Chinese fan devotes an entire volume to his idol - Yanni

While fans of movie and sports stars like paying tribute to their idols in many different ways, few can do what Zhang Mingyu has done for his favorite, the renowned Greek keyboardist and composer, Yanni.

Zhang, 48, is a loyal Yanni follower from Changchun, Jilin province who has spent more than 13 years enjoying and studying Yanni's music.

Now, his recently published book, Elegant Music and Intimate Voice the Hand Scroll of Yanni's Music, is a compilation of reviews and interpretation of more than 180 Yanni songs.

It uses 200,000 Chinese characters to do this, accompanied by photos capture the moments, in about a dozen countries, when Yanni held a live concert, such as in China's Forbidden City, and India's Taj Mahal .

Zhang is similar to Yanni in at least one respect - he's a self-taught musician, and has never had any formal training. But he is supremely confident that he understands every Yanni song and feels that the book was a necessary project.

"This isn't just a review of Yanni's work, but a biography, a travel story, and even a Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of book as well," Zhang says by way of definition.

It's not difficult to see that Zhang's a hard-core Yanni fan. He knows all about the songs of his idol and talks endlessly of them. He has even turned his private blog into an only Yanni zone, with bits and pieces of the artist's art and life, with a special selection of Yanni's songs in the background as the visitor browses.

Zhang first got to know the Greek artist when the Internet began popularizing his music in the late 1990s in China, and says, "I've known some vivid life experience of Yanni through his music."

One song, Felista, for example, Yanni dedicated to his mother and gave it her name, Zhang explains.

The song Standing in Motion describes a frightening earthquake that Yanni experienced in his hometown, Kalamata.

Yanni's music has often been described as "new age" by music critics and the media, but he himself prefers the term "contemporary instrumental", with which Zhang agrees completely.

Zhang calls Yanni's music "diverse and boundless, with complex orchestration", and says it combines natural sound effects with an electronic sound created by modern devices, which makes it "much richer than new age".

Among Zhang's many favorite songs, he singles out Nightingale as the "favorite of favorites". That song, which Yanni composed just for the Beijing concert, in the Forbidden City in 1997, contains Chinese musical elements, which many fans, including Zhang, firmly believe hit a peak that Yanni himself could not surpass.

In fact, the song became so popular in China that it was selected as learning material for a junior-high textbook, Zhang adds.

Lost in translation

Still, even though the composer's music has been used extensively on TV and for televised sporting events in China, few people really recognize his name, let alone the names of the songs being played.

For Zhang, this is similar to "people eating some delicious dish without knowing who the chef is or even what they're eating". This, he says, is a bit unfair.

One possible reason for this may simply be the language barrier, according to Zhang, who says that most of Yanni's songs have an English name, while some are in Spanish or Italian. These are difficult for the Chinese.

And, although the names have a certain poetic beauty, the feeling can vanish when they're translated into Chinese. So, for Zhang, restoring their original beauty was a major motive in compiling the book.

A second reason was the result of the Yanni Voices tours of 2008 and 2009. That was when the Greek artist, who had previously insisted on the purity of his music, as the most emotional expression, but then, suddenly, had his popular songs performed by vocalists, with new lyrics. Some fans were in a state of shock and could not accept such a "betrayal", and ominously foresaw the end of Yanni's career.

And, Zhang was one of those pessimists, but, when he tried to translate some of the new Yanni lyrics, he found to his surprise that the emotional feel and inspiration were just as clear and consistent as ever.

"That's when I made my mind to analyze his songs one by one," Zhang recalls.

Payback

After 13 years of becoming familiar with Yanni, Zhang was able to finish the first draft of his book in just two months and many enthusiasts had already ordered a copy while it was still being written. An art institute in Changchun even ordered 395 copies as textbooks, in advance.

This September, when the book finally printed by the Changchun Publishing House, Zhang had a chance to meet his admired figure, in Beijing, just as Yanni began a new China tour for 2011.

The 58-year-old Greek musician was surprised at being the subject of a book by a Chinese fan whom he'd never met.

"With all my respect and admiration," Yanni wrote for Zhang on the first page of one copy.

"I've benefited from Yanni's music for many years," says Zhang. "I would feel awful if I didn't give something in return."

(China Daily 11/16/2011 page15)