The range of music that people have access to is greater today than it has ever been, thanks to enormous technological advances of the 20th Century.
Aiming to present and promote the music of our time, Central Conservatory of Music, China's leading musical academy, joined hands with Chinese Musicians Association to create the annual Beijing Modern Music Festival in May 2004.
Although it is not as well-known as the Beijing Music Festival that occurs every autumn, the music event provides a feast of contemporary music in a range of modern forms and invites audiences to experience the thrill of live music.
"Today more than ever, incredible diversity exists in contemporary musical expression around the world. We hope the annual event could, on the one hand, broaden local music fans' vision, and on the other hand, provide an opportunity for Chinese composers and performers meet their counterparts from all over the world, to discuss issues affecting contemporary music and matters of mutual concern," said Ye Xiaogang, initiator and artistic director of the Beijing Modern Music Festival.
In its third year, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, which will start tomorrow and run till Wednesday, brings world musicians from the United States, France, Portugal, Swiss, Britain, Poland and Austria to display and discuss global composition trends. Folk musicians from Indonesia, China's Guangdong, Fujian and Inner Mongolia will also showcase the charm and vitality of their genres.
Meanwhile, unlike the previous two festivals, which highlighted the works of established Chinese composers such as Tan Dun, Guo Wenjing, Ye Xiaogang, Qu Xiaosong and Chen Qigang, this year's festival promotes young talents who are still students at conservatories.
"One of our very first aims to organize the festival is to provide a platform for the unknown students to display their talent, showcase their green fruits and communicate with the masters," Ye said.
"Therefore we specially solicit the student works from China's major conservatories and carefully select some from the application works to display at the festival."
The first concert featuring young talents will be held in the afternoon of the opening day at the Concert Hall of the Central Conservatory of Music. Ye called it a concert of "music under 25." The oldest composer featured at the concert is only 23 years old.
Two more concerts featuring other young composers' works will be held on Sunday evening and afternoon.
Ye highly values all these young talents' compositions and especially acclaims Tian Mi's "The Impression of Impression." He gives the 24-year-old Tian from Shanghai Conservatory of Music two thumbs and selects the symphony into the festival's formal opening concert in the evening of May 26, played by the EOS Orchestra Academy of the Central Conservatory of Music under the baton of Hu Yongyan.
In addition to three concerts devoted to the young composers, the festival organized some sophomore students of the composition department of the Central Conservatory of Music to create pieces for the Traditional Orchestra of Guangdong Song and Dance Company to showcase traditional Cantonese, Hakka and Chaozhou music.
Under the direction of conductor Liu Shun, these students, most of from North China, went to experience the local culture in South China's Guangdong Province early this year and created the Cantonese music with modern orchestration technologies.
"We encourage the students to recreate the old traditional music with their own new vision and try to use the latest orchestration technologies to revive the old music. It's a challenge for them to score music belonging to a region that they are not so familiar with, but most of them did very good job," said Liu, who will conduct the concert of these works on Monday.
The other concerts worth attending include the Indonesian Gamelan Ensemble's performance led by Ngurah Adi Putra on Sunday. The gamelan is a Balinese ensemble of gongs, drums, flutes and marimba-like instruments called metallophones.
Aside from the 33 concerts, the festival offers master classes given by Richard Tsang, Chinese-American composers Chen Yi and Zhou Long, British composer Alastair Borthwick, Manhattan School of Music professor Reiko Fueting and Polish composer Zygmunt Krauze.
(China Daily May 26, 2006)
