Journey towards a new dawn

The Bright March was a solo piece for erhu, composed by Maestro LIU Tianhu in the early 20th century. The piece showed the composer’s longing for a bright future in his contemporary circumstance. 100 years later, when composer Xiaogang Ye visited Wuxi City of the Jiangsu Province, and traced music maestros LIU Tianhua and A’bing’s life footsteps in their hometown, he decided to compose six works for Chinese traditional music with the same names of the two maestros’ works. And the works are The Bright March, Listening to the Pine, The shaking Candlelight and the Shadow, The Cold Spring Wind, The Dragon Boat, and An Imagination of Music and Dance.

The Bright March is XiaogangYe’s first one among the six works for Chinese traditional music. It was commissioned by LIU Tianhua and A’bing Foundation in 2016, and then premiered by SONG Fei, a famous erhu soloist at China National Center for the Performing and Arts in Beijing in the same year. The new piece didn’t adopt any music elements from LIU Tianhua’s original work, and was totally newly conceived by the composer. The piece is to express the composer’s admiration and thoughts to Maestro LIU Tianhua. The new piece is full of optimism and passion, which showing great expectation of the composer of the new generation. The piece has been presented in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and Nanjing, etc. and were well received.