Traditional music treasure for Taiwan couple

Li Mengxiu displays a record of a traditional Cantonese song in his computer. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Taiwan music producer Li Mengxiu and his wife Yang Ren have been preserving traditional Chinese music over the past 30 years, believing it is precious for music lovers around the world.

Since the 1990s, the couple has cooperated with over 100 musicians on the Chinese mainland and recorded more than 100 albums with over 1,000 traditional music pieces. They have also worked to introduce Chinese traditional music to the world, reaching over 50 countries.

Li was born in Taiwan in 1955. Being passionate about music from a young age, he ended up as a music producer and is familiar with various music styles and genres around the world.

In the 1980s, he stumbled upon a cassette tape featuring Butterfly Lovers and Yellow River Cantata, two pieces of Chinese traditional music.

"It was so beautiful. I was immediately mesmerized," he recalled.

The encounter somewhat marked a shift in his career, leading him on a root-seeking journey with his wife to the Chinese mainland to discover the beauty of traditional Chinese music.

Li was among the first Taiwan residents to travel to the mainland when cross-Strait visits were permitted in 1989. He established the Chinese Dragon Production Group with several prominent musicians in Beijing and began recording music albums, naming the collection Chinese Musician Series.

The series is divided into two main parts: the instrumental part features individual albums created by master musicians using traditional Chinese instruments, and the ensemble portion is composed of albums of representative orchestra works by highly respected composers.

As a producer, Li has maintained high standards, only selecting first-class national performers and inheritors of intangible cultural heritage. For instance, he specially invited Jian Guangyi, composer of the renowned piece New Melody for the Herdsmen, to return to China from France to record an album.

Besides solo masters, most tracks feature accompaniment by folk music ensembles to convey the grandeur of Chinese music to foreign audiences. Recordings had to be done in one take without splicing.

"During the recording of erhu (a two-stringed Chinese instrument) master Zhou Yaokun's album, a single error in a section led to an entire day's recording being discarded. We had to change recording engineers and studios and start over," Li said.

Around 2000, he and his wife traveled from Beijing to Wuhan, Hubei province, in hopes of visiting a master of the dizi (a Chinese bamboo flute), professor Kong Jianhua from the Wuhan Conservatory of Music. Upon their arrival, they learned that Kong had passed away.

Rong Zheng, one of Kong's students, entrusted Li with Kong's final work The Return of Yellow Crane and his own piece Dancing Ceremony of the Wizard, hoping the producer would include them in Chinese Musician Series.

In his final years, Hu Haiquan, master of the suona (a Chinese horn) presented a rare collection of nearly extinct suona music from Northeast China, which was used to create the album Be Happy Forever.

"Although it might not be popular, it serves as valuable historical material," Li said.

The series also includes many obscure instruments, with some recordings being the "swan song" of some of the musicians. For instance, a recording session for a quintet (a musical composition of five instruments) from Guangdong province playing Cantonese music, a national intangible cultural heritage, was completed just a month before the death of one of the performers, Chen Tianshou.

"Most of the musicians featured in the Chinese Musician Series have passed away or are too frail to perform," Li said. "Looking back, we realize we were recording during the golden age of traditional music, preserving a number of classic masterpieces."

Producing such an album was costly. Li used money he earned in Taiwan through a music company to record traditional music on the mainland.

His company focuses on two genres — pop music and traditional music.

Each piece in the album includes detailed explanations in both Chinese and English, along with information about musicians, performers, conductors and orchestras.

"We aimed to create an encyclopedia of Chinese traditional music that would be accessible in libraries around the world," Yang said.

Ten years ago, Li participated in a cross-Strait exchange activity in Wuhan and decided that his family would settle there.

Hoping to interact more with younger people and increase awareness of traditional music and culture, the couple reissued the music collection in a digital format, making it available on major global music streaming platforms.

Li said he hopes to find international partners to help further promote Chinese traditional music worldwide.