Believing that music is a universal language that can promote world peace, a 16-year-old Chinese girl organized a Chinese folk music band and is headed to the United Nations.

Wu Shuning, a 10th grader from Shanghai, and her band Xiao Luo (meaning Sky Vines) will perform a recital called the Music of Peace Youth Concert at the UN on Tuesday night.

The band is composed of seven youths, including Wu herself, ranging in age from 10 to 16. Most are students from Shanghai Foreign Language School.

Each of the seven has a specialty in a specific Chinese traditional musical instrument, including erhu, guzheng and yangqin.

Gathered by Wu in October 2014, the musicians, who had only played solo before, started practicing as an ensemble without any guidance.

At Monday's press conference at the United Nations, Wu said that one of the many difficulties they had to overcome was that all of them were full-time students so it was not easy to arrange daily times to practice.

But they managed to practice every two days for half an hour at least during the week and on weekends practices would sometimes last for a whole day.

After six months preparation, Xiao Luo was ready for prime time at the UN.

The repertoire for Music for Peace Youth Concert will include traditional Chinese folk classics, such as Shanghai Bund and High Mountain and Flowing Water and Western classical and pop music, as well, such as Ballade pour Adeline and Rolling in the Deep.

Wu said, although the band is composed of all youths whose performing skills may be immature, their passion for music and dream of peace is pure and real.

Chinese classical music was still new to the West, Wu said, so hopefully they could act as messengers to share Chinese music with the world. And the UN was the perfect stage to make their debut, since the UN's mission is to promote peace.

Nancy Shankman, director of music and performing arts professions at New York University, gave a speech at the press conference.

"Every culture in the world has music inherent in their culture," she said, "and if everyone would respect and learn and listen to each other's music, I think that we would have very much fewer conflicts around the world."

"So I have great respect for this project," she added.

The program is organized by the Sino-American Cultural Council, which is committed to promoting China and US cultural exchange for the China-US relationship development.

Hong Xiao in New York contributed to this story