Tastemaker: Stacey Rodda, founder of Music Beyond Borders

Music Beyond Borders, an annual event that brings to Hong Kong a range of artists and rarely heard music from around the world, is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. And the person we have to thank for the series is RTHK producer/presenter Stacey Rodda, a New Yorker who seems to have been destined to bring her international approach to Hong Kong.

"I credit my grandmother's sister and also a huge globe I was given by my parents," she says.

"My great aunt was a women's fashion buyer for a major department store in New York City and travelled the world for business. She was stylish, confident and very much a free spirit who embraced the exotic and used to bring back beautiful things from Spain, India, the Middle East, Hong Kong… Her flat was like a museum and each piece had its own story. I would sit listening to her absolutely entranced and wanted to see these places for myself.

"I have now lived in four countries and have visited four times as many. After leaving New York, I found myself in Spain helping out with a family business - an on-location film production company. After that it was off to London and the BBC World Service, where my radio career began," she says.

Several years later while freelancing at Classic FM in London she heard of an opening for a presenter at Radio 4, the classical music and fine arts station at RTHK. The city may have been far away at the time, but it's been close to her heart for some time. "My great aunt's stories about Hong Kong remain with me to this day. I had read James Clavell's Noble House - I also once worked on a radio version of the novel - and had developed a taste for Peking duck too. I also remember when I was about eight I used to pull apart the little paper parasols that decorated the exotic mocktails my parents let me drink, to find bits of Chinese newspapers. I used to try to piece them together like puzzles to find hidden messages. I feel as though the Far East had been beckoning for years," she says.

"As Hong Kong is a 'world city' and encouraging cultural exchange is a part of what Radio 4 does, I created the Music Beyond Borders project to bring in unexplored and relatively unknown music and artists from abroad, predominantly world and jazz artists, through collaborations with different consulates. The talent has ranged from classical pianists to jazz, world, folk and funk artists."

One person who taught her about the unifying power of music was Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony maestro who will be performing at the 2013 Hong Kong Arts Festival. "He once said, 'Music is the only art that can bring people together, that can help people communicate even if they speak different languages or have different religions.' I couldn't agree with him more," Rodda says.