No matter where you come from, music is a language everyone understands.

That was the message floating in the auditorium of Heritage Woods Secondary School in Port Moody, British Columbia Saturday night. The Nanjing University Student Traditional Instrument Orchestra had been getting across that message through their melodies in every concert during their two-week tour across Canada.

"Nowadays we say we are in a global village, so cross cultural communication is becoming more and more a phenomenon in the world and people want to understand each other, their language and their culture," said Aimin Cheng, dean and professor of the Institute for International Students at Nanjing University.

"Chinese language and culture in the past used to be kind of mythical to Westerners, but actually it's not, it's very beautiful. So we would like to share our own cultural experience to let people in other cultural backgrounds see what Chinese culture really is," he said.

In fact, every year the orchestra's student members close their books for two weeks, pack their bags, and take their show on the road, playing traditional Chinese folk music to audiences around the world to promote Chinese traditional culture and cross cultural understanding.

The orchestra was founded in 1996 with the goal of promoting traditional Chinese culture, popularizing the classical arts, and giving students a well-rounded education in the process.

The orchestra's members are not music students; rather they are students of literature, history, law, economics, sciences, or other fields.

They join the orchestra simply for the love of the music, and the joy of bringing that music to other cultures.

Over the past 15 years, the orchestra has given over 400 performances of nearly 100 pieces of traditional Chinese music. It has been played throughout Europe, Asia, and North America, and has been invited to play at some of the world's most prestigious universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard.

The orchestra plays folk music from throughout China, using traditional string and wind instruments such as the er hu, and pi pa.

This year's Canadian tour had a special Spring Festival theme featuring a children's dance troupe, and Spring Festival music. The tour hit six cities across Canada, including Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, and Edmonton before arriving in Port Moody.

In each city, they played for audiences at Confucius institutes and classrooms-public institutions that are usually based out of high schools or universities and aim to promote the Chinese language and culture.

Port Moody's Confucius Classroom was the first of its kind in British Columbia.

"Most of the audience were students or parents who have kids who are in Confucius Classrooms, so it gives them a sense of what the language looks like, where the culture is in a musical expression, rather than just in a classroom," said Thomas Grant, superintendent of schools, school district 43 in Port Moody.

"So for us it was a wonderful opportunity to look at another component of Chinese culture in our own setting here, and it was just an amazing evening," he said.

The traditional experience for audience did not stop at the music, which ranged from bubbling orchestral symphonies to string and vocal solos.

Performers and directors in the orchestra donned glamorous costumes in bright red, yellow, and sequined blue, and told the history of each piece of music and instrument played as the concert went along.

"It was something new for me, even though I was from China myself. I've never had a lot of opportunities to see this sort of thing, so it was definitely very nice of them to come here and do that sort of cultural exchange," said George Cheng, an engineering student from Simon Fraser University who attended the concert with his family.

"Especially the kind of professionalism that was demonstrated by these students here today really impressed me as a university student myself, so I must say it was really a great pleasure to be here and to be able to witness this fabulous performance," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency February 20, 2011)