Music from the East

It's not just the millennium-the Chinese new year marks the start of the Year of the Dragon, which symbolizes the king or emperor.

This confluence was part of the reason why Hsiao-mei Ku, second violinist of Duke's Ciompi Quartet, decided to organize the celebration of Chinese music being presented on campus this weekend. In addition to last night's First Course Concert in DUMA with Ciompi and guest artists, the ensemble Music from China will be performing tonight.

On Saturday, the Ciompi Quartet will play music by Chinese composers Chen Yi and Zhou Long, some of which pairs the traditional string quartet with Chinese instruments such as erhu and pipa.

Ku says, "I don't worry if Duke students understand [this music] right away." While it will certainly be perceived as exotic, she hopes the Duke community will appreciate the chance to be exposed to new and different sounds. She adds that even "a lot of Asian students don't know about their roots" and might find this music foreign.

The six-person ensemble Music from China will offer a program in two parts: one section with traditional, classical tunes (solo or as ensemble pieces) and another with contemporary music. The older works have titles like "Melody of the Purple Bamboo," but then one of the newer ones is also called "The Phoenix Unfurls Its Plumage."

The ensemble plays entirely on Chinese instruments. These instruments hail from recognizable families, but always differ slightly from their Western counterparts: There is the zheng, a 21-string zither; a bass guitar called daruan; the reeded mouth organ sheng; the four-string Chinese lute pipa and the erhu, a fiddle where the bow is fixed between its two strings.

Perhaps because of their inherent similarities, the collaborations between Chinese and Western instruments come together beautifully. It seems as if the husband-and-wife team of composers Long and Yi-the latter childhood friend of Ku's-have emphasized this tendency: In Long's "Soul," originally commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, the quarter-tone vibrati in the strings as well as the use of pizzicato bring them closer to the pipa they are accompanying, and in Yi's "Fiddle Suite," the almost pentatonic scale and the echoing of the fiddle's melody in the strings stress their resemblances. In its three movements-Singing, Reciting and Dancing-the "Fiddel Suite" employs increasingly smaller and shriller forms of the instrument, culminating in the Peking Opera fiddle.

Ku believes that because American society is multicultural in the first place, the audience will have no difficulties in relating to this Chinese music. It is certainly worth the effort of finding out whether this claim is true.