After spending three years working and studying in Mainland China and Taiwan, 26-year-old Jeremy Moyer returned to Waterloo with a new love - Chinese folk music.

Before he went to China, first as a volunteer with a church exchange program, next to study Mandarin, and later to teach English and study music, Moyer had been active in the local music scene, performing and recording with South American group Huellas.

In Mainland China, Moyer studied erhu (two-stringed Chinese violin) in a conservatory setting to develop his technique. And last summer, in Taiwan, he met a 78-year-old master fiddler, Zhang Shi-Dong, who taught him centuries-old songs from the oral tradition.

"I had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with this elderly gentleman - he's a 78-year-old man who used to play Chinese folk opera music," Moyer says. "It's a little bit different because it's the folklore tradition - songs from the oral tradition. So he knows all these songs that have never been written down. He doesn't even know how to read music, but he just knew hundreds and hundreds of songs that he'd play and play and play. I spent a lot of time hanging around with people like that who knew all these songs by heart."

It was those songs that Moyer brought home with him, and 10 of them he recorded on his recently released, self-produced CD A Discovery of Chinese Folk Tunes.

"I had learned all these songs and I didn't want to forget them. That's the main reason I recorded the CD," Moyer says. "This is a style of music that a lot of young people, even in Taiwan and China, don't know anything about because it's music from the oral tradition and the oral tradition has kind of been forgotten. Things that are written down and things that are recorded are remembered."

"I'm not really trying to preserve this music, I just thought it was neat to be able to learn these songs and play a style of music that even a lot of younger Chinese people have never heard. Because of that, I tried to make the recording as traditional as possible, so I did a lot of the arrangements on a coconut shell fiddle, which has been around for hundreds of years. I tried to keep the essence of the music."

Moyer's CD A Discovery of Chinese Folk Tunes is available at Reader's Ink Bookshop and Ears 2 Hear.

Moyer will be performing June 29 at 2 p.m. at the Multicultural Festival in Victoria Park.