The couple is known to be passionate about reviving traditional Chinese music by infusing the genre with a contemporary twist. They've adapted Chinese poems of the Song Dynasty (960-1127) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907) into Chinese songs. In 2017, they selected 24 traditional poems and turned each of them into a song with a title reflecting the 24 solar terms from the traditional Chinese calendar.

Zollitsch lives in Germany with their two sons due to the pandemic. He says his spoken Chinese has degraded, as the chance to talk to Chinese in daily life is rare now. But his interest in adapting classical Chinese lyrics into music seems to have grown more. He recently wrote songs by using excerpts from Shijing, or the Book of Songs, an ancient Chinese collection of poems.

"Often I select a poem before sleeping, read it several times and wait for a feeling of sound rising up in me, a taste of the melody, how it has to flow, how its rhythm has to be. Then the next morning I sit down and start composing, and often by the evening the song is finished. Of course, I continue with some corrections and some fine-tuning for a couple of days more, and then the production of the song is still a separate and pretty big piece of work. But the song itself, its basic idea, structure, melody, is done within a day," he says.

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn