China Daily Global Edition (USA)
The melody of our heritage
Instruments, once out of fashion, enjoy a surge of popularity as composer combines history with music to provide the harmony of a bygone era, Wang Ru reports.
It was a moment seared in her memory. When Liu Jing played the suite of Dream of the Red Chamber, which is based on a novel of the same title written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), in the University of Cambridge as a member of a Chinese ensemble in 2011, something strange happened. As she played A Lovesick Knitted Brow in Vain, a tune which describes the failed love story between two main characters Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu in the novel, an old woman who sat in the first row of the audience burst into tears.
She was curious and asked the woman, at the end of the performance, if she had read the novel. The woman said: “No, but I just felt the melody touched me very much when it was created by your Chinese instrument.”
The experience was one of the inspirations that urged Liu to promote traditional Chinese music and instruments. Many years later, the woman who is in her thirties now has promoted a series of original music videos featuring traditional Chinese stories and “relayed” by Chinese instruments with her online name Liu Qingyao. They have become hugely popular.
With her parents, who were keen fans of traditional Chinese culture, Liu learned the pipa, a Chinese lute with four strings, when she was 5 years old. She was admitted to a children’s orchestra after passing a test when she was in primary school, and got the opportunity to take part in many competitions and visit a number of foreign countries to give performances as a member of the orchestra.
According to Liu, the frequent performances and experience of competition sharpened her pipaplaying skills. “From grade four at primary school to senior high school, I often completed my homework on my way to other countries during many weekends and vacations,” says Liu.
Such high-intensity exercise didn’t end when Liu was admitted to Nanjing University for her English major, since she became a member of its Chinese ensemble.
After she graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a master’s degree in history in 2012, she found a job with internet giant Tencent doing entertainment work, and garnered experience in marketing.
“At that time, the internet company was developing rapidly, and I got to know some tips about marketing. One that impressed me the most was that we needed to combine hot topics and our strength to promote our own works,” says Liu.
So she started to use folk instruments to play popular music, but soon gave up since she found the structure of pop music not suitable for traditional Chinese instruments. In 2019, she decided to make original Chinese music and display it in the form of short videos.
I want to make more people aware of the traditional instruments of China. Then, I want to lead more people to enjoy Chinese music created by such instruments.”
Liu Jing, promoter of traditional Chinese music and instruments
“I want to make more people aware of the traditional instruments of China. Then, I want to lead more people to enjoy Chinese music created by such instruments,” says Liu.
She has designed a series of videos called “Chinese people’s musical instrument”. A representative work of the series is Prelude to the Konghou of Li Ping, a short video based on a namesake poem written by poet Li He in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The poem depicts royal court musician Li Ping’s splendid proficiency in playing konghou, an ancient plucked stringed instrument which became extinct, but has been re-created by modern techniques and is again played by musicians.
In the video, Liu wears Tangstyle clothing and plays her original music with a konghou, like a scene shown in a mural in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu province. As she is collaborating with the Dunhuang Academy
in this work, she also shows pictures of konghou on the Dunhuang murals in the video.
“In the poem, the poet compares Li Ping’s music created by konghou to the sound of jade shattering on the Kunlun mountains, and the phoenix’s shriek. Although many people learned this poem at school, they don’t know what it sounds like actually, so I want to show them,” says Liu.
The video has been chosen by many Chinese teachers to show in their classes to help students better understand poems from the Tang Dynasty.
The series also includes a short video showing images of music and dancing on the mural of the Mogao Grottoes, in which she displays the original music created by ancient instruments that appear most often on the Dunhuang murals, like the pipa, konghou, flute and lianhuaruan (a plucked string instrument that looks like a lotus).
To make this work,
Liu paid field trips to Dunhuang several times, and got to know many touching stories in Dunhuang. “I try to express what I feel about Dunhuang in the form of music, and hope to bring people to the place when they listen to this music,” says Liu.
To make her videos more attractive, she also learned other art forms like dancing and acting. On that basis, she made a video series showing war heroes of Chinese history, trying to show a glorious time in each hero’s life.
For example, she made Prince Lanling in Battle, a work about Gao Changgong, or the prince of Lanling of the Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577), who led about 500 warriors to end the siege of Jinyong, an important city, against about 100,000 enemy soldiers in 564 and achieved a famous victory.
“It is said Gao was sent a cup of poisonous wine later from his cousin, the emperor, who was suspicious that Gao would overthrow him one day, and died. So I want to show a glorious time in his life — the moment when he just drank the poisonous wine and retrospected his life before death,” says Liu.
“I guess during the time what was on his mind was not the political tactics, but the moment when he led the soldiers to fight bravely for their country,” she adds.
She shows the story in the video, in which she plays Gao drinking the wine, while musician Wang Jia’nan playing Gao who was on the battlefield in his imagination. Liu and Wang play several kinds of drums and pipa to create the feeling of a fierce fight. Finally, with the strong sound of a drum, Gao, played by Liu, falls on the ground and dies.
“I integrate some drama elements in the video. The clothes and decorations shown in the video are made strictly according to pottery figurines and murals unearthed from the tomb of emperor Gao Yang, an uncle of Gao Changgong.”
The video has received nearly 10 million views on the internet. “I’m amazed at the combination of pipa and drums. When I listen to this music, I am brought back to the battlefield, as if seeing numerous cavalrymen rush forward, and listening to the sound of battle drums, halberds, hooves and shouting,” says Yunxi, a user of Chinese online video-sharing platform Bilibili.
According to Liu Hongbo, a work aide to Liu Jing, high standards and a vision are key. “Out of her immense love for traditional music, Liu Jing has high standards for her works, and has devoted much time and effort into each of them. She hopes the traditional music culture can spread to more people in the modern era with the help of the internet.”
According to Liu Jing, her visits to many museums and historical sites have given her many inspirations in creating her works.
“In the future, I want to cooperate with more museums, and try to tell the stories of cultural relics in my musical works, so that people enjoy the beauty of both Chinese music and cultural relics, and appreciate Chinese culture,” says Liu Jing.