China Now Music Festival explores AI and tradition at Carnegie Hall

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

The future-focused China Now Music Festival at Carnegie Hall concluded on Saturday night after two weekends of performances. Composers, conductors and musicians collaborated to highlight the integration of AI technology in 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 of Bard College Conservatory of Music, has drawn over 10,000 attendees and attracted nearly 100,000 online viewers in previous seasons.

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

Unlike the opening concert on Oct 12, which highlighted the fusion of music and technology, Hao's work confronts the audience with a series of chilling questions regarding the ethics of merging science and technology with human creativity.

Hao's science fiction-themed drama, written for three voices and a chamber orchestra, tells the story of a troubled artist who allows his identity to be "enhanced" by AI, only to struggle 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, explore the artist's questions and visions of the future.

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

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

"Zhong Kui, with his ungainly and humorous head, his shaggy beard and his charismatic bonhomie, along with the little bat that follows him on his adventures — I had found my inspiration! A musical phrase came to mind to personify Zhong Kui… 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 resonating with Romantic lyricism. In the fast movement, the guzheng takes the spotlight with its mad virtuosity, contrasting with the slow movement, where 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 Emerging Composer Discovery Project by the China Now Music Festival. 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 blends horror, romance and moral lessons.

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

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