Artist:
Louis Chen & Friends Ya Dong
Album: The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo
Year: 1998
Line-Up: Louis
Chen – Zheng
Ya
Ch’in – Yang qin
Li
Kai – Erhu
Lam-zi
Kun - Ti-tse, sheng
Wu
Ronghua – Pipa
Ya
Dong – Pipa
Label: Network
Medien
”It
is in the nature of the ear to love sounds; and yet if the heart is
not cheerful then the ear does not hear, even if all five tones
resound”
-Lü
Pu We
A
few weeks ago the Chinese New Year was celebrated; it was a quite
nice festival even in cold and snowy Finland. I was actually
performing lion and dragon dancing and my fellow blogger was
attending the shows. I have always felt this mysterious calling
towards China, and its culture but only a few years ago I started
listening Chinese music and I have written a few posts about the
culture in question, and here is one more! Considering how huge and
old the culture is, there is just too much to tell about the music of China. And even though I think contemporary
Chinese music has gotten stuck in adoring and glamorizing the ancient
traditions, it is still so different to a European classical
approach, and for that it is not an easy quest to take.
The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo is a diverse and comprehensive overview on
Chinese traditional music. Chinese music can be categorized into two
sub-categories: Music for the sages and scholars for the closed,
private domain strongly concentrating on nature and more meditative
feelings, and then there are more upbeat folk melodies and rhythms
for the folk festivals, such as the Spring Festival, which is the
other name for Chinese New Year mentioned earlier. We can hear both
of these genres in the piece. Confucius had a strict demand for
music: “Music of a high-minded man has to be soft and gentle”.
But for the Chinese people, music has always been also an expression
of joy and happiness. One aspect of construing Chinese culture is
with its language. The ancient characters usually tell us something
about the Chinese way of thinking and perceiving the world. The
symbol 樂(traditional)
means music as well as enjoyable, and happy.
Louis
Chen, born in Guangdong province but raised in Malaysia, was the
first musician to introduce guzheng (古箏)
to
western audience decades ago. Also simply called zheng, this wooden
instrument contains as its up-to-date form 16 to 25 metal or silk
strings, it is a close relative to guqin (古琴)
or simply qin as gu refers to “ancient”. Last year I wrote about
Wu Jinglue, a qin master. The sound of these two instruments is very
close to each other, but zheng is nowadays much more popular in
Chinese music than qin for its diversity. Li Kai, also from
Guangdong, plays the erhu (二胡)
in this piece. Erhu is a string instrument with only two strings,
that is the reason of er (two) in the name. At the end of the album
we can also hear the sharp playing of pipa (琵琶),
the very traditional and old lute-like instrument of China. It has
actually been played for more than five centuries its form totally
unaltered, which is a rare case for a string instrument.
The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo captures the essential emotions and
soundscapes of Chinese music and offers nice music played with a
professional and skillful touch. It won’t disappoint if you are
looking for, or just into Chinese music or the culture itself. This
piece contains beautiful melodies with a nerve-calming effect. Spin
the album after a long day at work and enjoy a nice cup of tea: the
small and important joys of life.
Written
by: Oz
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