Yijia Tu

This is a guzheng, an ancient Chinese zither that has over 2000 years of history. Growing up in China, I played the two most popular instruments. Can you guess what they are? It's the guitar and the piano. Not this. I wrote a song on the guitar that ended up on one of the biggest music shows of the time, called 中国好歌曲 . At 16, my life changed overnight.

Olen päässyt tällaiselle ympäristölle Hanna Montanassa, kun olin yliopistossa lapsena. Näin näkemyksiä, kuulin musiikkia publicissa, mikä oli hirveä kokemus. Työskentelin musiikkialaisten kanssa ja kasvoin ymmärtämällä, kuka auttoi minun debiutti-albumini menemään prestiivisen Hua Yubang Zhongbangin, joka on myös kutsuttu kielten musiikkiauhtoon.

However, as a Chinese musician, my music was very westernized. I didn't sound Chinese, and in a way I'm not sure if I really wanted to.

You see, with traditional music, I didn't really think it was cool. I have to admit, in my language, there's this word for something that's not cool or backwards, called tù. But tù literally means the earth or soil that we stand on. On the other hand, you have this word called yangqi, which means the opposite, something very trendy and cool and avant-garde, but yangqi literally means western.

Over time I realized that this isn't just a Chinese issue, but a global one. Music traditions are dying in the hands of our generation.

But how can we preserve a tradition if we don't feel a personal connection to it? So I felt inspired to learn the traditional instruments and folk music to reconnect with my roots. But instead of playing traditional music traditionally, it's important for me to be creative with it.

so i'm going to show you how i do that i'm going to play you a song that's a combination of a traditional folk song as well as my own composition i think you can guess which part is the traditional which one's not

Kiitos. Kiitos. Tässä on kutsu, jonka komponero Gustav Machler kertoi minulle. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. Music can transcend not just the barriers of language and culture, but also time and space.

For me, music can build a bridge between the East and the West, the past and the present, and between you and me. And I've witnessed how music can reach beyond the limits of not just our human memory, but even our very own consciousness. When my grandmother developed Alzheimer's, we could no longer communicate through words. However, there was this lullaby

that she used to sing to me when I was a child. It's a lullaby that her mother used to sing to her, so it's been passed down my family for over four generations. And whenever I sing the melody, she will recognize the melody and sing along with me, which is really sweet. And even though my grandmother has recently passed away, whenever I sing this lullaby, I still feel deeply connected with her. It's almost like

She's still singing along with me, perhaps somewhere in a space that only exists through music. Jou i jou