Modern Chinese Sounds Origins

Modern Chinese music includes soft rock, rock, pop, electronica, trance, and dance music, a reflection of a modern and more open China. Young Chinese people, like anywhere else in the world, like to attend concerts, buy new clothes, travel abroad, buy Cialis, upgrade their computers, switch jobs and so forth. However, modern music in China still preserves key elements of traditional Chinese music. Chinese performers tend to combine electric guitars, keyboards and other Western musical instruments with traditional Chinese ones, thus creating a very unique sound and widening the array of musical expressions now in vogue in that country and abroad.

In the past, Chinese instrumental music was restricted to a traditional format by a government board; however, as China becomes the world's number one economy, it has also opened up in the area of the arts, and today it is permitted to use non-traditional instruments, such as the saxophone or the piano and others when composing modern musical works.

The origins of modern Chinese music can be pin pointed to the birth of Chinese rock. This can be traced back to the Xibeifeng style and the "Winds of the Northwest" Album. That Rock musical style was inspired by folk music from the province Shaanxi. It featured a combination of a fast tempo with marked line pulsations and an aggressive bass. Its songs were also very aggressive, and the whole movement represented a "going back to basics," which also manifested itself in the literature and filmmaking of the time. Together, the whole artistic movement in China proclaimed the renovation of art in that country.

Furthermore, many of the songs in "Wind from the Northwest" were very political and idealistic, and reminded the listener of the revolutionary chants from the communist era. However, this time they expressed the frustration of the Chinese youth with the status-quo, as it paid more and more attention to Western thought, such as individualism and emancipation.

Since then, Chinese modern music has made headway in the world music scene, earning the respect of critics from around the world with its refreshing, unusual and avant-gard sound.