Music with meaning

Fang Qiong performs at a Beijing concert, which features a combination of classical Chinese poetry and music. [Photo provided to China Daily]

To bring the poems and old tunes back to life, Fang and her team visited experts on musicology and classical poetry to re-create pieces that could be put on stage.

Shi Peng, 93, a Changsha-based expert on ancient poems, was invited to the concert to recite Climbing Yueyang Tower by Du Fu, a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet.

Fang, who's from Yueyang, Hunan province, says when she was young, she used to see old people painting, writing poems and doing recitations at Yueyang Tower, one of the best-known heritage sites in the city.

"But I did not understand the meaning then," says Fang.

So, on learning that young people in Taiwan had organized poetry clubs and were doing recitations in the Minnan dialect, Fang was inspired to promote poetry recitation by combining music with poetry.

Shi, who was glad to perform at the Beijing concert, says: "I'm here to prove that poetry recitation is part of our history."

Jiang Jiakeng, a Beijing-based singer in his 80s, was also at the concert, performing his best-known pieces.

Jiang has enjoyed the exquisite tones and diction of ancient Chinese poems. He began recording songs based on them with the guqin in the 1970s.

"I've recorded hundreds of them, but I got very few opportunities to perform because people rarely listened to this form of music then," he says.

However, the revival of old tunes played with guqin and the creation of new compositions using ancient poems as lyrics has helped.