After over half a century's involvement in playing and teaching the pipa (four-stringed Chinese lute), renowned musician and professor Wang Fandi still calls himself a folk performer.
It is probably an appropriate title for 70-year-old Wang, since with all his refinement of technique and academic teaching, Wang has never forsaken the variety and vitality of traditional Chinese folk music.
Different from most of today's young pipa players, Wang has not only mastered the pipa, but also plays a great many other instruments, among them the erhu (two-stringed fiddle), sanxian (three-stringed plucked instrument), and yangqin (hammered dulcimer).
Self-taught musician
Born in Shanghai in 1933, Wang didn't finish high school because of his family's economic situation. At 16, Wang began to play a cheap erhu that his cousin had given him. He had no teacher, but learned to play it from a neighbor and by listening to the radio.
Within a year, Wang was playing the erhu well enough to join the small music ensemble of a local comic opera troupe. Although the job paid him a pittance, he did benefit a great deal from the experience, becoming a qualified folk musician through his work with the troupe.
The ensemble consisted of five people, and each of them had to learn to play several instruments to make up for occasional absences of some of the players.
The comic opera performances were very much improvisational. There were no scripts, only outlines of the plots posted backstage. The actors often inserted a section of Yueju Opera (local opera of eastern China's Zhejiang Province) or a folk song into a play to hold the interest of their audiences. Because of this, the musicians had to be able to play many styles of music.
Wang could not read musical scores at that time and learned the music mainly through listening and watching the others play. Playing for a comic opera troupe was a very important part of Wang's musical development, for it laid the foundation for his life-long career in music and endowed him with a lively musical spirit, which is an absolute must in playing Chinese folk music.
During this time, Wang met his first teacher Ma Linsheng. Ma not only taught Wang to read musical scores, but also taught him to play Guangdong music (instrumental folk music popular in the Pearl River Delta area in South China's Guangdong Province), silk-and-bamboo music (instrumental folk music popular in the areas south of the Yangtze River valley, encompassing southern Jiangsu Province, Shanghai and Zhejiang Province), and the "13 sets of pipa works," which are the core of the pipa repertory.
In addition to Ma, Wang had two other teachers, Li Tingsong and Chen Yonglu, for a short time. Li was a representative of the Wang School of pipa music, which was established by Wang Yuting (1872-1951) and features a vigorous and unsophisticated style. Chen was devoted to silk-and-bamboo music.
However, Wang Fandi had the benefit of these three masters for only nine months. For most of his life he has been exploring pipa by himself, while taking in as much live folk music as he possibly could.
"My basic style is that of the Wang School, but I have enriched it with elements of various types of traditional music," said Wang.
Diverse colors
The CD album "The Art of Pipa -- Wang Fandi" (Roi Productions, 2003) is an anthology of Wang's recorded works from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century.
Three tracks on the album are from the repertory of the Wang School: Hegemon King Shedding His Armour (Bawang Xiejia) Spring River on a Flowery, Moonlit Night (Chunjiang Huayueye) and On the Frontiers (Saishang Qu).
While faithfully interpreting the classics, Wang also gives the pieces a personal touch. For example, in Hegemon King Shedding His Armour, Wang borrowed elements from Chinese operas, such as percussive language and variable rhythmic divisions.
A large part of the CD is devoted to various pieces of local folk music: Flowers Falling in the Green (Feihua Diancui), from Shanghai's Chongming Island; Chaozhou (eastern part of Guangdong Province) music, Ospreys Sporting in the Water (Hanya Xishui); and Guangdong Music Double Woe, (Shuang Sheng Hen).
In Double Woe, Wang used some fingerings of the gaohu (bowed instrument similar to erhu but with higher tuning), the instrument on which this piece was originally played. For a pipa player without gaohu experience, Wang's rendition would be very difficult to imitate.
This is also the case with Spring on Tianshan Mountain (Tianshan Zi Chun). Composed by Usman Jan and Yu Lichun in the 1950s, it was originally a rawap (plucked instrument of the Uygur ethnic group) solo in the style of folk music from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
After studying the rawap and dombra (plucked instrument of the Kazak ethnic group), Wang adapted the method of stopping strings with the left hand used for these instruments. The rhythmic patterns of the sapaj (Uygur percussion instrument) can also be heard in the work.
"I hope this CD will show young musicians some of the possibilities that have been tried on the pipa," said Wang.
Avid educator
Wang played pipa for the Shanghai Traditional Music Orchestra and China Film Orchestra in the 1950s and 1960s. He also won a gold medal at the 6th World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957.
However, Wang's performing career has seen some setbacks. Two finger injuries caused by too much practice stopped him from playing for six years, and the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) deprived him of another 10 years.
Fortunately, Wang's setbacks have been compensated for by his rich teaching experience, which is another important part of his musical life. Since Wang became a faculty member of the China Conservatory of Music in 1964, he has been devoting himself to teaching traditional Chinese music. His students have included not only such active pipa soloists as Wong Ching and Yang Jing, but also well-known erhu player Song Fei and sanxian player Tan Longjian.
"Students are the continuation of a teacher's artistic life," said Wang. "The relationship between a teacher and a student should be a relationship between two lives."
Wang not only teaches them music, but also shares with them such things as finding the right balance between hard practice and protecting the fingers, which is based on his own experience and extensive reading in psychology, physiology and biological mechanics.
"All of Wang's students agree that his moral is an intangible entrance examination, and a key to understand his music and thoughts," said Li Jingxia, a student of Wang and who is now dean of the Traditional Instruments Department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
Never expecting his students to play exactly like himself, Wang keeps telling them they "should question every word" he tells them.
Actually it is impossible to play exactly like Wang, since his tremolo, rhythmic divisions and tone colours are all variable. Wang's students often find it difficult to transcribe his music, since he plays works differently at different times. In this way, Wang has been teaching his students that music is a living thing.
Wang's work as a musician and teacher paid off in three concerts he and his students held in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong last September.
The most impressive aspect of the concerts was probably the variety of the players' styles. In addition to the traditional pipa works in the programme, there were also the contemporary pipa pieces Anecdotic Drawing (Yibi Caocao), played by Wong Ching, and Melody from a Kizil Dance (Qiuci Wuqu), composed and played by Yang Jing.
Wang Fandi joined with Song Fei in an erhu duo, Slow Three-Six (Man Sanliu). In this classic piece of silk-and-bamboo music, Wang played the second erhu, tuned a minor third lower than Song's first erhu. In this way, the two melodies supported and contrasted with each other with a lively verve. Wang's idea of a "folk performer" probably includes just this kind of verve. It is something he has been pursuing all his life.
"My study of music moves always from the general to the specific (the pipa), then back to the general again. In this way, I am able to appreciate my own music in the larger context of music as a whole," he said.
(China Daily February 23, 2004)
