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.