Ma Sicong

China's first-generation violinist and composer. He went to France to study at eleven, founded the China Symphony Orchestra on his return, and became the first president of the Central Conservatory of Music after 1949. Humiliated during the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he escaped by boat from Guangzhou to Hong Kong with his family in 1967 and went on to the United States; he was a wanted man for the next twenty years, cleared only in 1985, and died in Philadelphia before he could return.

Nostalgia, written in 1937 as the war broke out, takes its theme from the Suiyuan folk song 'Riding on the City Wall' and is the most widely played piece in the Chinese violin repertoire. He joined the European violin idiom to Chinese folk material without visible seams, which was rare at the time.