“Because I had all the keys, I asked a couple of friends, and we snuck into the library in the night with flashlights and crawled on the floor. We saw all the books we had missed, like Shakespeare, etc. and, more importantly,” Li-Kuo Chang leans forward intently, “the music and the records.” His face still lights up with the wide-eyed spell of a teenage boy discovering forbidden treasure.
“My friends were violinists; I was as well but also a cellist. So we said, ‘Should we read some cello music?’ Of course, we had to do that very, very secretly. We only took out books and sheet music—we didn’t listen to any records because it was way too risky. Then we went back again and again to exchange them after we finished reading them. Luckily, nobody discovered us.”
Chang, now professor of viola at the Jacobs School of Music, vividly remembers growing up in China, especially during its Cultural Revolution. He was born in Wuhan in 1949, the same year Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Soon afterward, Chang’s family moved to Shanghai, where, at age four, he began piano lessons with his mother, a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Music and a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He started studying violin after attending a recital by Russian violinist David Oistrakh and went to elementary and middle school then high school at the Shanghai Conservatory—until 1966.
“I was just finishing tenth grade when the Cultural Revolution began,” says Chang. “We had sensed something was coming because there were more and more restrictions on what we could play, but we didn’t know how drastic it would be. We had to decrease Western repertoire and increase Chinese repertoire; we could not publicly perform certain pieces. The overtone was that it had to be politically correct.
“For a while, there was no education; school just totally stopped. Professors were persecuted, beaten, killed. They were respected professors, then abruptly one day, they became criminals. The whole faculty, can you imagine? It was the total chaotic collapse of an established system. Suddenly, it all came crumbling down.”
Makeshift detention centers were created at institutions across the country and workers were held under “house arrest” there. Chang said his parents were imprisoned at their workplaces for over a year as “many indoctrinated young students directly followed Chairman Mao’s calling and began a movement of Red Guards throughout the country. Traditional governance everywhere was replaced by so-called Revolutionary Committees. The first generation of Guards was condemned in the second year, so I was asked to lead. I did not want to be number one, so I became the number two person to run the music high school of the Shanghai Conservatory in 1967, with access to everything—it was just like a joke.”
Because of his position, Chang was able to form his own string quartet with three classmates and started to play the viola since there was no viola major offered at the school then. He switched to viola exclusively in 1969, when he was chosen to participate in an experiment by Mao’s wife, Jian Qing, to modernize the Peking Opera. He was appointed principal viola, and later manager, of the 29-member Shanghai Peking Opera Theater Orchestra.
“They brought us to Beijing, to a very nice compound and treated us like royalty for two years. I joked that we were the royal court orchestra. I was incredibly lucky, because my mother, sister, and the whole school were sent to the farms without any instruments, just working the fields being ‘reeducated.’ My classmates, my professors were also locked on these farms not seeing their instruments for years. We were a very small number of survivors. It was unreal.”
Madame Mao was also the leader of the revolution’s infamous Gang of Four. “I met Madame Mao and shook her hand when she received the entire orchestra after one of our performances at the People’s Great Hall in Beijing in 1969. It was pretty amazing for me to have a face-to-face experience with this mystically powerful woman when the entire country was under her influence,” Chang recounts. “We saw Mao Zedong only once, from a close distance in Tiananmen Square at the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the PRC. We were also on the VIP stand, with thousands of people cheering below.”
Chang continued with the orchestra and quartet, then the only recognized string quartet in China, including performance tours in China and Japan plus recordings. With Mao’s death and the overthrow of the Gang of Four in 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended, and the orchestra was disbanded. Chang became associate principal viola of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 1977 and won China’s first Young Artist Competition the following year. Numerous concerts and television performances followed, establishing him as China’s first viola soloist to publicly perform there.
Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China resumed in 1979, after which he was offered full scholarships to The Julliard School, the Eastman School of Music, and the New England Conservatory of Music. He attended New England on a full ride until he was appointed associate principal viola of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra just before his senior year after winning a concerto competition as a young artist fellow at the Music Academy of the West.
Chang was appointed associate principal viola of the Denver Symphony Orchestra in 1987 and assistant principal of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in 1988. In 2017, he became acting principal viola of the CSO until his retirement in 2023. He joined the Jacobs School of Music faculty part time in 2021 before becoming professor of music in viola full time in 2022. He has also served on the faculties of the Affinis Music Festival in Japan, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the Peabody Institute, and the Music Institute of Chicago.
“In order to escape, many people swam from Canton to Hong Kong. There was a time I was so desperate I started to practice swimming,” Chang recalls. “I’m grateful the revolution ended first, and I came out with a viola, a bow, and $30 in my pocket. So many times while I was performing onstage with the CSO I started thinking, ‘Is this real? How can this be real after what I’ve been through?’ I ask, ‘Is this my achievement?’ No, this is my luck—brazen luck.”
Chang described a recent dinner where one of his colleagues mentioned how a current prominent U.S. politician said that universities and professors are the enemy. “My friend asked, ‘Li-Kuo, doesn’t that sound like your Cultural Revolution?’ ‘Exactly,’ I said. I survived the Cultural Revolution and came to the beacon of democracy, liberation, freedom—and now, I don’t believe it.”
