“My origins and upbringing are a hybrid of East and West…”
Reflections
Two fundamental forces define my concert performances: cultural experiences and an inner creativity.
As a zheng soloist, I explore all traditions of the classical and contemporary repertoire: from ancient Han tunes, lyrical Qing melodies to modern works of 50s-80s. Being Asian-French, and pianist, I discover avant-garde zheng, a new genre that explores atonality and the contents of sounds. Music becomes more than a classical emphasis on harmony, style and form. Today, I am primarily interested in the purity and expressiveness of each tone, and how each tone, in its different shades, communicates.
Performing at the age of 11
In his Poétique musicale (1952), Stravinsky wrote, “True tradition is not the documentation of a closed past; it is a living force which stimulates and teaches the present.” My origins and upbringing are a hybrid of East and West, past and present. I seek not to instill a mixture of both values, but simply to demarcate how different their similarities are. I play a traditional Zhejiang tune on my zheng, but punctuate it with Bach's counterpoint. Playing the piano and zheng are merely different in terms of technicality and cultures. They otherwise coexist to render possible a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary artistic expression.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
28 Sept, 2006 - Paris
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