This music is rich in national characteristics, and has a strong flavor of the times. It is deeply loved many musicians, was adapted into Guzheng, Sanxian, Yangqin, Ruan solo and orchestral music.

A famous Guitarist, Yin Biao, turned it into a classical guitar solo. In 1987, he played it at China International Guitar Festival held in Zhuhai. Artists from France, Japan, Spain, Austria and Argentina praised it and it soon became one of the most influential classical guitar music in the guitar world.

In the previous four posts about Chinese music, I introduced four most popular representative works written by Composer Lei Zhenbang. Today in this post, I’d like to summarize these posts and tell you something about the composer Lei Zhenbang himself.

Lei Zhenbang’s Most Popular Works: …>>

This folk song was a theme song in a popular movie “Liu San-Jie” in the 1960s.

According to legend, in Tang Dynasty there was a peasant girl in south China named “Liu San Jie” who loved to sing folk songs. Young guys within a radius of hundred miles came here singing in antiphonal style to ask for her love, but she fell in love with Li Xiaoniu of her village.

In the early years after establishment of New China (1949), many movies were produced based on stories of certain minority ethnic groups. Although these movies had different themes, depicted different figures, presented different times, they all spontaneously showed the simplicity of the folk customs, beautiful minds, and unique ethnic tradition of singing and dancing of these minorities to broader Chinese audience.

“Why Are the Flowers So Red” was originally an interlude in a popular 1960s spy movie “Visitors on the Icy Mountain”. It was based on an old Tajik dance music. In order to allow the music to reveal a sense of time and space, Composer Lei Zhenbang appropriately slowed down the speed of the original music in the process of adaptation. The music after adaptation has a kind of feeling of distant and vast space.