Chinese Music for Guitar. A Collaboration that Tightens Cultural Bonds

This project arose from three significant concerns that, at a certain and inevitable point in my life, intertwined and gave rise to this idea: in the first place, my early liking of and interest in music from different parts of the world that are significantly different from the Western sonorities we are used to; in the second place, the way I have come to feel professionally identified with contemporary music; and, in the third place, my enchanted attention and admiration towards Chinese culture, which emerged as a consequence of having participated in traditional Chinese martial arts.


When I started to formulate my degree project, I thought of coming up with a different repertoire. I was not confident about what kind of music I was going to perform; however, I was sure I wanted to reflect my fondness for Eastern music. While I was structuring my project, I encountered several obstacles: it was very difficult, for example, to narrow down such a wide variety of music as simply Eastern; it was equally difficult to access music from cultures where the language barrier hindered my search, or the music I was looking for had not been written for guitar.

However, the direction of my degree project changed when I decided to research how my knowledge of Chinese martial arts could solve problems specific to classical guitar performance. As part of the project, I had to select a concert repertoire. Even though the FaM did not require my research project to be related to my repertoire selection, I realized that Chinese music was exactly what I was looking for. I had to plan a project that could satisfy my personal, professional, and artistic needs. If I were to find adequate works, I would develop a round concept with a congruent repertoire that would appeal to me.

I was still conscious that finding guitar pieces was a challenge, but at least I had a concrete idea of the kind of repertoire I was looking for. I wanted to perform music that reflected the authentic Chinese worldview on contemporary music for guitar. When I started my search, I found arrangements of popular melodies, but they were very limited because of the nature of the instrument (they were not written for guitar) and, last but not least, because the arrangements had been made by people alien to Chinese culture, which skewed the perception of this kind of music and reduced it to the limited perception of Western arrangers.

It was 2019 and to my good fortune UNAM’s and CCOM’s IV Music Festival was being held, as part of the agreement signed in Beijing. The festival’s thematic axis was Echoes from the Silk Road. During a whole week FaM was the venue of conferences, masterclasses, and concerts of renowned professors and performers from the CCOM, who were able to come to Mexico thanks to UNAM’s International Affairs Head Office (CRAI), UNAM China and the CCOM, whose administration allowed them to send representatives of UNAM to China.

At that precise moment, I established contact with the composition and piano professor Marco Alejandro Gil, who was developing activities at the CCOM; his mediation allowed me to get in touch with outstanding young composers of the CCOM and to establish the project of premiering and videorecording the pieces they composed for me.

Through this project, not only could I satisfy my artistic needs, but I could also learn and grow professionally since I was forced to put great effort into reaching a different artistic perspective.

It is commonly said that music is a universal language, and, in that sense, I could clearly appreciate in their scores the way Chinese composers conceived sound, structure, texture, and color, each in their own style. Yet, each composer clearly shared a very particular worldview, absent in the Western music I had studied for years. Inside this universal language that music is, I could understand their discourse despite the differences. At the same time, I contributed to that discourse as a Mexican musician and guitarist.

Collaborating with Chinese composers was a very satisfactory experience, personally and professionally. They are top-level musicians, and their commitment to music makes them very kind and engaged with the people they work with. Despite the language barrier, I had no problem collaborating with remarks on the pieces they composed, even when two of them had never written something for the guitar. This last factor gave me, to a large extent, an idea of how they think music since, unlike most Western composers, who use a pretty much standardized musical written language, the Chinese formulated their ideas in a more personal, free manner.

I performed Illusions by Fuhong Shi, Echoes of Memory by Wen Ziyang, and Duge by Zhao Tianyi. In the notes of their musical scores, they wrote:

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