Music From China
Music From China, a group of five Chinese musicians from Beijing, Guangdong province, and Shanghai who met and began performing in New York City, features men and women playing both folk and classical pieces, solo and in various ensembles. Their instruments are as wonderfully strange as they are similar to some Western instruments: two-string fiddles of different ranges (erhu, gaohu, and zhongu), raspy double-reeded pipes (houguan), zithers more wobbly and tinkly in their voicing than the wildest Teutonic equivalent (the 21-string zheng and bridgeless seven-string qin), and the closest thing to a Western instrument, a four-stringed lute (pipa).
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Western violins are fretless; the point where the fingertip presses the string against the fingerboard determines the note, giving the fiddle less predictable notes, but giving the musician more freedom to play with them. Chinese fiddles and 21-string zithers, in contrast, are played on air. The fiddle has no fingerboard, and the note is produced by the pressure the fingertip applies to the string. The only Western instrument I can think of that uses this technique is the washtub bass used in jug bands. A Chinese fiddler can play with the notes in a way a Western fiddler can’t. While a Western fiddler can only slide along the string or bend it in two directions, a Chinese fiddler can pretty much wiggle away at will.
The zheng is less playful than the fiddles because its strings are held away from its body by wooden bridges that determine the note. A zheng player can change pitch or add vibrato, however, by pushing down on the string beyond the bridge. In addition, the player wears finger picks on one hand to perform mandolinlike tremolos and bluegrasslike picking patterns, while the pickless hand can alter notes beyond the bridge and pluck bass notes in accompaniment. Either hand can sweep the strings in lush glissandi.
Qin technique looks like pure torture, a physical therapist’s nightmare. The right hand plucks away harp-style at the tabletop instrument, vaguely similar in appearance to a Western zither, though larger than most I’ve seen. But the left hand must frequently be inverted at the wrist, top of the hand facing the strings, so the thumb or thumbnail can be used as a slide to produce a sound like that of zither, bottleneck guitar, or Dobro. Both this and the following busy showpiece entitled “Intoxicated by Wine” sounded kind of like the slide guitar work of John Fahey and his student Leo Kottke, which derived from older slide blues styles. Bluesmen took it easy on their hands by using a bottleneck while playing interminable dance party gigs, but Liu’s energetic and evocative solos were physically demanding. While some find Chinese music painful to hear, absent as it is of Western notions like major and minor keys, I found these pieces delightful to the ear but painful to the eye.
The visually dominant zheng was saved for the last solo, and young Yang Yi proved a soloist of skill and energy rather than of guile and evocation, traits that tend to develop with age. While I thought she was technically competent on “Song of the Mulberry Tree,” I felt her interpretation was only sometimes focused on Shanxi mourning music. She was in her element, however, during “The General’s Command,” another martial blisterer. There were times when the 21-string zither was made to sound like an ensemble–intricate picking, including sparkling tremolo passages, interwoven with glissandi and sure-fingered left-handed plucking on the andante passages, left no question about Yang’s or the general’s command. She sold the audience right through her last abrupt note and dramatic, frozen expression.
