Hospitality and Harmony

(Lindsay)

Last summer, in preparation for two months in China, I took an online course through Primary Source on Chinese history and culture. One segment of the course was on traditional music and it directed students to several websites, including a YouTube video of a pipa concert. The pipa is a 4-stringed instrument that looks something like an elongated and shallow mandolin and sounds a little like a dulcimer. You wouldn’t think that you could get much virtuosity out of four strings, but the concert in the video was a fancy-dress affair featuring the pipa with a full orchestra of traditional Chinese instruments to back it up, and I was amazed by the pipa’s range and swept away by the beauty of its music. On my list of experiences I hoped for in coming to China, a pipa concert moved into first place. 

When we arrived in Hangzhou, and Rose, an English teacher who came to DS seven years ago, asked me if there was anything in particular that I would like to do or see, I told her of my fascination with the pipa. The determination with which Rose took up the mission of finding a pipa concert was epic. Each time I saw her she updated me on the progress of the quest. First she asked friends in the music department; then she found a student who’d been playing for several years and asked her to ask her teacher. She called every concert venue she knew of, but nothing was turning up, and with our departure from Hangzhou coming up this Tuesday, time was running out. Finally, she got a local reporter friend to interview me and publish my desire to see a concert in the local paper, asking readers to contact the paper with leads. Et Voila! Rose called me on Friday night to tell me that every Friday and Saturday night the Shangri La hotel sponsors a pipa, guzheng duet from 6:30 to 9:00. Derek, another English teacher who came to DS in 2010, was taking our group to see the poetic gardens of Suzhou on Saturday, but we would be back in time. When we returned from Suzhou, Derek called Uber for me and off I went to Shangri La. 

The pipa is about four feet high, and it is played upright like a cello, only it is plucked, not bowed, and it is rested on one’s hip, rather than on the floor. It has about twenty frets. The neck curves in and then out, and the instrument of this evening’s duet had a beautifully carved ivory inlay at the very top. While the pipa is capable of its own concerti, the dominant instrument in this duet was the guzheng. The guzheng is a five-foot-long, eight to ten inch wide, and two to three inch deep mahogany box with a curved top and twenty-one strings running across its length, each with a movable bridge. The instrument is set across two sawhorse-like stands just above the musician’s knees. 

The guzheng is plucked and strummed, and “ornamentation” includes a tremolo created when the right thumb and index finger rapidly and repeatedly pluck the same note, and a singing sound much like that produced by Alvino Rey’s pedal steel guitar but more natural, formed when the artist runs her finger along a vibrating string. The songs the musicians played were folksy, but not hokey. There was sophistication in these tunes, mostly due, I think, to the different ways the guzheng was played. The artist wore four picks on her right hand and two on her left, and most of the music was plucked, but when it was strummed, I heard each note distinctly the way you hear a harp’s notes. Rather than trying to draw the listener into the bathos of a plaintive melody, the way American country music often does, this music invites you to appreciate its art at a comfortable remove.

The evening was perfect. I wasn’t sorry when it was over, because it was thoroughly satisfying. Rose seemed to know that the evening would be this way; the harmony of the two instruments, a reflection of the satisfaction in a shared appreciation of something good, very much like the China Exchange Program itself.