Not long ago, in the WeChat circle of friends, a music video attracted the attention of many Guangzhou people: in the video, more than a dozen elderly people with flowery hair were playing the violin intently under the guidance of young violinist Huang Jun, playing Shostakovich's "Second Round Dance" - and in the recent Fourth Guangdong Provincial Band Invitational Competition, this band with an average age of 70 years old won the gold medal historically.
Under the video, many netizens asked: Such a "professional" violin elderly orchestra, are uncles and aunts "trained"? As everyone knows, most of the old people in this band actually began to contact the violin at the Guangzhou University of Elderly Cadres after retirement: their average age is over 70 years old, including retired university professors aged 87, members of the preparatory team of the earliest batch of Yangchengtong, "senior" computer code farmers, and retired old cadres... They all shined in obscurity in their posts, and now after retirement, they have found a new stage of their own.
The interview was conducted in one of the rehearsal rooms of the Sawmill Chamber Orchestra. It is a small, 30-square-meter space, the structure of the house is trapezoidal, although it seems a little cramped, but it is warm and bright: in the corner is a piano, on the side of the display cabinet is placed five violins, the inside of the wall is pasted with red and yellow, retro-colored soundproof panels, and on the white walls on both sides, there are various competition certificates, video souvenirs and children's drawings of the children.
In Guangzhou, the "Capital of Music", the 4-year-old Sawmill Chamber Orchestra is still a relatively young chamber orchestra, but it may be the orchestra with the largest "age span" in Guangzhou: there are more than 100 members in the orchestra, including four groups, including preschool children, and primary and secondary school students, and the rest is the elderly orchestra with an average age of 70.
On the occasion of the New Year, a reporter from Guangzhou Daily interviewed the member of the elderly orchestra, 87-year-old Su Zhaofu. He told me about his youth and his musical path, and his story is as Samuel Ullman said in "Youth": "Old age is not old; ideals are discarded, and twilight years are lost." "Maybe youth is not resistance to time, as long as there is the joy of life in the heart, with the innocence and enthusiasm of a child, then there is a song of youth."
"The sound of the prosperous world is happy, and the sound of the chaotic world is resentful and angry." This is a passage from the Book of Rites and Music, and it is also a sentence mentioned by Su Zhaofu when recalling his musical story. Su Zhao, who is engaged in literature, has a kind of realist romance, and he summarizes his life with three melodies: in his childhood, it was a song "Ballad of Yellow Water"; in his youth, it was a "Coachman's Love"; in old age, it was a classical music without lyrics.
The 87-year-old Su Zhaofu is the oldest violinist in the sawmill elderly orchestra, although he is old, Su Zhaofu's spirit is particularly full: he has a very good memory, and he can easily grasp the stories of his classmates, the titles of the tracks he has practiced, and the classic sentences; his personality is also humorous, telling the elderly orchestra to go to the nursing home to "perform", and at the end, there are elderly people in the hospital who mix into the orchestra team and want to "escape the nursing home", a colorful description, inadvertently amusing the listener.
Su Zhaofu's body is the greatest condensation of the "happiness" and "satisfaction" of a retired old man, he said: "I attended the violin class and piano class of Guangzhou Elderly Cadre University, and my classmates were the eldest daughter and the second daughter; my piano was sent by the eldest daughter, and my violin was sent by the second daughter. ”
So far, Su Zhaofu has been retired for 27 years. For 27 years, he has been staying at the Guangzhou University of Elderly Cadres, refusing to graduate, "graduating and reading, graduating and reading." Before retiring, Su Zhaofu was a professor of the department of Chinese at a university in Guangzhou, and he gave almost half of his life to the three-foot podium, he taught the "Book of Poetry" to the children, and he talked about the "Aesthetics of Literature and Art", he said, "Literature and art are for the people; in the past I used to serve the people; when I retire, I can also serve the people in another way." The school proposed re-employment, and he humorously said that he didn't want to occupy the pit and not, but wanted to live to be old and learn from old. Therefore, he originally had no foundation in music theory, learned to play the piano at Laogan University, then learned the violin, entered the sawmill chamber orchestra, and the people who followed the orchestra entered the nursing home and rehabilitation center to visit the elderly who were older than himself.
In so many performances he has participated in, Su Zhaofu said that the performance he impressed most was not in the Grand Theater, but in the park of Dengfeng Street, where the elderly and children were quietly watching them, and he felt that classical music was not only "Yangchun White Snow", but also "Lower Riba people".
The only thing Su Zhaofu needed to resist was the deterioration of his finger function as he grew older: he obviously felt that his body seemed to be inferior to the past aura, his fingers began to tremble a little, the flexibility of his legs and feet was not as good as before, and in order to take care of him, most of the time the orchestra would assign him only some simple melodies. Therefore, as soon as he picked up the violin, Su Zhaofu would concentrate all his attention and "guard" his tones.
Text/Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun
Photo: Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun
Video/ Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Cheng Yilun
Guangzhou Daily New Flower City Editor Cai Lingyue