ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Those looking for a good musical experience will soon have just that with the next Community Concerts of Liberal show.

ArcoStrum, a duo comprised of TY Zhang and Straus Shi, will be performing at 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21 in Maskus Auditorium at Liberal High School.

Zhang said the duo came together in a somewhat unorthodox fashion.

“Our duo is called ArcoStrum, and it took us a while to came up with it with a lot of help. ‘Arco’ means the bow, and ‘Strum’ means the guitar. We're based on violin-guitar duet, so that's why we call ArcoStrum,” Zhang. “We were both born in China, though like I lived in China for about 18 years of my life before I came to the United States. Strauss grew up in San Francisco since he was about 6 years old with his whole musical family. We met in college, and now we both live in Los Angeles.”

“For us, this duo was never really a planned career path. We first met as roommates at Juilliard. TY was one year ahead of me, and in the beginning, we didn't really collaborate or play together that much,” Shi added. “But long story short, we had a friend group that did a fellowship at Juilliard, and we got to perform together as a quintet. Through that, we did one or two duo pieces together, and then fast forward, I graduated Juilliard and then I went to the University of Southern California (USC). TY went to USC as well for his doctorate, and then we reunited there after three years or so. We hadn’t really talked or hung out, and then once we reunited in Los Angeles, we got a special opportunity to perform for the first time as a duo in San Francisco in a concert, and through that we applied for a competition called Concert Artists Guild, which we won, and then from that then from there, ArcoStrum was born basically from that competition opportunity.”

Zhang and Shi agreed being a duo has been a great time.

“This is one of the luckiest and most fortunate things in both of our lives because we love to hang out and now, there's an extra reason for us to hang out while working together,” Zhang said.

“One of the most enjoyable parts for us is we enjoy the process of working together and we really love the process of rehearsing together. When we're preparing for the concerts, the competitions, it does not feel like work. During the day we do our own things like teaching, practicing, running errands, etc., but it could be 8 or 9 p.m. and we end up rehearsing a little bit, like one hour, and we got so excited every time. The working environment with us, I would describe it almost like dream time and the most ideal for any music environment. Working together is great because we’ve never fought, and our energy and goals are pretty in sync. We encourage each other even when we try some weird musical idea. Even if we know it won’t work, we go ahead and try it because that's our step into that artistic space. We love spending time together, and although we live very close to each other we rarely get to spend time with each other. But now it's a situation where we say ‘Let's get together to work,’ and we get to travel together as best friends and play music, and we love sharing music with the audience and making people laugh and making sure they have a great time.”

“Our relationship is basically every best friend's dream to get to do this, and I mean that in the most wholesome way,” Shi added. “If you have a best friend, you want to do everything with them, and ArcoStrum is basically us two best friends and we get to perform and rehearse and explore music together. I'm so lucky to be able to do this. And our unspoken definition of best friends is I feel very comfortable and I think we're on the same page when it comes to rehearsals and playing and everything else. And there have been a lot of times when there's been something we share with each other we don't even share with family. That is such a bonus in both of our lives, and we really treasure that dynamic.”

And the travel involved has also been great, Zhang said.

“Ever since we started working with Concert Artists Guild in 2023, every season has been growing more and more for us, and we travel to quite a lot of places,” Zhang said. “Right now we're on our first Midwest tour, and we've never ever done this such a long tour before. We're doing three Midwest tours this season, and that's the highlight of this season. We have 14 concerts all throughout the Midwest in four or five different states, and then next year in the whole March we're doing a third Midwest tour, which will last slightly more than a month. This year we're doing you know we're going to West Coast, the East Coast and several different cities. This year is probably our most packed year for concerts.”

And the duo is excited to bring that energy to Liberal, they agreed.

“We're really looking forward to exploring and coming to this new community of audiences and sharing our stories and music,” Shi said. “We really try to break the barrier distance between us and the audience, and we really look forward to understanding and knowing the audience and community. Every town we travel to is very unique, so we're really excited about that.”

“The best way I can describe our show is it’s going to be almost a musical party where everyone gets to join in on who we are as best friends,” Zhang added. “We’ll all get to laugh together, share moments, and share all sorts of different kinds of music together because our show is beyond a classical music concert for us. We’ll have some of the classics, like Vivaldi and Piazzolla, and they’ll be played on very unique Chinese instruments arranged by us, along with a few jazz tunes arranged by us. We want our show to feel more like a hangout and more interactive. It's not like we’ll talk to audience, but we want people feel more free, more comfortable, and just enjoy a great time together like we’re having a big party where we just play music.”