A recent typical winter morning in Beijing was the day the Grammy Awards were presented in Los Angeles, and across the Pacific Ocean, many Chinese were constantly refreshing Internet pages for updates.

But a German composer who’s living in China thinks the Grammys are not the end-all, be-all and is working to promote traditional Chinese music with modern sensibilities.

“Grammy is a North American pop music award. It pretends to be the most international awards that cover lots of genres, but it is not. We can learn from it, we can be very happy about receiving it, but it’s not ours,” Robert Zollitsch says to start an exclusive interview in Beijing with Shanghai Daily.

“For me, it is most boring to copy North American pop music, to take Grammy as the worldwide standard as what we should achieve in the music,” he adds.

The 49-year-old composer and producer uses the word “we” throughout the interview, mainly as “we Chinese musicians.”

Born, raised and musically trained in Germany, Zollitsch is now one of the most widely known foreigners in China, where he is addressed as Lao Luo, with Luo taken from the first syllable of “Robert.”

In China, adding Lao (old) in front of the name is a typical way to call someone casually. Zollitsch changed the character often used in names to a different one with the same pronunciation that means luogu, or gong, to be musically relevant.

Lao Luo is also known as the husband and producer of Gong Linna, a singer who became a household name since she performed a song titled “Tante,” or “Disturbed,” at a New Year’s concert in Beijing in early 2010.

The wordless song, written and produced by Lao Luo, fused a variety of different singing styles and voices from traditional Chinese opera, accompanied by a combination of different traditional instruments. It was a shock to Chinese audiences — a song that was hard to categorize into any existing genre yet clearly drew influences from traditional Chinese music and operas.

The video of the performance soon went viral on the Internet, attracting many pop musicians and comedians to cover or make parodies of it.

“‘Tante’ represented the state of mind of contemporary Chinese,” Gong said in an interview shortly after her success with the song. “When I was little, every home was about the same, and it didn’t make a difference whether you had money or not. But today, Chinese struggle between money and dreams. For many people, their values and faiths are challenged. This process is very tante (disturbed), but it also inspires a lot of energy, because the country is moving forward all the time.”

As Gong became increasingly popular across the country, Chinese people were surprised to discover that the song’s producer and composer, Lao Luo, was a foreigner.

Since their success, the couple have seen “promoting Chinese traditional music” as their mission. They have released many songs quite different from “Tante” and from each other, but all present a heavy influence from traditional music, folk tales and ancient poems. Gradually, the songs have come to be categorized as “New Chinese Music” and the couple is considered the founder of this new genre.

“How do you create music that can represent 21st-century China?” Lao Luo says when asked the definition of this genre. “It’s like poetry. Nowadays children are learning traditional poems, and many specialists research and talk about these poems and their complex themes, but it doesn’t help today’s people understand the texts by heart, doesn’t help them connect with the spirit of the poems.”

In Lao Luo’s music, there is extensive use of Chinese classic music elements as well as ancient texts, and the couple have also been self-sponsoring and organizing salons on traditional Chinese poems.

“Such kind of music needs to have its own identity, and that’s a question of cultural identity,” he says.

Lao Luo is strongly opposed to the idea that “what is local is also international,” particularly in the music industry.

“The very traditional, very local sounds require a lot of knowledge of the culture to understand,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean it can’t be turned international, but not by itself. You need to speak to the world with an international language.”

Prior to Gong, the German musician has successfully produced singers Urna, Qiu Ji, Luo Yan, among others known for bringing their traditional sounds to the world.

With Gong, he started from within China.

“My understanding of it is that music has to be actually appreciated by a big group of people locally first, and then you can say ‘yes, this music is international’,” he says.

In mid-February, the couple released a new song, “Once Upon a Time,” with a divine melody that takes the audience back to long ago, when “sky and earth were not yet separated” and tells the love story of a goddess from the sky and a king from the earth. Some of the lyrics were borrowed from the ancient mythic text “Shan Hai Jing,” or the “Classic of Mountains and Seas.”

In their collaboration, Lao Luo often composes the music and then Gong writes the lyrics. But on a few occasions, the German composer has also written the Chinese lyrics, sometimes relevant to ancient poems or folklore tales.

From the very beginning, his knot with China began with a question, “What is beauty in Chinese music?”

“Back then, my perception was that Chinese music was boring; it didn’t sound nice, and I couldn’t believe it,” Lao Luo recalls and explains his decision to come to China for the first time in 1993.

“It was only my perception, because I didn’t understand the country’s history or culture, and I didn’t understand its music. I couldn’t believe there isn’t something musically beautiful in Chinese music,” he says.

It was three years after he graduated from the prestigious Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin in 1990. He had already held a variety of jobs in the music industry and wanted to go somewhere else in the world.

He came across a tape with Chinese guqin, an ancient plucked seven-string Chinese instrument, and found it boring. He listened to more Chinese music, including the opera sounds, and found them “irritating to Western-trained ears,” he says.

“I realized I knew nothing about China, except for the few times I went to Chinese restaurants in Germany. And I wanted to find out more, to find out what beauty is in Chinese music.”

In 1993, the young German musician came to study guqin at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he met some young Chinese musicians with whom he formed a band and recorded a CD. With little knowledge of the country or its music, Lao Luo turned to the Bavarian zither, a folk instrument he learned in early childhood.

“It merges with folk music instruments from anywhere, and it is always my starting point with Chinese musicians,” he explains. “During that time, I learned quite a lot about Chinese music and how Chinese musicians themselves talked about it.”

At the beginning, everything was difficult, but there was one concept that confused him the most and took him many years to understand: yun.

“Of course you can translate it as elegance, or as flavor, but its meaning doesn’t quite come through these interpretations,” he says. “It doesn’t represent a condition of elegance, rather, in Chinese music, it is a movement rather than a condition. It is about how it goes, how it slides, how it moves, sort of like tai chi.”

Yun is exactly what Lao Luo considers lost in today’s Chinese traditional music scene. “In the conservatories, most erhu musicians are taught to play it like violin, and they have lost the sliding techniques that form the unique yun of erhu or Chinese traditional music,” he says. “It’s like the forming of a Chinese traditional orchestra. Today they are basically copies of Western orchestras — not only because they play a lot of Western classics, but also the whole combination of the instruments is a copy.”

He carries on with what he sees as a big misunderstanding about classical, traditional and modern music.

“When you think of classical music, most people say Western or European classical. They don’t think of Chinese, Persian or Indian — all the ancient cultures that have amazing musical traditions and splendid classical music,” he says.

Because of such ideas, he adds, erhu is often put as the central sound of a Chinese traditional orchestra, as mirroring the role of violins in the Western symphony orchestra. Erhu players, like other traditional instrument players, use Western techniques to present the Chinese instrument, losing the unique yun.

“But it shouldn’t be,” he says. “You must think about how to develop it, how the sound can evolve in modern times. The answer is definitely not copying Western music, which is so boring, like in the Chinese pop music scene.”

He proposes to put sheng, a reed pipe wind instrument, as the core instrument in Chinese traditional music.

“It is a very East Asian instrument, and it merges perfectly in an orchestra sound,” he explains. “The Chinese orchestra lacks variety in the bass instruments, and it is totally fine to use newly invented instruments or to use Western instruments in this section, but you must use the core elements like guzheng, yangqin, or pipa, properly. Most Chinese composers are trained through Western music and they don’t know how to write for these instruments, and how to bring the unique features out.”

He extends his criticism to the entire Chinese music industry, saying, “There is too little confidence in their own musical values, and too much looking to the West.”

“There is so much to be discovered in Chinese music traditions, but today’s Chinese musicians, especially in pop music business, means not sounding Chinese at all, the more it sounds like North American, the better. That is ridiculous!”

The German composer and producer never hides his criticism of the Chinese music business or Chinese musicians. He has voiced many critical comments toward famed musicians and popular TV shows.

“I see it as a responsibility for musicians to talk about the content of what can be a new Chinese sound,” he says. “It is important that people realize there is so much treasure still in Chinese music, and there is so much space to be developed.

“Based on such cultural roots, we can create a modern sound which speaks to the world, and shows the world what today’s Chinese are really thinking about and feeling.”

In the 1990s, after he studied guqin in Shanghai, Lao Luo went back to Germany before he came to Beijing again in 2002, where he connected with old friends, played, sang and gave concerts. It was at one of these concerts he met Gong, who was in the audience.

“At the time, she was already a successful minzu (‘national music’) singer, but she felt caged by the singing styles and methods she had learned since childhood,” he recalls.

“We did an improvisation together, and I immediately realized I found a big raw diamond, with a kind of directness, without borderline, no curtain in between. The presence of her sound is absolutely incredible, with yun, with 100 percent purity connected to her, the kind of things you can’t find often in a singer.”

The pleasant surprise was felt immediately from Gong’s side, as well, as recorded by an interview she gave shortly after her success with “Tante.”

“Lao Luo is the one who has changed my life,” she said. “Because of him, the nature of my music changed. I returned to innocence, to spiritual, to nature. The music he has composed has led me into the world of arts.”

Since then, the two performed as a duo in both China and Germany, where “once we were able to draw the audience, they were always surprised and satisfied,” Lao Luo says. “But it was always difficult to attract audience because of certain preconceptions and misunderstandings they had about China and about its music.

“The world is waiting for a sound from China, but there are still lots of obstacles in between, lots of misunderstandings.”

Lau Luo is now working on a collaborative project with New York-based contemporary classical music organization Bang on a Can. Each party will compose half of a song, which will be performed by Gong at the organization’s concert in New York in June.

“She is totally ready for the international stage,” he says.