China Now Music Festival: Music in Motion
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
The China Now Music Festival returns to the Sosnoff Theater with a program of symphonic works by three generations of living composers from China. Conductor Jindong Cai connects this year’s festival theme of ‘music in motion’ to the extraordinary momentum shaping the development of contemporary classical music in China from the 1980s to today.
The three composers in the first half of the program represent the newer generations. Dai Bo, afflicted with blindness at a young age, conjures landscapes of China by way of his exquisite sensitivity to sound. Mongolian Yu Mengshi tells a story of longing, using a solo cello to evoke the sounds and folk traditions of his homeland. Zou Hang depicts the urban scenery of Ningbo and Beijing as vivid colorscapes through sound.
The second half of the program features Ye Xiaogang’s epic masterpiece, The Song of the Earth for orchestra, soprano and baritone. Ye Xiaogang rose out of the legendary first class of composition students at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) after its reopening in 1978. Ye and his fellow classmates, such as Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, and Bright Sheng, went on to revolutionize contemporary Chinese orchestral music. As a professor at CCOM for many decades, Ye mentored generations of young composers in China, including Dai Bo and Zou Hang from this program.
Learn more about this program and the China Now Music Festival.
For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/china-now-music-festival-music-in-motion/.
Time: 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
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