12 Girls rock the classics
 |
12 Girls Band has become a musical sensation in China and Japan.
Story Tools
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
|
Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.
Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
|
|
(CNN) -- It's a tried and trusted technique in the world of pop music these days. Take a young classically trained female musician; add a healthy dose of makeup, some club couture and you've got a star in the making.
But the latest incarnation of this pop product from China has a point of difference. Or should that be twelve points of difference.
Tina Sun spent her childhood in a strict musical conservatory in Beijing. But she has come a long way from those days. Now she plays to big audiences as part of 12 Girls Band, a new music sensation in China and Japan.
The twenty-one year-old began mastering the two-stringed erhu at the age of eight. But while her love for the instrument wasn't instantaneous, all her practice has taken Tina a long way from home. With her eleven fellow classically trained musicians, she's giving the humble erhu a new audience, and not just in China.
Last northern summer, 12 Girls Band's first album sold more than two million copies in Japan and they're selling out concerts all over Asia.
"I think our popularity is due to the way we present our music," says Tina.
"Our manager's vision was to take classical music and meld it together with modern music in a way that represented both the old and the new."
The group's repertoire includes pieces from Beethoven, jazz favorites and their own take on traditional Chinese folk songs.
There are strong similarities between 12 Girls Band and the British group Bond, the female foursome who also sold a lot of albums with their upbeat versions of the classics.
While their Chinese counterparts also do their own version of Bond's hit 'Victory', they deny they're merely a Chinese copy.
"We're not the same as them at all," says Wang Xiao-jing, 12 Girls Band manager.
"Their music is Western music. They're good and we've incorporated some of the Western influences but in terms of momentum, the 12 Girls Band is much more forceful."
And the 12 Girls Band is setting its sights further afield than Asia. Tina, her erhu and the rest of the band aim to break into the U.S. market later this year.
