Sound of music
Dadawa’s new album captures a wide array of theMiddle Kingdom’s indigenous music, infusing it with contemporary energy. Xu Jingxi chats with the global artist in Guangzhou.
World-music pioneer Dadawa’s new album captures a wide array of the Middle Kingdom’s indigenous music.
It took four years and five months for Dadawa to put together her latest album Moonrise, which debuted in Guangzhou on Dec 7. The Chinese musician, whose real name is Zhu Zheqin, spent four months traveling through remote regions and collecting more than 1,000 samples from indigenous music masters from 15 ethnic groups. In the contracting recording industry, the artist took a big risk and worked like an “insane idiot” on the most important album for her in a decade. She worked with young musicians and breathed newlife into the diverse samples by combining them with contemporary compositions.
“This album has found a new way for creating Chinese original music,” she says.
“It may take 20 or 30 years for people to digest the musical concept of the album, but I’m confident that it will be eventually recognized as a landmark in the history of Chinese music.”
Dadawa made her voice heard by the world with her 1995 album
Sister Drum, which drew influences from Tibetan folk music and sold more than 3 million copies in 56 countries.
He Xuntian, a New Age composer and the producer of Sister
Drum, opened a new door for Dadawa, who initially had a pop career with her hit A Story of the
Crow. As a student in Guangdong province’s capital Guangzhou, she won a TV talent show with this song in 1990.
She worked with He on four albums, three of which took Tibetan folk music as the core inspiration. But the singer took up a new role as a producer for her latest album Moonrise.
“I have been stereotyped as a singer with an ethereal voice since SisterDrum. I don’t want to repeat. I need to find a new start for my musical career,” Dadawa says.
It was impossible to make the newstart happen overnight.
“Actually, musicians ofmy generation, who have grown up in the past 20 or 30 years, know little about our own culture,” she says at a lecture on Moonrise in Guangzhou’s Fangsuo Commune on Dec 8. She is dressed in a white gown and wears a faint smile most of the time, but she gets emotional about music.
“We have been following the West’s musical trends in the past 30 years. It’s time for China’s top musicians and young music lovers to look back to the country’s musical legacies with a centurieslong history,” Dadawa says.
Appointed as a goodwill ambassador of the United Nations Development Program in 2009, Dadawa led a group of 10 on a four-month journey of discovery of “neglected national treasures”. The 20,000-kilometer trip covered remote areas in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, and the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang Uygur and Tibet autonomous regions.
The crew traveled across mountains and rivers into the origins of ethnic music, collecting samples from inheritors of the indigenous music. Dadawa frets about the so-called ethnic music wave, which she finds to be superficial, and says understanding indigenous music demands immersion.
The contrast between folk tunes and industrial tempo is surprising, but it reflects a deep pondering over the clash between the old and the new in modern society.” DADAWA MUSICIAN
She discovered a group of Tibetans singing and waving their long sleeves for their traditional dance called xuan zi on the mountain, 4,000 meters above sea level.
Another day, she sat on the grass in Guizhou, listening to a group of Miao people dressed in their traditional attire, singing a love song and imitating the sounds of nature perfectly. Their sonorous voices reverberated in the valley and, Dadawa says, penetrated directly and deeply into her bones.
The most touching moment happened when Dadawa suffered altitude sickness in Tibet. Her host, Toinzhub, let her lie on the bed to recover and played a six-string guitar, a traditional Tibetan plucked instrument, soothing Zhu’s pain.
“Toinzhub sang in praise of the magnificent snow mountains. He played only one note, and it went faster and faster,” she recalls.
“The melody was still stuck in my mind when I went back to Beijing. So my composing partner and I developed a song based on that, which is Mountain Top onmy newalbum.”
After returning to Beijing, Dadawa was determined to preserve the original taste and flavor of the samples she collected.
“Strictly speaking, this is not my album as an individual,” she says. The leading voices are the ethnic music masters she has collected and documented in performances.
Dadawa is confident that this approach will make Moonrise stand out from Western attempts to rejuvenate folk and tribal music with contemporary elements, such as the French musical group Deep Forest, which mixes African tribal music with electronic sounds and dance beats, and Enya, who adapts Irish folk rhymes into New Age music.
Dadawa’s technique is on display in the song Mountain Top. The sounds of the Tibetan musical instruments are transformed by industrial music’s tempo, in an interesting contrast with the rhymes in praise of snow mountains.
“The contrast between folk tunes and industrial tempo is surprising, but it reflects a deep pondering over the clash between the old and the new in modern society,” she says.
Dadawa cooperated with young musicians when producing the newalbum. Jiang Ming, a folk singer and music critic, applauds the introduction of new blood.
“Young musicians’ arrangement of the tempo revitalizes the old, traditional music, which is presented in a trendy yet not gaudy way,” Jiang says.
Dadawa says she wants to prove that ethnic music can also be popular among young people.
“To protect China’s diverse ethnic music, we not only need to preserve the music in its authentic context, but also bring it into contemporary life,” says Dadawa, who will donate 10 percent of the sales of Moonrise to her “1+5” plan to fund 400 ethnic art masters who will each cultivate five inheritors of their music.
Moonrise’s digital version will soon be on global music sales platforms, including iTunes and Spotify.
“I hope my album can wake up the drooping music industry and prompt Chinese musicians to stand up straight to create original music full of soul, instead of being an appendix to talent shows,” the artist says.