Living in a remote, mountainous region of China’s “Land of Clouds” has buffered the Yunnan people from the outside influences of non-native cultures for centuries. With a wide range of voice techniques and instruments as unusual and diverse as the tree leaf, the moon guitar and the spirit drum, the musicians of the minority ethnic groups of the Yunnan province now perform their traditional songs and dances before world audiences, sharing their native arts and way of life. In this first of...

Despite China’s long musical history, Chinese orchestras are relatively new. The push for developing a distinctly Chinese performing arts repertoire came with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In the years after, Chinese orchestras mirroring the operational style of Western orchestras, such as having a baton-waving conductor and divisions of instrument families, began to form. Chinese orchestras initially focused on indigenous folk music, but in the last twenty...

Composer and self-described “musical anthropologist” Tan Dun (perhaps best familiar for his Oscar-winning score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) creates works that bridge time, place and culture through the fusion of ancient and avant-garde sounds Celebrating the vocal, instrumental, and environmental sounds of the remote Chinese countryside, Tan explores the minority cultures of Hunan Province, where he was born, and brings it into play with modern instruments and...