'Music is my magic'(2)

Liu Sola and her group rehearse for the upcoming show, Liu Sola&Friends Ensemble Concert, which will be held at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing on Saturday. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

In the 1980s, Liu and her classmates, including Tan Dun, Chen Qigang and Guo Wenjing, became the first generation of Chinese composers to be recognized by Western audiences. Liu was one of the most rebellious students.

Instead of composing classical symphonic music, Liu tried to escape the academic restraints and compose for opera, modern theater and contemporary dance.

After graduating from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing with a degree in composition in 1983, she first broke into the spotlight with a novella titled You Have No Choice. Depicting a group of frustrated music students, the award-winning novella was described by critics as "reckless and restless" and "far from Chinese social reality".

"The 1980s were romantic ... it was easy to stand out and be avant-garde then. As for the early fame, I think it was totally accidental. I didn't take it seriously," Liu says.

The success of the novella pushed Liu to further pursue her musical career. In 1987, she visited the United States, where she met and worked with many jazz and blues musicians. She later released albums in the US, such as Blues in the East and China Collage, which introduced her unique style to international audiences.

"I lived in New York, London and Berlin. Academic musicians were not my targets. I was much more interested in the local independent musicians, who taught me how to improvise and how to build a music world with freedom," Liu says. "You can never learn that knowledge in music schools."

Liu describes her collaboration with the ensemble as seeking a zhi yin, or soul mate, a term from a Chinese legend that Liu has adapted into her album, Blues in the East. The legend tells of a zither player, Yu Boya, and his friend Zhong Zhiqi, a woodcutter. Zhong was the only one who understood Yu's music. After Zhong dies, Yu breaks his zither and never plays it again.

"All of those musicians have inspired me to explore the possibilities of guqin. The instrument, which is thousands of years old, is lonely. When I play it in the ensemble, it feels like seeking a soul mate via music," says guqin player Wu Na, who collaborated with Liu in her contemporary opera The Fantasy of the Red Queen in Berlin in 2006.

Liu spends most of her time rehearsing and composing new works in her house in Songzhuang, an art district in Beijing's eastern suburbs.

Liu says she can only concentrate on one thing: creating music.

"I am neither good at selling music nor capable of catering to an audience with brainwashing pop sounds. I am fated to constantly write music, and I easily absorb music, both ancient and contemporary. The conversation we had about music was very sincere, and we want to start a trend," she says.