马 可
He studied chemistry at Henan University, then, under the guidance of the composer Xian Xinghai, suspended his studies upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, joining the anti-Japanese movement in Henan. In 1939 he traveled to Yan"an, where he studied at the Lu Xun Art Academy with Xian Xinghai, Lü Ji, and others, and worked to collect and record a massive number of Chinese folk songs.
He was from Xuzhou, Jiangsu. In 1947 he joined the Communist Party of China. After 1949 he was appointed the vice president of the China Conservatory of Music and the head of the Chinese Opera House.
As a musicologist, he devoted special study to the work of Xian Xinghai, writing a biography about the composer.
He also studied the development of modern Chinese music drama and China"s tradition of revolutionary music with several books and approximately 200 papers. In 1978 a partial collection of his songs was published.
A festival dedicated to Ma Ke, called the China Xuzhou Ma Ke Art Festival, was held in Xuzhou in June 2004.
