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Guqin concert celebrates its fan club
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GUQIN is known as a traditional Chinese art for zhi yin — friends who understand and appreciate each other’s talent.
A group of top guqin players from the Chinese mainland and overseas will gather at Shanghai Concert Hall on April 29 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Jinyu Guqin Club, a non-profit platform that enables guqin lovers to find their zhi yin.
All the players for the night are members of the club, including representative inheritors of guqin art as the National Intangible Culture Heritage like Yao Gongbai and Dai Shuhong, as well as younger guqin musicians like Chen Leiji and Dai Wei.
Audiences will get to hear guqin classics like “Guangling San,” “Zuiyu Changwan” (“Evening Song of the Drunken Fishman”) and “Pingsha Luoyan” (“Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank”); there will also be a cello and piano interpretation of the guqin classic “Qiuyue Zhao Maoting” (“As the Autumn Moon Shines On”), and composer Zhao Xiaosheng’s piano work “Qin Yun” (“The Charm of Guqin”).
“I am probably the only Jinyu member who cannot play the guqin, but that does not affect my love for it,” says Zhao, the composer dedicated to replicate the feature of guqin by piano.
The piano and guqin, Zhao says, are very different instruments. “Guqin, composed of a simple wood body and seven strings, is a very expressive instrument that creates the natural sound in the universe which cannot be precisely identified; while the piano, the huge instrument with a very complicated structure, is usually featured by mechanically-identified intonation. It always interests me how to make a piano sound like guqin. ‘Qin Yun’ is just one of my attempts.”
Initiated in 1936, the Jinyu Guqin Club is so far the oldest existing club for guqin lovers in China. Apart from organizing gatherings where members play, appreciate and exchange their views in guqin pieces, the members also collect, verify and organize ancient scrolls.
A personal interest in the guqin and a recommendation from two club members were and still are the only requirements to become a member. With 28 initial members, the club counted about 100 members at its peak time in the 1990s.
“If you look into the particular records, you may find that the members seem to have lived in a world where guqin is the only focus. All those wars or political events at the time seem to be irrelevant to them, all that they cared for was where to get fine strings or who played well,” says Fan Yu, editor of Shanghai Music Publishing House, who is also the grandson of guqin master Fan Shaoyun.
Though from different schools, the club members have an open attitude to different opinions, according to Dai Shuhong, the current club president, a well-known vertical bamboo flute player and a fan of the guqin. He hopes that the tradition can be carried on by younger generations.
Date: April 29, 7:30pm
Venue: Shanghai Concert Hall
Address: 523 Yan’an Rd E.
Tickets: 80-480 yuan
Tel: 400-891-8182
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