I’ve never understood a capella. In college I went to a few concerts and bought two CDs from one of the myriad groups on campus. Even though I enjoyed it, the need to render Radiohead and Weezer into a compressed arrangement of voices always puzzled me. It was like reading the novelization of a movie, or, perhaps more precisely, watching a low-quality pirated copy of a movie instead of going to the theater. But I thought that probably it was just me, that I didn’t understand the art form.

So when I sat down to watch Voces8, an acclaimed English octet, at the National Center for the Performing Arts, I expected insight. I thought that a capella performed by professionals would be qualitatively different from those Friday nights on the quad. And it was, in terms of quality and song choice (less pop, more English ballads), but in the end it was just eight people singing, making sounds, and occasionally snapping to the beat. But if I thought I was confused, it seemed that most of the audience was worse off.

Singing without instruments is as old as time, but a capella as we know it evolved about a hundred years ago in the United States at colleges. Groups have been formed steadily since but this form of vocal music remains a uniquely Western tradition. So performing Bach and Gershwin in a capella in Beijing is something akin to performing Farewell My Concubine with shadow puppets at the Met.

Not surprisingly, after the first piece a few people started nodding off and by the end of the fifth piece only about half the audience was clapping. The man next to me checked his cell phone (in vain because service is blocked once the performance begins) and was reproofed by an usher on the other side of the hall with a laser pointer. During the rest between the second and third movements of “Singet dem Herrn” someone, thinking the song was over, began clapping loudly though the audience was told beforehand that there were four movements. This happened again toward the end of “Fever.”

Before you write this off as ignorance or embarrassing folly, think of how you’d do watching Noh or tauromachy. Perhaps you’d be able to appreciate the surface novelty but could it really affect you? Would you really understand what was going on? This begs the question if one is able to appreciate an art without a sufficient understanding of the medium or source material. How can I understand the improvisations of “I Got Rhythm” if I’ve never heard it before? If we can’t, then Western high art is waging a losing battle in the world and an almost impossible one in China. Opera, symphony, and a capella are Western art forms just as Chinese Opera, erhu solos, and crosstalk are Chinese ones.

When viewed this way, the two hemispheres seem so far apart but I suppose there’s something to be said for cultural exchange. However, without offering a proper introduction or context, I don’t know if the audience walked out intrigued or boggled. The whole experience seemed backward to me. The only people in suits were the performers—most of the audience wore polos and shorts. In fact it seemed that the NCPA was merely an attempt to bring “culture” to China. The inside, with its museum, gift shop, and glass facade, looks like the Platonic ideal of an opera house, like what someone who had never seen an opera would draw when asked to draw an opera house.

At the end of the concert, the arrhythmic applause suddenly became unified and oddly militaristic, increasing in tempo, like the end of a slow clap. It was odd, but perhaps that’s how Chinese audiences register appreciation. I know that when Chinese audiences see something they like or think is funny, they tend to clap in the middle of the performance, no matter what is going on. So when the familiar cadence of “Carmen” appeared in the first encore, some in the audience began to clap along. They were promptly shushed.