The qin or guqin is an ancient Chinese zither capable of a great variety of sounds. The strings may be stopped or sounded open, with a huge variety of ornaments, percussive sounds, and harmonics employed; the Western listener is apt to notice the long passages consisting exclusively of harmonics, which take on a registral and structural rather than simply decorative significance. Chinese musicians think of the instrument and its music as difficult and sophisticated, but for Westerners music like that heard on this album may be easier to enjoy as compared with other kinds of Chinese music simply because of the sheer diversity of sounds employed. One of the pieces played here, Liushui, or Flowing Waters, is a programmatic work depicting the Yangtze River, expanded here by performer
Liang Mingyue (
David Mingyue Liang) to a series of 89 distinct musical images of water. The listener untrained in Chinese music will have no difficulty picking up on many of them.
Liang is a musician equally fluent in Chinese and Western idioms, and in the U.S. he has been active in both Western concert music and jazz. Here, however, the music he plays is traditional in nature. The opening piece, Youlan, or Lonely Orchid, is presented as the oldest extant work for the qin, dating back to 590 C.E.
Liang discusses problems of notation and tuning connected with this work, but it seems clear that, whatever the difficulties, the modern player can approach the intentions of the original composer more closely than in the case of Western works of comparable antiquity. For the Western listener this is worth consideration as an introduction to one of China's great instrumental traditions.