As part of the effort to tackle the impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak on the performing arts market, Beijing Culture and Arts Fund, which was founded by Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, has extended its application date and adjusted the schedule of performances of fund-supported projects. The fund will also increase financial support for smaller performing companies.

One of the projects, which received money from the Beijing Culture and Arts Fund in 2019, is a music education program initiated by Chinese folk singer Gong Linna. According to Zheng Honglin, who is in charge of Gong's program, it is about training young talent to adapt traditional Chinese poetry into songs as a way to promote and preserve traditional Chinese poetry.

Consisting of three parts: vocal training, traditional Chinese poetry research and anthropology of music, the program was scheduled to be launched on Feb 10 in Beijing, but has now been commuted into an online course through popular podcast platform, Himalaya FM.Since Feb 10, the online program has been listened to about 80,000 times.

Zheng adds that the future of the singer's upcoming tour of 10 performances－in which she will sing songs written by her husband, German composer Robert Zollitsch, about the 24 solar terms, a traditional Chinese calendar that summarizes different seasonal phenomena and helps to guide agricultural production－is still under discussion and may be postponed or even canceled.

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