The Chinese pipa is a four stringed lute—or Chinese guitar—with a pear-shaped body. Historical records reveal that the pipa first appeared during the Qin Dynasty (222 – 206 BCE), and become one of the most popular stringed instruments in China surviving more than two-thousand years.
Traditional Chinese music has been traced back 7,000 to 8,000 years. For centuries this music was heard primarily by the royalty and high government officials.
But by the Tang Dynasty, records indicate this music had spread to the common people.
Traditional Chinese musical instruments can be divided into four categories: stringed instruments, percussion instruments, plucked instruments, and wind instruments.
Wu Man Wu is recognized as the world’s most famous pipa player and the leading ambassador of Chinese music. She was born 1963 in Hangzhou, China and moved to the United States in 1990. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award and in 2009 was asked to curate two concerts at Carnegie Hall.
Wu has performed as a soloist with many of the world’s major orchestras, including the Austrian ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Moscow Soloists, Nashville Symphony, German NDR and RSO Radio Symphony Orchestras, New Music Group, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.
_______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves.
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
iLook China 
Love to learn about the music of other cultures. Thanks.
You’re welcome.
I sent you an email with a picture. It’s not a great picture … for some reason, these guys are really hard to photograph.
The photos came through and they were better than the ones I took of my wife’s collection. Thank you.
I did a lot of processing on it to make it clearer. These are hard to photograph without putting them under real lights.
I know. Look how bad the photo I took turned out.
I have a very old porcelain set of musicians from the Sui ear. One of the musicians (I think they are all women, but really all I can tell is that they are wearing long gowns) is playing an instrument that looks like a pipa.
Do you have a digital photograph you could share?
I do have one of the general group, but I’ll take one of the specific figure. Meanwhile I’ll email the picture I have to you and when the light is back tomorrow I’ll take another for you.
I do have one of her albums. She is good
Which album?