Lecture-demonstration of yangqin shows its significance in Chinese music

The sounds of the yangqin, an instrument at the center of Chinese musical ensembles, resonated through Baird Hall on April 18 as multi-instrumentalist Helen Yee shared her expertise and knowledge of the exotic instrument with a UB noontime audience.

Yee, who would perform on the yangqin with UB violist Leanne Darling in Darling’s faculty recital on April 20, demonstrated to the Baird Hall audience the versatility of the exotic ancient instrument, also known as the Chinese hammered dulcimer. Trained in classical, improvisation and jazz, she performed solo pieces she had learned as a child on an instrument that was donated to the Department of Music by UB’s Confucius Institute.

The institute also co-sponsored Yee’s lecture and performance.

“It’s thought to have come from the Middle East or Persia,” Yee told those attending the talk. “There are differing accounts of how it got to China — partly through the Silk Road trade. Others actually believe that it went by ocean. And some think that it traveled by both land and sea to China.”

There is no mistaking the yangqin (pronounced “yang chin”) from other hammered dulcimers, Yee explained.

“The sound quality is the first difference from other hammered dulcimers,” she said. “But one finds that different types of yangqin also have different timbres. It also has to do with the material and sizes of the strings, the materials and dimensions of the body, and the types of strikers used.”

The strikers — or beaters — are used to play notes on the yangqin. Yee used bamboo beaters, which are light-weighted mallets.

“Stringed percussion is how people may classify it,” she said. “In the Chinese orchestra, it is classified as a plucked string instrument, even though it is not plucked.”

What sets the yangqin apart from other instruments is that it’s ever-changing. Yee described the standard version of the yangqin as having multiple rows and bridges.

“The development of newer, more sophisticated models of yangqin makes them a bit more complex than traditional hammered dulcimer instruments used in folk music of various ensembles,” said Yee, who has been a longtime musician with Music From China, a New York-based organization that shares and promotes Chinese music, history and culture.

There is still a general appreciation for older instruments like the yangqin, and for traditional music among contemporary Chinese youth, according to Zhiqiang Liu, director of UB’s Confucius Institute.

“It’s still quite popular,” he said. “But I think that now more Chinese parents push their kids to play the violin or piano more.”

At the lecture-demonstration, Darling performed a duet with Yee. The piece, “Moon Reflection in Erquan,” originally was written by Hua Yanjun for yangqin and another Chinese instrument called the erhu.

“The piece describes the moon reflecting in a spring or stream, now located in a park in Wuxi city,” Darling told the audience.

Yee said she began learning the yangqin at age 10 through a number-based system, a system different from the Western musical notation she was accustomed to.

“I had already begun violin about a year and a half earlier before I started the yangqin,” Yee said. “I had to learn a completely different notation system.”

The number-based system relies on the numbers zero through seven.

“It’s just numbers and zeros on the page,” she explained. “The zeros are rests. Say you rest for two beats — it will be two zeros. If you rest for half a beat — then it will be a zero with a line under it.”

The yangqin also shares similarities with Western music when it comes to scales, Yee said.

“There are major and minor pentatonic scales. It’s pentatonic-based but not purely pentatonic,” she said.

Yee closed her presentation with questions, and allowed audience members a closer look at the yangqin. She also gave personal demonstrations and mini-tours of the instrument itself.

“I hope they enjoyed hearing the sound of the instrument and enjoyed the music played,” Yee said of audience members, “and also being introduced to thoughts about a foreign instrument and how its sound can carry on.”