Lyrical souls

A musician couple is turning ancient Chinese poetry into songs, Chen Nan reports.

The Austrian composer Franz Schubert was a pioneer of turning poems into music.

A similar line is now being followed in China by German composer Robert Zollitsch, who is working on poetry of two dynasties - Tang (AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279).

It is expected to both enliven Chinese music and bring back classical poems to a modern society.

"We want to use music to get those poems across to the contemporary scene, and (take them) to people from different cultures," says Zollitsch, 48.

Along with his wife, Gong Linna, a Chinese folk singer known for her powerful voice and dramatic facial expressions, Zollitsch has used such experiments in their latest album, Tang Song Dong Xi.

With Gong singing and Zollitsch composing, they used more than 15 Chinese poems from ancient poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi as lyrics.

The new album comprises two CDs.

Tang Song, referring to the two Chinese dynasties, sees Chinese and Western instruments played together, and the other CD, Dong Xi, a Chinese wordplay indicating the East and the West as well as the Chinese phrase meaning "the thing", has pop and electronic music in the songs.

The first song of the album is Jing Ye Si, or Thoughts on A Quiet Night, taken from the famous poem of the same title by Li Bai (AD 701-762).

Zollitsch says he has read the poem since the 1990s and so far has seen more than 300 translations of it.

"Though I am a foreigner, I can share the sentiments of the poem," says Zollitsch, adding that Austrian composer Gustav Mahler also used poems by Chinese poets like Li Bai, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei, as text sources in composing The Song of the Earth. "It's mutual human emotion, which is told through music."

For Gong, who, like many Chinese, learned the poems in school, she didn't understand the poem until she left home. The 39-year-old singer had moved with Zollitsch to Berlin in 2004 and returned to China in 2009.

She says, she connected with Li's poetry the most when she felt homesick while in Germany.

Instead of using her trademark high-pitched voice to impress listeners, she depicted the poems with her storytelling skills.

In a recent speech to the students of the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, she said that she had burst into tears while singing songs based on such poems.

As advocates of new Chinese folk music, the couple first met in 2002, at a concert in Beijing, where Zollitsch played the zither, a classical Bavarian folk music instrument. Impressed by his performance, Gong contacted him after the show and later learned that he had been listening to traditional Chinese music for a long time and studied the guqin (Chinese stringed instrument) in Shanghai.

Gong, who was born in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China's Gui-zhou province, started learning Chinese folk singing at a very young age and enrolled at the Chinese Conservatory of Music in Beijing at age 16.

After graduation, she joined China Central Nationalities Orchestra.

In 2000, she won the Chinese National Singing Competition as best female singer and became a popular figure on various TV shows. However, after a while the shows got boring for her.

She describes her meeting with Zollitsch as "life changing", which helped her regain her love for singing.

In 2009, Gong got rave reviews after she released the song Tan Te, or Disturbed, online. Composed by Zollitsch, the song uses sounds rather than words to convey different emotions and moods.

While many were impressed by Gong's singing skills, some regarded the song as an attempt to attract people's attention.

However, the couple continued to break conventional rules in Chinese folk music and released the song, Fa Hai, You Don't Understand Love, which also made their critics uneasy.

"If you listen carefully, these songs display some beautiful Chinese ethnic singing skills and musical elements," says Gong. "You need to take some time to digest them."

The couple's next project will see Zollitsch adapt a set of poem, Jiu Ge, or Nine Songs, by Qu Yuan, China's patriotic poet from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC).

In the form of chamber music, the composer used Western string instruments, brass-wind instruments, Chinese percussion instruments, suona horn (a woodwind instrument) and sheng (a reed pipe wind instrument) to unveil different layers of the poem.

Gong, along with another Chinese folk singer, a soprano and a tenor, will perform along with a 120-member chorus. The couple's biggest work so far is expected to be staged in January.

"There is a vast treasure of Chinese music which I am interested in exploring" says Zollitsch, adding that he always wanted to compose with the bianzhong (an ancient Chinese instrument made of a set of bronze bells).