新时代曲计划
Reimagining Shidaiqu through jazz, cinematic scoring, and contemporary sound.
The New Shidaiqu Project is an ongoing cross-cultural initiative that brings the spirit of Shidaiqu into a contemporary musical context. The project involves music production, live shows, workshops, educational content, and film scoring inspired by Shidaiqu. It continues the legacy of a hundred-year-old genre while exploring new ways for traditional cultural elements to live inside modern sound.
The project unfolds in many forms. It includes the creation of a full-length album, touring performances, community-based workshops, video essays, and research-driven experiments. In film and game music, the project also reshapes Shidaiqu’s melodic and cultural language into a modern cinematic vocabulary. At its core, this project aims to encourage musicians from diverse backgrounds to rediscover their heritage instruments and integrate them into contemporary genres.
The New Shidaiqu Project, created by Si Scoring Studio and led by composers Siyi Chen and Yusi Liu, is proudly sponsored by the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre.
The New Shidaiqu Album reimagines classic melodies from early Shidaiqu works. Songs such as Rose, Rose, I Love You and Wuxi Scene are reconstructed with new harmonic structures, jazz textures, cinematic elements, and contemporary production aesthetics.
Cultural hybridity remains central to the album. African rhythmic languages and traditional African instruments play a meaningful role, acknowledging their influence on the origins of jazz. The album continues to grow with new compositions shaped by the cultural and technological shifts of our time.
So far, we have released
• 4 tracks on Bandcamp (2023)
• 1 track on SoundCloud
The project extends into film and game scoring. A representative example is the 2024 film Paeonia, in which we created the cue Flaming Departure by adapting the Cantonese folk song Bright Moon 月光光. The piece combines folk material with a cinematic texture that reflects both tradition and contemporary film scoring approaches.
This way of working has become a distinctive part of our scoring practice. Shidaiqu’s melodic sensibility brings emotional depth and cultural resonance to film and game narratives.
To expand the cultural presence of Shidaiqu, we produce ongoing video content that includes behind-the-scenes creation, historical introductions, and experimental short pieces that reinterpret Shidaiqu in modern contexts. These videos invite audiences to see how Shidaiqu extends across different eras, genres, and media.
We explore how Shidaiqu appears across different eras, genres, and media, from film scoring to hip hop sampling, and from historical sound to contemporary reinterpretation.
“I hope our attempts can bring Chinese instruments into the American music industry and encourage other musicians to try similar things.
Ethnic musical cultures are not decorations. They can become defining stylistic voices in modern soundtracks.”
We will soon launch a public workshop centered on Chinese instruments and cross-genre music-making. Participants are welcome to bring instruments from their own cultural backgrounds. The session will explore how traditional sounds can be merged with jazz, cinematic scoring, electronic production, or any other musical language. The workshop is designed not only to introduce Chinese music but to help others find ways to let their cultures speak naturally through sound.
