Alex Ho and Britain's Chinese diaspora step into their Cinderella moment...
On a hot summer evening at Southbank Centre, Alex Ho gets risqué: he invites his audience to follow Chinese custom by removing their shoes. The sweaty couple sitting in front of me exchanges shocked glances. 'This’ll be different!' one eagerly says to the other.
What follows is an hour-long tale of Ye Xian, surprisingly familiar Chinese folklore: a kind woman trapped by a wicked stepmother and stepsister, who gets supernatural help to attend a royal ball, then leaves a shoe — but written almost 1,000 years before the Grimm brothers’ Cinderella.
It’s Ho’s show but he shares the stage with five other musicians, their personal anecdotes intersecting the fable. Flautist Daniel Shao balancing being 'the Chinese kid' in London and a wàiguórén (foreigner) in Beijing. Countertenor Keith Pun remembering his auntie telling him, 'Dreams can’t be eaten like rice.' Erhu player Ziyang Huang summoning bravery for a guitar duet in London. Percussionist Joanne Chiang bartering with Buddha in a Taiwanese temple to become a vegetarian for six months if she aces a British audition. Percussionist Beibei Wang talking about how she 'escaped the fridge' as a shèngnǚ (leftover single woman) by coming to London at the ripe old age of 26: 'I’m not leftover; I’m marinating.' And composer-conductor-pianist Ho’s own trauma of Sinophobic slurs spat by snickering children in the wake of Covid cruelty. The performance ends with Yuè Guāng Guāng, a Cantonese lullaby inviting both rest and dreams.
The musicians’ intimacy expands the fairytale into their own Cinderella moments of finding their fit. 'In her misery, Ye Xian forgot what it was to be accepted,' Ho tells the crowd. He may still struggle with acceptance, but he is well past misery.
Alex Ho: a British composer of Chinese heritage
He credits Minor Feelings, a 2020 collection of essays by Cathy Park Hong. 'I don’t think I’ve ever felt so seen or heard. It’s articulated so precisely but also so playfully,' Ho tells me. 'It made me think much more actively about artistic expression in community.'
Ho is a living rebuttal to Sir Antonio Pappano’s criticism earlier this year that 'British classical music is being left behind by China.' Ho leaves nothing behind but his reluctance. When words fail, music speaks; when whole languages have failed Ho — Cantonese, English, Mandarin — his music doesn’t speak. It roars. Like Ye Xian, it’s a zeitgeist, a millennium in the making.
At the Southbank concert, Ho sports a blue silk tángzhuāng, a vestige of a one-and-done photo shoot from years ago. It collected dust in his closet until a Windsor Castle reception this year with King Charles III in attendance. 'I wasn’t particularly comfortable. I’m not into monarchy,' he tells me later. 'I spent so much of my life trying to assimilate. I didn’t want to perpetuate that narrative.'
Beyond Chinese basics in British life like tea, rhubarb, silk, porcelain and takeaways, the cultures are inexorably entwined. The Premier League has had as many as 300 million Chinese viewers for a single match, dwarfing British viewership. Since 1834, Liverpool has housed Europe’s oldest Chinatown. And the first foreign university in China was the University of Nottingham in 2004.
According to UK government data, 47.2 percent of ethnically Chinese people in Britain are aged 18 to 34 — more than twice the White British rate of 20.3 percent and in fact higher than all other ethnic groups (that’s before a post-pandemic surge in Hong Kong immigration after pro-democracy crackdowns there). British arts organisations keen to build young audiences would do well to focus on Chinese repertoire.
Alex Ho: a composer with double-outsider status
Enter Ho, 32. London-born, trained at Cambridge and Oxford, cofounding the cross-cultural music collective Tangram (who are also associate artists at LSO St Luke’s), mentored by Guggenheim Fellow Huang Ruo and Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, and now working as a resident composer at Glyndebourne, Ho has a people-pleasing pedigree for the powers that be. Yet he retains an almost-abrasive alacrity for agency as an artist. He has leveraged his double-outsider status as British-born Chinese into a strength, transforming ethnically Chinese identity from an obstacle course to a playground.
'China is a plural noun,' he tells me over builders’ tea at his Edwardian home in Nottingham (consequently, he always discusses 'Chinese cultures', never the singular). He refuses to be pigeon-holed — or pidgin-holed — swinging from The Glass Eye, his 2022 dystopian song cycle about humans becoming worms, to a musical mashup with five comedians in February 2026 that plans a counter-mockery of European orientalism. Or a nascent horror opera inspired by Get Out, Parasite and Last Night in Soho.
'Alex and I joked we had the same bio because there was really only one path back then — but Alex and Tangram empowered me to do stuff I believe in,' says Rockey Sun Keting, 32, a Chinese-born composer who became a co-director of Tangram in 2023. 'There are so many cultural differences in the Chinese diaspora. That’s exactly why it’s exciting. We’re not polarised. It’s not one side against another. There are so many sides.'
Huang Ruo: a mentor for Alex Ho
Handel added trombones to orchestras. Mozart added clarinets. Shostakovich added glockenspiels. Ho and his vanguard are adding something far more radical. Any musician knows the ensemble elegance of instruments themselves; ethnically Chinese musicians have an astute recognition of the orchestral qualities of each other — whether from Beijing, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Kolkata, Kyoto, Manchester, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tower Hamlets or Vancouver. In their collective Cinderella moment, it’s glass slippers for everyone.
'It speaks volumes of various British cultural entities and organisations,' says Huang Ruo, 49, the globally sought-after Chinese-born composer who mentored Ho. 'The big shift is away from monolith in contemporary music. More variety. More voices. More styles. Different composers. Different cultures. All telling our own stories in our own voices. Its mosaic is so much more colourful than a melting pot. We maintain our shapes, our identities, our accents.'
Far from a London-only renaissance, the fresh reach and allure of Chinese diasporic composition is epitomised by Huang, who last year debuted both his radically immersive City of Floating Sounds in Manchester and performed his redemptive retelling of Puccini, M Butterfly, in London — and this year had a sold-out run of his mythic Book of Mountains and Seas in Edinburgh.
Ho has even more irons in the fire. Critics call him 'experimental' and he scoffs. 'It’s only an experiment if you’re unsure of the outcome,' he says. 'I know what I’m doing.'
'The Chinese diaspora has created their own culture'
Paul Hughes, former longtime director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who is now a top global consultant for classical music competitions, festivals, and students remembers being a juror in Beijing: 'These anonymous scores were wonderfully orchestrated, imaginatively orchestrated, with wonderful colours. But all the same, it concerned me that, in asking who the composers were writing for, their answer was, "Well, we’re writing for you." The Chinese diaspora, by contrast, has created their own culture. It hasn’t set out to appeal, but it does because it has something to say. Something new. The impact is not because they’re Chinese; it’s because of what they’re writing.'
Britain’s rising tide has also lifted the pastiche riffs of Hong Kong-born London composer Raymond Yiu, 52, whose hyper-referential style toys with the Chinese national anthem and EastEnders intro alike. In his debut Violin Concerto last year — a tribute to Ma Sicong, China’s exiled 'king of violins' — Yiu calls the standout solo an 'elaborated transcription' of a 1974 erhu tune. This year, he premiered Chinese Whispers, which sets to music text of his that he says was redacted by 'a certain Asian orchestra for its Beethoven 250 celebration in 2020'.
In his chapter on transcultural composing in The Cambridge Companion to Composition, Yiu finds kinship with Bartók’s 'double bind of being Hungarian and aspiring to success abroad'. Similarly, Ho is developing a response to Mahler’s own response to Chinese poetry. Both embody resonant reclamation.
Back at Southbank on an autumn afternoon, Ho catches Taiwanese artist Val Lee’s debut solo UK exhibition at Hayward Gallery. 'I like to experience as much as I can,' he says, 'but you have to know you’ll miss some things.' He still regrets missing last year’s West End production of Spirited Away. So much has been missed.
Early Chinese music in Britain... so much is unknown
Other than an impromptu qin performance in 1756 London, little is known of early Chinese music in Britain. The songs sung by Chinese Limehouse dockworkers are mostly lost to time. English Heritage’s embrace of Chinese British history is largely limited to a Notting Hill blue plaque for the 20th-century writer Lao She.
Yiu’s Original Chinese Conjuror (2006) and Corner of a Foreign Field (2019) have elevated some Chinese British history. And for years Ho has orbited Michael Shen Fu-Tsung, Britain’s first recorded Chinese immigrant — in 1687 — whose portrait was commissioned by King James II and whose life brims with European spectacle. But it’s a challenging history, full of rumour and misunderstanding, saddled by centuries of British ignorance and disrespect.
Chinese composers in Britain... a new dawn
At the same time, Ho bristles at being braided and bridled by history and heritage. He aches for his humanity to be his identity, full stop. 'I hate my work being called Chinese music,' he tells me. 'I’ve composed music about chess. It’s not always tied to being Chinese.'
Certainly, ethnically Chinese composers in Britain today still struggle with day-to-day racism. Ho routinely gets mistaken as a waiter at Japanese restaurants. Brits compliment Sun’s English as if her competence is surprising. And Yiu’s husband, who is white, often speaks in an orientalist accent.
Their lives are unprecedented. Now, after countless challenges, they are generationally empowered to be who they needed when they were starting out. There’s a Mandarin word, zhōngyì — more than like, less than love; Britain’s Chinese diaspora are enjoying their zhōngyì era, yet still improvising their paths, their practices, and their successes.
'Ancient Chinese music was all improvisation,' Wang reminds the Ye Xian audience. 'It wasn’t about perfection. It was about presence: the breath, the silence, the space between two notes — that was the music. Then modern China discovered Beethoven and Bach… accurate and precise. We chased Western classical music so hard we forgot that improvisation was ours, too. I love improvising. It feels ancient, wild, awkward — but completely free. Improvising isn’t about what you play. It’s not about you. It’s about how you listen, how you connect yourself with the world, and how you take responsibility to free yourself.”
Ho is free. He knows his duty is to help free others — musicians and audiences alike.
Alexander the Great – Alex Ho on three pivotal works
Vanishing Point (2016)
‘In my first professional work, the Shanghai Philharmonic commissioned me to write for erhu and it was the first time I wrote for Chinese instruments. I had never heard of the erhu, actually. My mum was shocked. It unlocked something internally – not compositionally or sonically, but about myself. The final result imagines a distant horizon moving further away, which is how I felt at the time about losing touch with my heritage.’
Unveiling (2022)
‘While I was artist-in-residence at Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, they commissioned my whacky fanfare for a singing orchestra. It can be difficult to raise our voices. So, I asked the orchestra – untrained in singing – to literally raise their voices, something we should all do more. I hope it brought up questions for the audiences: what do we do with unfamiliarity, rawness and discomfort?’
Bound/Unbound (2024)
‘I combined Chinese sword dance and Western opera. Created with Sun Keting for Tangram and the LSO, we tell the stories of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in the US, and Qiu Jin, the feminist Qing Dynasty revolutionary. The goal was to draw connections not just across culture but across time.’
