Bamboo, Silk & Stone (Live) - Mei Han 韓梅

Mei Han 韓梅 performs the powerful electro-acoustic work for zheng and digital soundtracks, by Canadian composers Barry Truax and Randy Raine-Reusch, live at the Heritage Hall in Vancouver for the Push Festival's and Music on Main's Terminal City Soundscapes, January, 2011.

Bamboo, Silk and Stone is a collaborative work between Barry Truax, who realized the tape part, and Randy Raine-Reusch who performed the source material for the tape (on the Balinese suling gambuh, the Chinese guzheng, the Korean hun or ocarina, gongs and tam-tam) and who composed the live accompaniment which he plays on the first three of those instruments. The tape part is designed to preserve and amplify typical improvisational gestures used by the performer, sometimes stretching them in time to discover their inner complexity. In Chinese philosophy, bamboo, silk and stone are regarded as three natural elements of the world.

Bamboo, Silk and Stone is available on the Cambridge Street Records CD Inside (http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/cd4a.html), as well as being the title track of Randy Raine-Reusch's CD (http://www.asza.com/bamboosilk.shtml), in addition to a solo zheng version by Mei Han on her CD Outside the Wall (http://www.asza.com/outsidewall.shtml).
video photographer: Mark Pickersgill

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Mei Han 韓梅
• zheng 箏
• guzheng 古箏
• electro acoustic
• Barry Truax
• Raine-Reusch
• Push Festival
• Music on Main
• Chinese music
• New Music
• 21st Century Music
• Contemporary Music
• musical instruments
• improvisation
• solo

[oksiam]

woww

[dbadagna]

Very nice "ya zheng" playing! Great improvisation, too, and the player's total commitment and immersion in the music (making every note meaningful and "speaking" through the zither) is a wonderful thing to see. This, to me, takes the instrument back to its roots in ancient times, when it was a new and magical thing.

I'm not sure I've ever heard this tuning for guzheng. I couldn't really detect the supporting instruments mentioned in the mix, so I suppose they must be processed quite a bit.