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ABSTRACT
The trend of pursuing higher education abroad in China has resulted in many Chinese musicians immigrating to the United States, Europe, and other Western countries. Among them is a Chinese traditional instrument pipa player, Wu Man, who has achieved great fame. This article analyses the creative life of Wu Man’s and her artistic outputs and thinking from two vantage points: as that of a famous and respected performer of the pipa and as that of a reflective practitioner whose work might be labelled practice as research, or as we term it ‘research for practice’. We draw on contextual analyses of the social and artistic environments that have shaped Wu Man’s career and her ability to integrate ‘authentic’ musical elements and world musics into new compositional and performative techniques. This article foregrounds Wu Man’s voice through personal interviews to showcase the reflexive approach she uses to shape her artistic practice.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nelson defines practice as research as ‘the possibility of thought within both “theory” and “practice” in an iterative process of “doing–reflecting–reading–articulating–doing”’ (Citation2013: 32).
2 Please refer to Wu’s ideas in ‘Understanding Wu Man’ to answer questions raised by this author: ‘When you first arrived in the United States, how did you use your performances to gain a foothold there? What difficulties did you encounter and how did you find solutions?’
3 No names of players from China will be mentioned in this article to avoid any pejorative implications when comparing performers.
4 She studied at an English language school during the first few years after arriving in the United States.
5 Admittedly, one of the aims of the REF in the UK is to provide financial transparency. Since affiliates and visiting or ad hoc staff generally do not draw a regular salary from institutions, their work need not be accounted for, financially, at least. Not capturing the activities of unsalaried or ad hoc staff also lightens the administrative burden of the already very burdensome REF exercise. It does though, raise the question of how we value research and whether financial and administrative considerations should always trump the need to try and capture the entirety of a Higher Education Institution’s ability to support research of quality, including research undertaken by those who have no responsibility for research in their contracts.
6 The authors have been in communication with Wu Man for many years. The interviews quoted in this article took place between June and August 2021. The interviews were via emails and WeChat in Chinese, and translated into English by the authors. What we have presented here is just a selection of the long interviews according to the needs of this article. Wu Man has given us permission to reprint these responses and discuss her work in this article.
7 Shijian Yanjiu 实践研究.
8 An ensemble founded by the eminent cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 provides a particularly good example through which to examine the integration of culturally diverse musical elements. It comprises musicians from countries found along the Silk Road, with Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello alongside two or three other musicians on Western instruments, and those from West, Central, and East Asia added according to the musical style needed.Wu Man is one of the founders of the Ensemble and wherein she has shaped her understanding of the world multicultural music as a channel to develop her music career abroad.
9 Feng has reviewed publications on musical performance in China and concludes that the erhu (fiddle), pipa, and other folk instruments are acknowledged to have ‘improved’ much in terms of tuning, performance techniques, and artistic expression owing to professionalized institutional music education.
10 学堂乐歌.
11 National Music Improvement Society, Guoyue Gaijin She 国乐改进社.
12 There are several minority universities in China, the most influential being Zhongyang Minzu Daxue, or Central Minzu University established in 1951 in Beijing. Curricula of minority universities comprise minority languages and culture, including music, and students are mainly minority people, even though now Han Chinese students are admitted.
13 In Chinese, these terms are ‘high art’, 高雅文化; ‘supreme artistic standard’, 艺术性高; and ‘professional’, 专业化.
14 See Mark Slobin’s elaborations of the relationship between super-culture, sub-culture, and inter-culture (Citation1993: 75). See also Mari Yoshihara (Citation2007).
15 The sound recording of Buddha’s Bedroom can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUHPpBvo2eA (accessed 30 August 2021).
16 Suixin suoyu wan yinyue 随心所欲玩音乐. A report of the event can be found at: https://www.chncpa.org/zxdt_331/zxdtlm/yczx_332/201608/t20160823_107936.shtml (accessed 30 March 2020).
17 ‘beyond the boundaries’跨界, meaning to allow the minds of audiences of pipa music cross cultural boundaries of China.
18 In Chinese this is 跨文化交流.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Boyu Zhang
Boyu Zhang, Ph.D., is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Department of Musicology, Central Conservatory of Music; director of the Central Conservatory of Music Press; Professorial Research Fellow, Advanced Research Institute for Music Education, Zhejiang Conservatory of Music; vice-Chairman of Chinese Traditional Music Association; and member of Academic Advisory Board of Humanities Faculty of Helsinki University (2011–2014). He authored three research books, co-authored six books, seven book chapters, edited seven books, translated six books, together with over 100 articles published in both Chinese and English. His research interest is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, focusing mainly on the meanings of traditional musics in their societies.
Ching-Wah Lam
Ching-Wah Lam holds degrees from Chinese University of Hong Kong (B.A., Music), Oxford University (M. Litt., Musicology) and Durham University (Ph.D., Ethnomusicology). He was a music critic of leading music magazines and newspapers in Hong Kong, before taking on academic positions at Lingnan College and Hong Kong Baptist University (where he was Head of Music Department from 1995 to 1998). His publications include over 200 sets of programme notes and many articles on Chinese music. His book The Idea of Chinese Music in Europe up to the Year 1800 has been published by the Central Conservatory Press bilingually.