China Now Music Festival explores AI and tradition at Carnegie Hall

By combining technology with human creativity and blending traditional Chinese instruments with orchestral elements, Eastern and Western musicians created a harmonious dialogue that bridged cultures.

The forward-looking China Now Music Festival at Carnegie Hall concluded on Saturday evening after two weekends of performances. Composers, conductors and musicians worked together to highlight the integration of AI technology into music creation and performance, while also showcasing the harmony of sound.

In its seventh consecutive year, the China Now Music Festival, co-founded in 2017 by the US-China Music Institute at Bard College Conservatory of Music, has attracted more than 10,000 attendees and nearly 100,000 online viewers in previous seasons.

One of the featured performances was AI’s Variation: Opera of the Future by conservatory composer Hao Weiya, performed by the China Now Chamber Orchestra under the baton of conductor Cai Jindong.

In contrast to the opening concert on October 12, which emphasized the fusion of music and technology, Hao’s work confronts the audience with a series of chilling questions about the ethics of merging science and technology with human creativity.

Hao’s science fiction drama, written for three voices and a chamber orchestra, tells the story of a troubled artist who has his identity ‘enhanced’ by AI, but struggles with the consequences in his personal life.

Through music, the China Now Chamber Orchestra, with Chinese soprano Shi Lin, baritone Hong Zhenxiang and American soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, explores the artist’s questions and visions of the future.

The Bard East/West Ensemble, known for its unique blend of Chinese and Western instruments, also performed at the festival, seamlessly blending both cultures as Halloween approaches – a fitting nod to the season.

Duo Chinoiserie, a unique combination of the Chinese guzheng and the European classical guitar, performed Zhong Kui’s Regrets and Zhong Kui’s Journey by French composer Mathias Duplessy. Zhong Kui is a figure from Chinese mythology known as a demon hunter and the king of ghosts.

“Zhong Kui, with his clumsy and humorous head, his shaggy beard and his charismatic bonhomie, together with the little bat that follows him on his adventures – I had found my inspiration! A musical phrase came to mind to portray Zhong Kui to personify… All I had to do was develop and weave a musical story around these few notes,” Duplessy wrote in his introduction to the composition.

“Adventure, humor, battles and heroism! For the slow movement I imagined Zhong Kui at rest, nostalgic, lost in the reverie of a lost love. Here my French compositional style is more present, with Ravelian tonalities and Debussy-like chords which resonate with the romantic lyricism. In the fast movement, the guzheng takes the spotlight with its frenzied virtuosity, contrasting with the slow movement, in which the guitar sings from the depths of the Chinese mountains,” he added.

The festival also focused on future composers.

Yan Yan, 21, from Shanghai, was commissioned as part of the China Now Music Festival’s Emerging Composer Discovery Project. His work The Painted Skin, inspired by Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio), written by Pu Songling during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), tells a supernatural story that combines horror, romance and moral lessons.

“Just as the West has its ghosts, China has its own ghosts. This kind of culture is universal. I want to express this shared experience through music,” Yan told China Daily.

“We listen to Beethoven and Mozart a lot, but in the 21st century we need more young people to pay attention to contemporary music,” said conductor Cai Jindong. Cai said he hoped the world would hear the sound of Chinese music and instruments.