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Craftsmen still make traditional clay flutes by hand
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THE xun, a bulbous clay flute with a history dating back 7,000 years, is one of the oldest musical instruments in the world.
Commonly played in early Chinese royal courts, the instrument has been enjoying something of a revival in recent decades. Its ruminative, sorrowful tones have been employed in some cinema scores, including Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern.”
At Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden, craftsmen Wang Liming and Xia Yuefeng are introducing the xun to a new generation of audiences.
Wang, 38, from Hubei Province, was a Chinese clay whistle maker 20 years ago when someone asked him to make a xun.
Compared with clay whistles, which come in the shapes of animals and are painted in varied colors, the xun looks dull and unimaginative. But the craftsman was intrigued by it from the start.
“I had absolutely no idea how to make it at the beginning,” Wang says. “There was no one to consult because very few people have that know-how in China.”
In the end, he used a pottery wheel.
“It took a team of four of us to tune and polish the instruments,” Wang recalls. “They were then fired in a pit burning firewood for two days and ready for sale.”
Making a xun without a pottery wheel is much more difficult, but Wang says he had to take that challenge because he couldn’t use a pottery wheel when he started working in Shanghai in the late 1990s.
The first attempts failed miserably.
“I couldn’t shape it perfectly, and it often fell apart because I poked holes in it at the wrong time in the drying process,” he says.
His attempts improved after six months of experimentation, but Wang knew nothing about music and couldn’t tune the instrument. He was finally assisted by a friend who plays the xiao, another kind of Chinese flute.
To Wang, a handmade xun is superior to one that’s spun from a pottery wheel because it has earthier tones.
“It’s a subtle distinction that really matters,” he says.
When making a xun, he starts by laying the base of the bulbous instrument on a board and then makes a dent in the middle and carefully pushes the clay to the sides to make a wall.
More clay is added, bit by bit, until it reaches about 15 centimeters in height.
Since it’s almost impossible to achieve a perfect shape at this point, Wang uses a thin piece of plastic to trim the instrument and skim off unwanted clay to make the wall thinner. It takes about an hour to finally get it right.
Wang says there are no precise mathematical measures to a xun, and that the craftsmen who make the instrument rely on experience.
“If the wall is too thick, the quality of high notes will be affected, but if it’s too thin, the high notes will sound hollow,” he says, explaining that it took him two years to get the hang of it.
The ideal timing to poke holes in the wall and tune the instrument is when it’s half-dry. At that stage, when you slightly press your finger on it, it won’t collapse. A special tool is used to poke holes so that the bits of the clay that are hollowed out wouldn’t stick around the holes and block them when the instrument is being fired.
The pitches are determined by the size of the holes, but the tuning is not yet complete.
“It’s not possible to tune it precisely when it’s half dry,” Wang says. “You have to wait till it’s thoroughly dry to fine tune it. Of course, the tones are subject to change when the instrument is being fired.”
A xun with one “room” have eight to 13 sound holes and can play 10 to 14 notes. Generally speaking, the larger a xun, the lower its pitch.
The xun in the shape of an egg or a pear is a traditional variation of the instrument, which can also be made in the shape of a penholder, a bull’s head and a gourd, among other designs.
Apart from mud, china stones and bamboo are used to create the instrument. Clay of good viscosity is the best choice, Wang says.
“Sandy mud will make it harder to shape the instrument, and when fired, it can easily crack,” he says.
He uses the clay from Yixing in Jiangsu Province, a place renowned for clay mining. Similar clay can’t be found in Shanghai.
Another xun maker in Yuyuan Garden is 54-year-old Xia Yuefeng from Hebei Province.
His father, a member of the local village band, taught Xia how to play multiple Chinese traditional instruments, including the xiao and the Chinese bamboo flute. However, he wasn’t introduced to the xun until later in life.
In 2002, he began selling xun and discovered they were popular.
“I bought them for 50 yuan (US$8) each, and they sold out really fast,” he recalls.
Then he decided to make the instrument himself. The hardest part for him was the tuning.
“The higher a note, the harder it is to tune because you need to blow harder into the instrument to sound it,” he says.
Unlike the xiao or bamboo flute, the xun doesn’t have a fipple mouthpiece. Xia says it took him one year to learn to play the xun proficiently.
“It’s a difficult instrument,” he says. “It’s better to play it in the afternoon because your fingers feel defter than when you get up in the morning.”
He says playing the xun also requires the right, quiet setting.
“I prefer taking the xun to a quiet spot in a park to play,” he says. “And it’s even better when playing with fellow music enthusiasts.”
Nowadays, there are dozens of manufacturers of the instrument in China, but very few craftsmen thrive on making it by hand, Wang says.
The cheapest xun in the market — those selling for 10-20 yuan — are usually not tuned well, and people buy the instrument as a curio, not for playing.
Indeed, few people actually can play the xun. “Some talented people might be successful, but for most, it takes a lot of practice and determination to play it well,” Wang says. “Most customers buy it because it’s a fine piece of Chinese culture.”
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