The moment Chinese composer Peng-Peng Gong remembers most vividly from a China-US concert in Philadelphia did not happen under the stage lights, but during a break. A horn player from the Philadelphia Orchestra knocked on his dressing-room door and asked if he was the composer. When Gong said yes, she told him that his work was beautiful and that she and her colleagues were thoroughly enjoying playing it.
"Only then did the tension I had been carrying for half a year finally ease," Gong recalled. "That one sentence meant more to me than a front-page headline in The New York Times."
It was January 2019. About 100 musicians from the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra were preparing to perform side by side at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.
The special Chinese New Year concert was being held as China and the United States were marking the 40th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations.
The centerpiece of the concert was Gong's Symphony No. 10, Peking Fantasy, a work co-commissioned by the two orchestras and inspired by Peking Opera.
The Philadelphia Orchestra had made history in 1973 as the first US orchestra to tour the People's Republic of China. Nearly half a century later, Gong was bringing to its home stage a work steeped in a traditional Chinese art form and written in the language of the Western symphony.
Gong's own musical life has also unfolded across the two countries. He grew up in China in the 1990s, when piano and Western classical music were becoming increasingly popular. His father was a piano teacher, and Gong's childhood ambition was to become a concert pianist. At 9, he was accepted into the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School in New York.
Looking back, Gong said his upbringing in China and his musical education in the US went into shaping the artist he has become. His years in the US, he said, exposed him to an approach that placed particular value on individuality and encouraged him to find a voice of his own.
"It allowed me to retain my own cultural traditions and attachment to my country without losing myself," Gong said. "That is probably the main reason I can move relatively freely between East and West today."
Gong initially trained as a pianist at Juilliard before deciding to turn to composition. He remains grateful, he said, that the school respected that decision and gave him room to pursue a different path.
After graduating in 2014, Gong returned to China and became composer-in-residence with the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra. He is now also a council member of the Chinese Musicians Association.
In Peking Fantasy, those different musical experiences found expression in the same work. Gong chose Peking Opera, which he describes as a quintessential Chinese art form, as its central inspiration. He even incorporated the roaring laughter of Xiang Yu, the self-styled "Hegemon-King of Western Chu", as portrayed by renowned Peking Opera artist Shang Changrong, into what he described as "thunderous, Hollywood-style orchestration".
Gong joked that US citizens in the hall may not have understood the words from Peking Opera, while Chinese members in the audience may not have "understood" every note he had written in the technical sense. Yet the audience of more than 2,000 rose to its feet and cheered for five minutes, he recalled.
Among those listening to the concert was Andrew Thomas, Gong's first composition teacher at Juilliard. Thomas had long wanted his former student to move beyond what Gong described as highly accomplished imitation of earlier masters and find something distinctly his own.
After hearing the symphony, Thomas described it as an artistic experience that could make people "forget the composer, forget race and forget ideas" and return to "the fundamental experience of being human".
"For me, that was the ultimate praise I could have dreamed of," Gong said.
The ups and downs in China-US relations in the years since have had little effect on the friendships he has forged among musicians from the two countries. "People may have different ideas because of their different cultural backgrounds, but their love for this art is completely equal," he said. "Our common passion for art is almost like a spiritual United Nations."
When the broader political environment becomes more difficult, Gong said, people may cherish such shared languages even more. His years in China and the US make him reluctant to separate one cultural experience from the other. "Without either half, I could not be who I am today," he said.
If Chinese and US musicians were to commission another work from him, Gong said he would aspire to create something in the spirit of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony, often known as Symphony of a Thousand. What attracts him is not its monumental scale, but the way it can bring together things that might otherwise seem unable to coexist.
He does not want classical music to become "a museum of sound", sealed away from ordinary life, or to be regarded merely as an elite pastime. "It is an art that can reach the deepest emotions of the human heart," Gong said. "As long as people are willing to quiet down and listen, what we hear is never just the composer or the performer. What we hear is our truest selves — and a reason to live life well."
For Gong, that is also what he hopes Chinese and US musicians and audiences can continue to hear in one another.
