You Have No Choice

The idea and title of the music programme are based on the novel "You Have No Choice" by Liu Sola, singer, composer, author and curator of this project. In this book, which attracted great attention in China, Liu Sola portrays her final-year class at the conservatory in Beijing. This class produced the most prominent composers of contemporary Chinese music. They belonged to the first generation of music students to begin studying (again) after the Cultural Revolution. Above all, theirs was the first generation to distance itself from the propaganda aesthetics of the Revolution. The students began to re-evaluate tradition and search consistently for new forms and individual languages.