‘Leaving’: Release of Zhao Cong’s First Bilingual Single

The release of her album, Sound of China, by Universal Music Group, reveals how successful Zhao has been in cultivating a China chic musical style both true to tradition, but with widespread appeal, being the first Chinese instrumental solo album to be released by Universal. Her time spent as a Stanford, as the first visiting scholar of art, and her travels to over 50 countries for performances has left her with a deep conviction that music is something which transcends cultural differences: “Regardless of nationality, or age, people will react very similarly when listening to a piece of music,” she explains.

For Leaving, Zhao wanted a cross-cultural creative process, as well as product. To achieve this, she assembled a team including Simon Kiln, an award-winning classical producer and editor, whose work won a Grammy in 2019; Mary-Jess Leaverland, a British soprano singer and the winner of China’s X-Factor in 2009; Wang Bo, a Chinese tenor who recently performed at the Royal Albert Hall and who was dubbed by the BBC as the “young singer who built bridges between the East and the West”; and Ding Xiaokui, a well-known classical Chinese musician who played the Chinese flutes for the song. The song was produced by Cam Rivers Music, an international music agency and innovative production company whose offices in Cambridge, Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, among other locations, allow it to sit at the nexus between eastern and western musical innovation. Zhao hoped that by inviting British talent to the creative process, they would “show us what Chinese music is about and should be like in their eyes… inject new blood into the music and teach us how to create traditional Chinese music which has an appeal to an international audience.”

For Kiln, the resulting piece “sits very nicely in [the] middle area… slightly pop-sounding, but [still] incorporating many traditional instruments.” In other words, through its use of traditional instruments such as the Chinese lute (called a pipa) and Chinese flutes (called di and xiao), yet distinct absence of the set pattern and regular musical form of traditional Chinese music, the piece perfectly exemplifies the music genre “crossover”. The addition of alternating Chinese and English lyrics, traditional and pop, also contribute to this effect. As Leverland put it, “Zhao is taking western influences and putting it into her Chinese music… mak[ing] it more accessible to a western audience.” Professor Macfarlane of King's College, Cambridge, was struck upon listening to a demo of Leaving by the propensity for music to generate intercultural understanding, by “communicating at a deeper level,” saying, “what this shows is that music is an international language… it's a really wonderful way to begin to understand each other.”

What Zhao is doing is also reflected in the lyrics themselves. The Chinese version, which was released in June 2020 in China, draws heavily on Zhao’s favourite section of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tsu’s works. Titled Kunpeng, the song is a retelling of A Happy Excursion, by Chuang Tsu, which has become a popular legend in China. Kunpeng was the name of a mythical fish, who in the tale, must transform into a huge bird to be able to make a 90,000-mile journey across mountains and rivers. The legend has come to symbolise the ambition needed to achieve great goals in popular culture, and the musical form of both the Chinese and bilingual version of Zhao’s song aim to reflect the complex emotions we have when faced with lofty ambitions, featuring soaring crescendos. As Wang Bo, the tenor for Leaving, explained, “I was really careful to place extra emphasis on vigour and energy to try and reflect Kunpeng’s ambition.” Zhao, herself is no stranger to these emotions, and Leaving is proof of this, its eclectic form, a striking example of a brand-new form of music, one which draws inspiration from places many miles away from one another. Zhao has already published a poetry pamphlet to accompany the song, containing the English, French and Italian translation of the original Chinese version’s lyrics, which was recited by a series of performing artists, scholars and poets at a virtual launch event, and has been well-received thus far. From this, it is clear that Zhao’s hope is that, regardless of language or cultural context, Leaving will invoke in the listener a deep understanding of universal experience of ambition, and share the legend of Kunpeng with those as far flung as he flew.