Moonrise shines bright with surprises

Dadawa traveled to the remote regions where Chinese ethnic groups live when making her new album.

Full coverage: An ear for China

You can hear the title song Moonrise first, and then turn to the other CD to listen to the original version of Miao folk song If You Were a Flower, a sample of which is used in Moonrise. Likewise, you can compare the original recording of Nagqu Love Song to the use of its sample in the track In This Life .

But such comparison would become difficult with To Play, To Dance, To Sing, which uses samples of 33 folk songs of different ethnic groups from southwestern China.

"Up to the fourth month these raw materials-drawn from different nationalities, different languages and different tonalities-seemed to be out of tune with each other, and at one point I felt like abandoning them," Dadawa wrote in the CD. "But thanks to Zulan (arranger and composer)'s persistence when we entered into the mixing stage of recording, we carried it through to completion. Through it, we have learned how wide the road of music is."

Dadawa has done a good job in finding a wider road through traditional music. Diverse ethnicities and thousands of years of history bestow on China many rich folk music traditions, yet most of them are not part of contemporary life simply because people don't have opportunities to hear them.

With no publicly accessible sound archive and few recordings of traditional folk music released in China, we are losing memories of the roots of Chinese music. As a result, the young generation of Chinese musicians often tend to look to the West for inspiration, ignoring the treasures that our ancestors have accumulated.

Many of China's rich resources in traditional music make for great materials for world music, but they usually stay as materials, as few people know how to present them under the context of "world music".

It took Dadawa four and a half years to make Moonrise. Hopefully the album will show its significance for many more years to come.

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