Zheng 箏 ichigenkin 一弦琴 jazz 爵士 - Mei Han Art Ensemble 韓梅爵士樂隊

Mei Han Art Ensemble performs Tokyo Crows at the Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in 2006. Mei Han on zheng, Coat Cooke on sax, Paul Plimley on piano and Randy Raine-Reusch on ichigenkin and guanzi.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• zheng
• guzheng
• Mei
• Han
• Cooke
• Raine-Resuch
• Plimley
• ichigenkin
• guanzi
• bili
• jazz
• world
• music

[dbadagna]

Do a Google search on 鸭母哒仔 and the first search result is a company in Taiwan making the Taiwanese equivalent of this instrument. I wonder if this instrument came to Taiwan from Guangdong or Fujian. Apparently it's used in Taiwan opera. The name means "female duck quacker." Such an undignified name! ;-)

[ZaDiscs]

Obviously a houguan descendant.

[dbadagna]

Yes, the Van Gulik book calls it a lute throughout.

[ZaDiscs]

You are correct in that the Chinese characters for foreign terms such as "pipa" and bili" are onomatopoeic, and are therefore quite difficult if not impossible to translate. I often run into translations of instrument terms in English words like "bugle". Most of these are quite humorous in their inaccuracy. Keep in mind that "qin" was translated as a "lute" for years, when it is actually a zither.

[dbadagna]

Search Wiktionary for 篳 and 篥 (the characters making up "bili" and "hichiriki") and you'll see the individual definitions: "wicker, bamboo" and "bugle." They're very unfamiliar characters that I don't think are used for many, if any words other than this instrument, so that's why I said they seem to have been concocted just for this instrument's name, like some other Chinese instruments adopted from elsewhere, whose names similarly mean nothing in Chinese.

[dbadagna]

Nice to talk about this esoteric Chinese oboe stuff; most people aren't interested, preferring to talk about the guzheng, erhu, or pipa. ;-)

[dbadagna]

I'm going to hunt up those references. I've never heard Naxi guan music. Regarding what is "traditional" in Cantonese music, that's a tough one, because the music keeps changing. And supposely a lot of northern Chinese music (including instruments and opera genres) was imported to Guangdong about 300-400 years ago. Certainly the guan is used in opera and Cantonese instrumental ensembles, if only for less than 100 years.

[ZaDiscs]

You might want to check that, as the Chinese character for bili actually has no meaning as "bili" is a foreign term. The character for guanzi could be interpreted as such, often people use the same character for the two instruments.

[ZaDiscs]

The Zhongguo Shaoshu Minzu Yueqi Zhi lists the small tubular bamboo instrument as "bili". An instrument that originally came from Xinjiang region in the 13th C. and is played by Naxi in Yunnan. It is not considered a traditional Cantonese instrument.

The Zhongguo Yueqi Tujian lists the "houguan" as only the instrument with the bell, invented in the early 20th C. for Cantonese Opera.

[dbadagna]

The Chinese websites about the instrument state that 100 years ago the small size was a street peddler's instrument, and that the medium and large sizes, with bell, were developed in the mid-20th century.