“Angular banjos sound good to me”: New music from China for qin, zheng and pipa.

The sound of plucked strings, with generous use of ornamentation such as portamento and vibrato, is perhaps the most obvious western stereotype of music from the Far East.
The American rock group Steely Dan, in the title track to their 1978 LP Aja made this light hearted referance : “Chinese music always sets me free/Angular banjos sound good to me".
Right now this lyric fits my own experience, music for plucked strings from East Asia has a growing appeal to me. Yet until just 3 years ago my knowledge of music from East Asia had been close to zero. In October 2006, during a conversation with a Chinese friend on Skype, I overheard a recording of the Chinese guqin zither in the background. The variety and quality of tones produced by the guqin, especially the shifts between deep bass, harmonics and hollow, brittle percussiveness immediately caught my attention. As a composer of electronic music, I have a particular interest in musical timbre (sound colour and texture), so the guqin provided a suitable starting point for my exploration of music from East Asia.
From reading David Liang Mingyue’s book Music of the Billion I discovered that attention to timbre and space between notes had since ancient times been an important aspect of Chinese music aesthetics. I have since collected around 15 cds of guqin music, each of which illustrates an individual interpretation of the sound, phrasing and style. What also emerges, as noted by Kouwenhoven, is that despite a general belief that the qin expresses and captures an archaic, symbolic form going back 3,000 years, new idioms have evolved in the 20th century that have departed from tradition.
An even more recent trend is for younger players of guzheng and pipa and guqin to adapt their playing to modern styles, sometimes by modifying their instruments using amplification or even electrification. Recently I found that YouTube included clips in which Wu Fei does a 2.15 minute guided tour to the anatomy of her guzheng. Of particular interest was the hinged panel that provides access to the tuning bolts. Another clip shows a complete tuning process including the insertion of the movable bridges. My impression is that the guzheng (2,500) years old) has much of the sophisticated design of the piano. In Wu Fei’s demo we see how the left hand can play accompaniment to the more intricate right hand picking and strumming, or how one hand can concentrate on string dampening in a more guitar-like manner.



Many musicians born in East Asia have settled in the West after studying in the USA or Europe, and have diversified their activities into collaborations with jazz, improvised and electronic musicians. Wu Fei has released cds on the Forrest Hill label and on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Wu Man has extended the range of her work by using electric pipa. Wu Na is still based in Beijing and is also very active in the international experimental and improvised music scene. She is experimenting with the possibilities of the amplification and electrification of the guqin. Another innovation by Wu Fei is to play prepared versions of her zither which is modified by attaching objects to the strings, just as John Cage prepared the piano, to produce a wider range of colours and textures, including un-pitched sounds, percussion and noise.
Basile Zimmermann suggests that associations between music heard and its country of origin are mainly determined by the sound of the instruments used. If Chinese use Western instruments of rock, classical or jazz music, he suggests that the results end up sounding western, just as a European who takes up the guqin sounds Chinese. However this line of reasoning is confused somewhat if musicians combine the tactile interface of the zither with the sound processing potential of Western music technology such as the insertion of electric pickups, or by running the source sound through effects processors, distortion etc. The resulting playing style and timbre thus become a real hybrid technologically and musically.