of piano and pipa, guitar and guzheng, cello and guqin. Relative to the last of these, the practice of da pu is the ultimate achievement of guqin players who know the music so deeply as to enable them to personally interpret the notation in uniquely creative ways. Experienced musicians of many of the world’s traditions arrive at a pivotal point in their development such that their accumulation of technique and repertoire brings them creative license to play with the possibilities of dynamics, phrasing, and tempo (and sometimes pitch and rhythm, too). To be sure, there is a creative-expressive spectrum on which are found various styles, from Bach chorales to Beethoven cadenzas, Beijing opera to improvisational theatre, and Brazilian choro to the blues of B.B. King. Still, all music “worth its weight” will have a measure of creative-expressive potential that can be realized only by those musicians who have attained a mature state of musical development.

Expansive cross-cultural examinations of music were an important activity of comparative musicologists a century ago (Nettl 2002), before ethnomusicologists shifted their attention to the specificity of music in a vast array of cultures defined geographically as well as by race and ethnicity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, religion, and lifestyle. Since the founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology in the mid-1950s, however, attention has been directed to the distinctions between these social units rather that to the commonalities. Yet it stands to reason that music is a phenomenon that is at once both culture-specific and cross-cultural. We have established that musical and artistic communities in Greater China share a measure of history, heritage, language, and cultural values, and that there are thus similar soundscapes on the mainland, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. Noteworthy, however, is the transferability of music from place to place on the planet, such that amid the seeming diversity in an age of global awareness there is still a shared sense of music as cultural practice, as artistic expression, and as socially meaningful behavior. The transnational flows of culture in the time of our globalizing world have blurred the geographic boundaries of nations, and this is surely the case of those identified as members of a Greater China coalition. Knowing Chinese music is a way of knowing the Chinese, and an understanding of Chinese musical practices contributes to a growth in a global understanding of the human means and modes of artistic and cultural expression.