A TV classic spins anew on vinyl

"The music has continued to grow," Ye says. "It walked out of the television drama and became something independent."

Ye notes that many of the musical ideas developed in Jade Goddess of Mercy Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra never appeared in the earlier suite.

"In that sense, this album brings together nearly all the themes from the television drama that I felt deserved to be further developed and shared with a wider audience," says Ye.

For Ye, now one of China's most internationally recognized contemporary composers, the origins of Jade Goddess of Mercy still feel strangely fated.

He recalls buying Hai Yan's novel almost accidentally and reading it straight through. By the end, he had become convinced that the story demanded music. Not long afterward, director Ding Hei approached him to compose the score for the adaptation.

To prepare, Ye traveled to Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province, where parts of the drama were filmed. He observed local life, spoke with actors and immersed himself in the emotional atmosphere of the story.

Although he now describes the actual writing process as instinctive, he insists that spontaneity only becomes possible after deep emotional preparation.

The resulting music was unusually lyrical for Chinese television at the time, blending symphonic structure with an emotional openness more commonly associated with cinema than serialized drama. Some members of the production reportedly worried that the score sounded too classical and not commercially viable. Ye refused to simplify it.

The novelist Hai Yan later joked that the television series itself had become "a music video for Ye Xiaogang's music", because the production team became reluctant to cut scenes that carried the score's emotional momentum.

Over the years, the music developed a life beyond the series. Orchestras across China began performing the suite version regularly, and audiences continued to associate its melodies with a particular emotional atmosphere: restrained longing, romantic fatalism, and moral vulnerability.

The recording was completed in Berlin, Germany, in November 2024 with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under conductor Stefan Malzew.

"Even without a shared spoken language," Ye says, "music became our common language."

The afternoon also revisited Ye's long creative partnership with singer Zhu, whose performance of the drama's theme song became inseparable from the series' emotional identity.

Returning now to the music of Jade Goddess of Mercy after 25 years, Zhu describes how age has altered her understanding of the work.

"When I sang it years ago, there were emotions I could not fully understand," she says. "Now they feel very clear."

Time, she suggests, has softened the technical self-consciousness of youth. Her voice now moves more freely within the orchestral texture, particularly alongside the strings.

In contemporary China's entertainment industry, where soundtrack music is often designed for speed, algorithmic circulation and immediate commercial impact, the survival of Jade Goddess of Mercy feels increasingly unusual. Its endurance owes less to nostalgia alone than to the seriousness of its artistic ambition.

Ye spoke candidly during the discussion about what he sees as the shrinking creative space for composers in film and television today. Producers increasingly treat music as a functional background, he says, rather than as an equal narrative force.

For him, Jade Goddess of Mercy belongs to a different moment — one in which directors and composers were willing to shape scenes around musical ideas rather than merely decorate finished images with sound.

That philosophy also informs Ye's broader thinking about contemporary Chinese composition. Educated largely within Western classical traditions, he has long sought to reconcile European structural rigor with distinctly Chinese aesthetic sensibilities: restraint, silence, and emotional space.

But he warned against superficial forms of East-West fusion now common among younger artists.

True synthesis, he argues, must emerge from a deeper cultural consciousness rooted in Chinese philosophical traditions — ideas of harmony, coexistence and the relationship between humanity and nature.

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn