"The hours of the days used to be slow. So were carriages, horses, mail," wrote the late Chinese poet Mu Xin.

After he passed away in 2011, Mu's poem Life Was Once Slow was adapted into a popular song, performed by many musicians and singers.

The Mu Xin Art Museum will hold a concert inspired by the poem in his hometown of Wuzhen, an ancient water town in Zhejiang province, where Mu lived a large part of his life, on Dec 21.

The concert will stage five versions of Life Was Once Slow, each to be performed by musicians in different styles, including a chorus that is popular among young fans, a band with songs in different dialects and several well-known vocalists.

Chen Danqing, director of the Mu Xin Art Museum, says they want to distract people from the fast pace of modern life and evoke a collective imagination of the old days, when the pace of life seemed to go a lot more slowly, just like Mu wrote in his poem: "The day's hours used to be so slow that a lifetime is only enough to love the right one."

Chen thought the song would be a passing fad after celebrated singer Liu Huan performed it in 2015 at the Spring Festival Gala, the mainland's most-widely watched TV show, which airs on the eve of Lunar New Year. However, the museum has been getting requests from musicians for authorization to use the poem for their compositions since then.

Mu wrote hundreds of poems in his lifetime, many of which have been published in popular books. The poem Life Was Once Slow was not among Mu's favorites, adds Chen.

Speaking of the popularity of the poem and the song, Chen says: "People are touched because it appeals to their desire for a slower place of life by creating a poetic vision of days gone by."

In fact, prior to the composition of the song by singer-and-songwriter Liu Huyi in 2014, Mu was not what you'd call a household name, although he enjoyed fame in art and literature circles for his books and paintings.

Mu was born in Wuzhen in 1927. He moved to New York in 1982 and returned home in 2006. His work, including books, poems and paintings, draw on both Chinese and Western styles.

The Mu Xin Art Museum, established in 2015, holds special shows every year, with either Mu's manuscripts or his paintings as the main focus, to allow visitors to better understand the writer, poet and painter.

By holding concerts since 2016, the museum is attempting to introduce another side of the polymath to the public-Mu's talent for music. Over the course of his career, he composed more than 30 musical pieces, the scores of which were discovered after his death, hidden among thousands of other manuscripts that were left in his house in Wuzhen.

"He loved music. He talked a lot about well-known musicians from the West in his books," says Chen's assistant, Xu Bo.

Mu once said there were "three people in him"-an author, a painter and a musician. But the author and the painter teamed up and killed the musician.

Coming from a wealthy family, he learned to play the piano at a very young age. He worked as a piano teacher at a middle school in Shanghai in the early 1970s. During his time in jail in Shanghai during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), he is said to have drawn piano keys on a piece of paper and practiced playing on it.

Xu says in his later years, Mu told others in Wuzhen that one day he would play his music, but it was not until after his death that it was finally performed.

In 2016, the museum held a concert featuring composer and pianist Gao Ping, who was authorized by the museum to reproduce Mu's musical legacy-mostly parts of melodies, rather than complete compositions.

In addition to those newly reproduced compositions by Gao, this year's concert will have even more songs that feature lyrics taken from Mu's poems.

"It might be the good melodies of Mu's poems that make people want to use them in songs," adds Xu.