From two traditions, one true sound

“Fusion? Everything in music is fusion. Stravinsky is fusion. Shostakovich is fusion. Debussy is fusion. Brahms is fusion. . . . I’m fusion. Of course it’s possible.’’

The cross-pollination of Eastern and Western musical traditions is the subject of a concert tomorrow evening at Jordan Hall, presented by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts. Participants include Wu Man, a virtuoso of the pipa, a Chinese lute; violinist Lynn Chang; percussionist Robert Schulz and the BeatCity Art Ensemble; and the conductorless chamber orchestra A Far Cry. Various iterations of these performers will play works by Lou Harrison, a San Francisco-based composer steeped in Asian musical traditions, and Chen Yi, a Chinese-born composer whose music synthesizes the folk music of her homeland with Western modernism.

“What we’re seeing here is almost a new form of art as a result of, I guess the key word people like to use these days is ‘hybridization,’ ’’ says Chang, who curated tomorrow’s concert. “[It’s] people using influences to create new forms of expression.’’ His words echo a quote of Harrison’s: “Don’t put hybrids down,’’ he said in a BBC interview, “because there isn’t anything else.’’

When Chang was putting the concert together, he wanted it to center on Harrison’s Concerto for pipa and strings. Written in 1997, it was the composer’s last large-scale work. (He died in 2003 at 85.) Chang explains that the concerto’s second movement is a suite of sub-movements, each of which shows off a different aspect of the pipa’s character - in one section imitating a balalaika, in another sounding like a Chinese mandolin. In one section, those playing the pipa, a cello, and a bass all tap out rhythms on their instruments, a nod to early Chinese percussion.

“It is a culmination of all he’d worked on during his lifetime,’’ Chang says of the piece. “This is, in a sense, his final will and testament.’’

The concerto was written for Wu, with whom Chang had first collaborated in 2005. At that time they played “Ning,’’ Chen Yi’s stark and disquieting trio for pipa, violin, and cello that commemorates the Japanese invasion of the city of Nanking. Like Bright Sheng, Chen is one of a number of Chinese composers who have found a way to integrate Western and Eastern traditions into a unified language.

“I think for many years, ever since I grew up, we’ve had a lot of Asian performers,’’ Chang explains. “But it’s only in the last 20 years, or less than that, that Asian composers have made their place - people like Tan Dun, Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, and a number of younger ones. The creativity side is catching up to the performer side - they’re bringing their own experience to it.’’

Chen’s musical path was remarkable, and in some cases harrowing. Born in 1953, she grew up in a musical family and was playing piano at age 3, violin at 4; the sounds of Western classical music were part of her vocabulary from early on.

During the Cultural Revolution, she was forced to spend two years as a farmer in the Chinese countryside. To keep her spirits up, she practiced on violin by fitting Paganini caprices into revolutionary songs, which were the only music allowed. Call it an early cross-cultural mash-up.

“When they recognize the tune, they won’t stop you playing,’’ she says by phone from her home in Kansas City, where she teaches music at the University of Missouri. “That way you can keep moving. That was the way for me to survive.’’

For the next eight years, until the Cultural Revolution ended, Chen served as concertmaster of a Beijing opera orchestra. In addition to the 40-member Western orchestra, the ensemble included a 20-piece group playing traditional Chinese instruments.

The mixing of Eastern and Western instruments that takes place in many of her works - including the “Ancient Dances’’ for pipa and percussion, also written for Wu - was no artificial construct. It was a fact of her life as a working musician.

“I got to learn all these naturally from my work,’’ she says. “They sat next to me. I learned not only the sound but also help them to copy parts because these people don’t know Western notation.’’

Even when she writes for Western instruments, that familiarity with traditional Chinese instruments often works its way in, as two pieces on tomorrow’s program demonstrate. “Sprout,’’ for strings, derives its material from an ancient melody for the Ch’in, a Chinese zither. In “Romance and Dance,’’ two solo violins and strings imitate the Ch’in and the Hsiao, a vertical bamboo flute.

Chen entered Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1978 and later earned a doctorate at Columbia University, studying with composers Mario Davidovsky and Chou Wen-chung. While Eastern and Western traditions both run strong in her musical persona, Chen herself no longer thinks in terms of two separate languages. They have been fused into something uniquely hers.

“I believe composition is a unique process in your own language,’’ she says. “If I know both languages well enough, it becomes the language of my own voice. I just speak it naturally.’’

For more information on the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, go to www.chineseperformingarts.net.