Rediscovering centuries-old music and lyrics of ancestors

One of his most memorable performances came during Tiam Drop's first appearance at the festival in Quanzhou. The group performed at night, surrounded by darkness and silence.

"It felt like a scene from ancient times," he recalls, "like people secretly going out to meet their lovers."

Nanyin, which was inscribed in 2009 on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is deeply rooted in the culture of the Minnan region of southern Fujian and in Minnan communities overseas. Sung in the Quanzhou dialect, it is known for its slow, elegant melodies and distinctive instruments, including the dongxiao bamboo flute and the horizontally held pipa (a four-stringed Chinese lute).

Its repertoire preserves ancient melodies, poetry and stories, while its influence can be found in other traditional performing arts, including opera and puppet theater. For Minnan communities in China and across Southeast Asia, Nanyin has also long served as a musical link to home and cultural identity.

Tiam Drop's program for the music festival will feature some of the best-known Nanyin pieces, including Entering the Garden, whose elegant, flowing melody draws listeners into the tradition's distinctive minimalist aesthetic, and Galloping Horse, an instrumental classic that evokes the movement and vitality of horses.

For each piece, the group follows a principle. Cai sums it up simply: "No changes, only arrangements."

The ancient lyrics and melodies remain intact. But the musicians carefully create a contemporary auditory environment around them, giving modern listeners another way into music created long before the age of pop songs, albums or even modern song titles.

Many traditional Nanyin pieces, Cai notes, are simply named after their opening line.

"The music is so old that it comes from a time when songs didn't even have titles in the way we understand them today."

Tiam Drop initially experimented with a larger number of modern instruments. But Cai gradually realized that contemporary sounds could sometimes compete with Nanyin rather than support it.

So the group began moving in the opposite direction.

"The more we do this, the more we think about Nanyin itself," he says. "We don't ask how to make it sound more modern. We ask how to make it sound more like Nanyin."

Among the six musicians is Zheng Mingming, whose relationship with Nanyin could hardly be more different from Cai's.

When Zheng was about 5 years old, she loved sitting beside her grandmother and listening to her sing ancient songs in the Minnan dialect. Her grandmother, a regular performer at a Nanyin hall in Quanzhou, knew hundreds of songs by heart.

For Zheng, Nanyin was the soundtrack of her childhood — heard at family gatherings, festivals and quiet afternoons at home. The tradition has been passed down through her family for five generations.

"Nanyin is not just music; it's a way of life, filled with human warmth," she says. "It contains a whole universe — music, rituals, culture and so much more."

Many Nanyin songs tell ancient stories of love, longing and separation, while some suites can last more than 40 minutes.

"It's like reading a book," Zheng says, "but even more enjoyable because you can sing and play it."

That connection between music and everyday life is also what Cai finds most remarkable.

As a child, he remembers walking past informal Nanyin performances in Quanzhou and seeing elderly listeners moved to tears. At the time, he could not understand why.

Later, he began to see Nanyin as a form of cultural memory.

Quanzhou's history as a maritime trading center helped carry the music to Southeast Asia, where generations of Minnan communities continued to perform and preserve it.

"For someone who has been away from home for decades, hearing these songs again may mean hearing the music of their childhood," Cai says.

In recent years, Tiam Drop has performed in China and overseas, including in South Korea and Malaysia. The group was also recognized in 2023 by the Global Awards for World Heritage Education Innovative Cases, an international initiative promoting innovative approaches to heritage education.

Yet Cai remains remarkably modest about the group's role.

"It's not because we're so great," he says. "It's because our ancestors were so great."

For his generation, he believes, the task is simpler: to approach traditional Chinese music with sincerity, responsibility and respect.

After years of writing his own songs, Cai says he eventually learned something unexpected: sometimes the most exciting music waiting to be discovered is not new at all.

"Sometimes, it has simply been there for hundreds of years, waiting for someone to listen again," he says.