Finding an Universal Language: “Fill the World with Love”
Also an officially approved song, “Fill the World with Love” was written to celebrate the International Year of Peace in 1986, directly inspired by the US pop song “We Are the World” (1985) and the succeeding Taiwanese version “Tomorrow Will Be Better” (Mingtian hui geng hao , 1985). The head editor of China Audio and Video Head Office (Zhongguo luyin luxiang chuban zongshe), Wu Haigang, invited a composition group to write lyrics for this purpose. The assigned composition team copied the aim of raising money for public welfare and the group-singing format of these two song examples.17 This song was designed to be performed by 108 pop singers, the first time a big group of pop singers had gathered together in any such official performance (You, 2019: 346).18
Its published notation names five lyricists: apart from Chen Zhe, lyricist of “Blood-Stained Dignity” as overall coordinator, Guo Feng gave advice on revisions, Sun Ming and Xiao Lin each contributed to several lines of Part I of the song, and Wang Jian,19the only middle-aged composer in the team, provided a draft, of which only the title was finally retained (Lin, 1994: 665). The practice of “collective composition” was commonly found during the Cultural Revolution and refers to multiple meanings in the Chinese context, but its prime aim is to avoid any the emergence of a distinctive musical style belonging to any particular composer or area and thereby enhance its supposedly universal national characteristics as an official song.
Because four out of five composition members are young musicians, this song was positioned as an articulation of the young generation during the mid-1980s. Following a long period of spiritual suffering during the Cultural Revolution and in the quickly changing social transformations that ensued in the subsequent Opening-up, China was really in a period when Chinese needed to introspect on the past and look for spiritual guidance as to where they should go.20 The young generation conceived the feeling of loss and the need for self-comfort and self-direction. Chen Zhe added his own words on this point:
At that time, [the spirit] of young people was wandering.… [The revolutionary faith of] Mao Zedong was gone and the new belief hadn’t been set yet.… The temporary small shops run by entrepreneurs crowded across the square outside People’s Hall. They hosted different exhibitions and sold clothes. That was the general scene at the time. That means all things belonging to the past were gone. Unlike today, at that time, you were not someone, you were nothing.21
To accommodate these thoughts, this song was designed as a large-scale song suite of minutes, far longer than the average pop song (Ex 7). Its overall structure of three parts could be heard as a narrative of a whole experience of the transitional period. Part I expresses retrospection on past experience, referring to the Cultural Revolution. Here words like “far away”, “decades before”, and “the past is already behind” refer to the attitude of the young generation towards a painful collective memory, suggesting people’s spirits were gradually recovering from the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution. Part II opens with a very soft and delicate description of the people’s efforts at mutual comfort, which points out the needs of the current generation. Use of a chorus suggests the role of social cohesion in helping the young generation heal the gloomy memories of the past, and shares their experiences more collectively with audiences who may have had common experiences. Part III uses a lively tone to depict a future scenario in which everyone will share true love. Here the sentence “let the world fill with true love” is repeated several times, to stress the main theme of conceiving love to finish the whole narrative.
In contrast to official songs of a previous era that loudly declaim hate (for class enemies or other targets) or love (for Communist leaders or labor heroes), the song relied on gentle, calm means of expression. In Part II, for example, the instrumentation maintained a quiet and soft feeling, avoiding a dense texture or a loud, strong arrangement in the melody.22 A four-bar introduction on the piano gives a sequence on three descending pentatonic scale steps. Verse I—sung by all the children and female singers—keeps a very stable and smooth vocal line, over a simple piano accompaniment providing an arpeggio at the end of each word. The melody and arrangement of the interlude are the same as those of the introduction. String instruments play sustained chords on the first beat of every measure. As a whole, all the music, arrangement, and vocal style contributes to sustaining the intended soft, gentle and smooth feeling.