Strings that speak: pipa, civil and martial

Rain and pearls

The pipa is a lute with four strings, a pear-shaped wooden body and a long row of high frets. It came into China along the Silk Road and has been played there for almost two thousand years; at the Tang court it was a leading instrument. Today it is held upright on the lap and plucked with false nails taped to the fingertips. The high frets let the left hand bend a string far out of tune and back, which is why pipa notes can slide and weep.

The most famous description of its sound is twelve hundred years old. In 816 the poet Bai Juyi, in exile on the Yangtze, heard a woman from the capital play for him, and wrote it down in his Song of the Pipa:

大絃嘈嘈如急雨，小絃切切如私語。 The thick strings clatter like a sudden rain; the fine strings murmur like whispered words.

嘈嘈切切錯雜彈，大珠小珠落玉盤。 Clattering and murmuring, the sounds mingle, like pearls large and small falling on a plate of jade.

Keep those two images in mind, the rain and the pearls. You will hear both.

Martial and civil

Pipa players sort the old solo repertoire into two families. Wu or martial pieces are fast and forceful, and most of them are battles. Wen or civil pieces are slow and lyrical, about love, sorrow or a landscape.

The pieces themselves were passed on by players and their schools. The first widely printed collection of pipa solos, edited by Hua Qiuping, came out in 1819, and a larger one, compiled by Li Fangyuan from his family's tradition, in 1895. Both pieces in this step belong to that old repertoire.

The king takes off his armour

The first recording, The King Chu Doffs His Armour, is a martial piece, but a strange one: it tells of a defeat. Around 202 BC, at the end of the war that founded the Han dynasty, the great general Xiang Yu, King of Chu, was trapped by Liu Bang's army at Gaixia. At night his soldiers heard the songs of their own homeland, Chu, coming from the enemy camp, and lost heart. Xiang Yu said farewell to his companion, Consort Yu, broke out with a few riders, and died at the Wu River. The Chinese phrase for being hopelessly surrounded, sìmiàn Chǔ gē, "songs of Chu on four sides", comes from that night.

The piece moves through the story: the camp, the battle, the songs drifting across the lines, the parting. Listen to how the pipa switches roles, from drum to voice and back. Its famous companion, Ambush from All Sides, tells the same battle from the winner's side; this one stays with the loser.

A song beyond the frontier

The second recording, Songs from the Other Side of the Border, is civil, and almost the opposite. It is linked with Wang Zhaojun, a lady of the Han palace who in 33 BC was sent north, beyond the frontier, to marry the ruler of the Xiongnu, and never came home. Legend says she played the pipa on the journey so sadly that geese flying overhead forgot to beat their wings and fell, and Chinese painters have shown her with a pipa ever since.

There is no battle here, only one voice. The suite grew from short tunes in Hua Qiuping's collection into a set of linked pieces in Li Fangyuan's. Listen for the left hand: the notes are pushed, pulled and shaken after they sound, so that the instrument seems to sigh. This is the "fine strings murmuring" of Bai Juyi's poem.

One player, two faces

Both recordings are by Liu Fang, who was born in Kunming, began the pipa at six and now lives in Montreal. She chose this pair herself, one martial and one civil, so that listeners could hear both faces of the instrument side by side. She also plays the guzheng, and you can hear her Lotus Emerging on the Surface of Water on her artist page; it returns in step 7, on the zither family.

For the pipa in a larger group, hear Wu Man in the Chinese program of the Brooklyn Folk Arts series, with gaohu, zheng and percussion.

覚えておきたい言葉

琵琶 pípá

the Chinese four-string lute, its name said to come from the two strokes of the right hand, outward (pi) and inward (pa)

武曲 wǔqǔ

“martial piece”: fast and forceful, usually a battle

文曲 wénqǔ

“civil piece”: slow and lyrical, about love, sorrow or landscape

輪指 lúnzhǐ

“wheeling fingers”, the five-finger tremolo that makes a single note shimmer

ほかで聴く

• Liu Fang's own label, Philmultic, with her Soul of Pipa albums