MUSIC REVIEW; Silk Screen meets Blue Pipa in Pittsburgh
by Shuo Zhang
10/03/08
Pittsburgh has been blessed by the music of pipa—an ancient Chinese lute, since the ‘Music on the Edge’ project presented a concert featuring collaboration between Pitt composition professor Eric Moe and pipa soloist Wu Man in 2005. Three years later, last Saturday night, at the opening concert of Silk Screen Film Festive 2009, another pipa virtuoso, Min Xiao-Fen, brought her Blue Pipa to the curious audiences in the packed concert hall of Pittsburgh CAPA High School.
Min, an internationally acclaimed pipa soloist and composer, moved to the United States in 1992 from China, where she has established herself as an accomplished musician. She has since worked with numerous prominent composers, including Carl Stone, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Philip Glass, and Tan Dun, among others, to perform pipa music ranging from traditional Chinese to Western classical and jazz. A featured jazz artist at Lincoln Center for the Arts, New York City, Min founded the Blue Pipa Trio in 2003, whose current member also includes guitarist Steve Salerno and bassist Dean Johnson.
Their Saturday performance was the most inspiring in the unfolding of the music throughout the concert, which reminds one of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Tai-Chi—a process moving between the two poles of “yin” and “yang”, rest and motion.
Starting from “lyrical” style traditional repertoire for solo pipa, the first half of the concert culminated when the sound from battlefields of ancient China swept the concert hall with the “martial” style piece “Shi Mian Mai Fu” (Ambush from All Sides). A piece called by New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn as “energetic, rolled strumming similar to the technique guitarists call rasgueado; rapid solo figuration; and clear-textured counterpoint”, Min, with her virtuoso mastery of the complicated right-hand skills, demonstrated the power of a relatively small instrument over the large space of the concert hall. It may come as more astonishing than what Franz Liszt did to show the power of piano as comparable to a symphony orchestra back in the 19th century, considering the size of the instrument.
The last piece before the intermission, Written On the Wind, a commissioned piece by New York based Chinese composer Huang Ruo, presents an experimental approach that combines vocal and pipa, both played by Min, with the two unfolding in a linear fashion rather than vertically structured. Interestingly, the lyrics for the vocal part in this piece are not in any language in existence—rather, they are non-sense syllabus, supposed to be “personal words, feelings, stories”, “that meant to kept to her [the performer] own”. A not uncommon design seen in modern Western compositions, Min’s presentation was full of contrast and affection, on top of which a special flavor cast both musically and phonetically, showing her background in Mandarin Chinese oral delivery.
The second half featured the whole crew of Blue Pipa Trio performing their most classic pieces such as “Chinese Take-out”, “Red Haired boy Dancing with Golden Snake”, and “Fortune Cookie”. The concert reached its climax when the trio played the last piece, “Fascinating New Year”, another work that features Min’s singing. As a matter of fact, there is more than singing—but really was singing and dancing and mumbling—the voice, the bodily motion, and the instruments all came together to the most exciting state, just as the audience were heated up to the top of their fervor.
As a trend, the collaboration among Chinese instrumentalists and jazz musicians has been proved to be fruitful in the States in recent years, in which a Chinese instrument usually leads with a Chinese flavored melody and other Western instruments follow and explore with their potentiality where the music is going. I have heard American audiences speaking of it as “inspiring” and “most refreshing”, and the Blue Pipa is no exception. Throughout each piece, the potential of all three instruments are fully explored and the exposition of their individual parts by Salerno and Johnson are proved to be full of inspiration.
Overall, the Chineseness and the spirit of jazz gave the music a fresh liveliness. Although one might argue that there can be more variety for Blue Pipa Trio in terms of timbre—indeed, the tone quality of three plucked stringed instruments may run the risk of sounding homogenous. On the other hand, Min’s vocal performance and some of the double bass part played by Johnson using the bow do add to the diverse layers of the music’s tone color.
“I needed a harmonic instrument that can provide the chords for my music”, said Min in an after-concert discussion about her thoughts on the instrumentation. “But piano is definitely not the one that I’m looking for. It has to go well with the flavor and timbre of pipa”.
Mr. Shuo Zhang is a Ph.D student of Music at University of Pittsburgh.
