Pipa Revival

As with European music from the Medieval to the Baroque, there is something of a revival of ancient Chinese music going on, played with authentic period instruments. Kathie Price contributes an interesting feature article to The Arizona Republic today, titled "Foothills Woman Masters Pipa."

Phoenix musician La Mai Gates (below, right) is featured. She plays the Pipa, an ancient Chinese lute-like instrument that dates back to well before the Ch'in dynasty (221-206 B.C. E.) .

"The pipa is a familial favorite for Gates, a concert master and soloist with the Phoenix Chinese Art Ensemble. Her father was a pipa professor at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in the northeast province of Liaoning. Her mother, her uncles, aunts and cousins all played the pipa as she grew up.
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As a tot, Gates listened to a cousin play the pipa.

"I got a lot of influence from my family," she said. "My dad not only taught, he used to fix pipa and make them."

In middle school, we're told, she "majored in pipa with piano as a minor." The pipa "is not an easy instrument to learn," Price warns.

"The 2,000-year-old pear-shaped lute, also known as a Chinese guitar, has four or five strings and as many as 30 bridges to produce 12 tones and a range of more than three and half octaves."

Playing the pipa requires both strumming (pi or 琵) and plucking (pa or 琶) the strings.

Master painter Tu Zhiwei's conception of how the pipa was played while dancing in the grottos of Dunhuang can be seen in the reproduction, above. It is one of his first murals, completed in 1994.

That mural is now in private hands, but the pipa theme is repeated in some of his other Dunhuang paintings and murals, inspired by the thousands of wall drawings and documents uncovered by archaeologists in western China in the 1970's.

Ancient treasure troves are still being discovered, even today, in remote areas of China as well as metropolitan Beijing. Urns, funeral masks, clothes, weapons, even an entire 'pottery army'.

But the pipa remains something very special, indeed: a musical instrument that symbolizes the joy and peaceful yearnings of an entire culture. It's gratifying to know that the instrument lives on so its music can enrich our own age. Give a listen: