Power of the Pipa

Every time pipa player Wu Man visits The Met, she stops in front of the same case in the Musical Instruments galleries. Behind the glass lies a late-sixteenth or early-seventeenth-century version of her instrument, a pear-shaped cousin of the Middle Eastern oud and European lute introduced and assimilated into Chinese culture via two millennia of Silk Road history. The front of this Ming Dynasty pipa looks plain, its wooden front darkened with time, its silk strings unplayably withered. But on its back, more than 110 ivory plaques unite scenes from Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism—a pluralistic assemblage of symbols for prosperity, happiness, and luck.

Since moving to the United States in 1990, Wu Man has premiered hundreds of works for the instrument by composers from around the world, breaking new ground for the pipa in Western classical, jazz, electronic, and folk music while preserving millennia of ancient Chinese traditions. Her novel experiments have brought the pipa into conversations it had never before known, earning her a Grammy and a U.S. National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and cementing her status as the pipa’s reigning worldwide exponent.

Wu Man returns to The Met on September 9 with Brooklyn orchestra The Knights to perform the Pipa Concerto of Lou Harrison (1917–2003), the first concerto of its kind by a Western classical composer and one of many pieces since written with her singular musical voice in mind. Ahead of that performance, I spoke with the virtuoso on Zoom about her instrument, its histories, and its futures. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Emery Kerekes:
Wu Man, you’re an old friend of The Met—you’ve performed here several times and serve on the visiting committee for the Department of Musical Instruments. Footage of you even plays on loop in the galleries. Tell me about some of your early memories of the Museum.

Wu Man:
The Met is like a second home to me. As a tourist, I’ve been to The Met many times—with family, with friends. But eight or ten years ago, when Ken Moore was the curator in charge of the Department of Musical Instruments, he took me to a back room to see the Ming Dynasty pipa in the collection. Although I grew up in China, I had never seen an antique pipa before, and I got the great opportunity to hold it and feel its history. It was like holding a child—I still get goosebumps thinking about it. It was so meaningful to look through the Museum and compare the history of other instruments from the same time.

Kerekes:
On this program with The Knights, you’ll be playing Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto, generally regarded as the first concerto written by a Western classical composer for the pipa, and one of many written for you since. Tell me about collaborating with Harrison, and with Western composers in general. Apart from your vast knowledge and experience, what resources exist for Western composers writing their first pieces for pipa? What does the workshop process look like?

Wu Man:
There are so many Asian composers writing for piano, violin, or symphony orchestras—it’s the same kind of idea as Lou Harrison writing a pipa concerto. The composers bring their own experiences of music.

I premiered the piece at Lincoln Center in 1997, on a concert series that celebrated Lou Harrison’s eightieth birthday, with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. Dennis was a great friend of Lou’s. We had performed a different pipa concerto together, by Macanese composer Bun-Ching Lam, with the American Composers Orchestra. After that, literally in front of me, Dennis picked up the phone and called Lou. “Lou, would you like to write a pipa concerto for my string orchestra?” And I heard Lou say, “Of course, who’s the player?”

Lou grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent so much time sucked into Chinatown, playing with Chinese bands on all kinds of traditional instruments. He was very familiar with the pipa—he kept one in his house after traveling to Taiwan to learn about Chinese music. It was the nineties, so we didn’t have cell phones or computers—we only had landlines and fax machines. So Lou wrote the first few notes, he faxed them to me, and he asked if it was doable. It wasn’t an American scale, and it definitely had nothing to do with Chinese music. It was more like Indonesian gamelan music.

Lou always compared the pipa’s sound with that of the banjo. There’s nothing fancy, no strumming, nothing dramatic. Everything is a single line with single notes.

At one point I said to Lou that this is a California piece, in California style. He said, “Wu Man, I’m not going to write a piece like traditional Chinese pipa repertoire. I’m going to write my music.” That’s exactly what I wanted to see—how Lou’s imagination would be different from a Chinese composer’s. I wanted to listen to his language and experience of the instrument.

Lou always compared the pipa’s sound with that of the banjo. There’s nothing fancy, no strumming, nothing dramatic. Everything is a single line with single notes. It’s very challenging. “How am I going to make this sound like a pipa, not a banjo?” I asked Lou when he finished. “That’s your job,” he said.

Kerekes:
In addition to Lou Harrison’s concerto, you’ll be playing a set of music for solo pipa—some of it traditional, some your own compositions. Tell me about the traditions you've been helping to preserve and how your compositional style either expands on or diverges from that sound world.

Wu Man:
The pipa has had such a long history—it came from the Persians two thousand years ago. It’s related to the Middle Eastern oud, but the Chinese developed the tuning, the scale, the technique. It’s a totally different language.

Before the nineteenth century, the pipa had no written scores. Everything was learned by oral tradition, and then in the later nineteenth century, a pipa master hand-notated some of the pieces that had been passed down. Even today, we all learn from that book of thirteen pieces. There are different traditional styles: the martial style is very dramatic, and then there's a meditative, beautiful, slow lyrical style.

For this concert, I will introduce some repertoire from that standard book. I’ll also introduce some popular folk music from my hometown of Hangzhou. It’s tea-house music, based on one single tune that becomes a much bigger piece with a lot of improvisation—it’s almost like jazz in that way. When I play a traditional tune, there are a lot of left-hand details and ornamentation, since Chinese music is traditionally based on melody. So when you put all the elements and details together, there’s a lot of up and down, kind of like when you’re speaking in Chinese.

Kerekes:
Over your career, you’ve introduced the pipa into musical traditions it had never before been a part of—Mexican son jarocho, Bollywood, folk music of Eastern Europe, Africa, and the United States—and you’ve brought Western classical ensembles into the realm of Chinese folk music, often for the first time. Why initiate these cross-cultural conversations? What motivates your curiosity?

Wu Man:
Curiosity is my personality. When I was in music school in Beijing, we all learned the traditional solo repertoire, but I was always interested in playing with someone else. When I was still living in China, I was recording in a studio for all of these pop-song cassettes—they’d have, like, three or four bars with a Chinese instrument, just for the color. And that gave me a bigger picture than the traditional music.

So when I moved to the States in the early nineties, it was a culture shock. Especially in New York—people are telling me there's downtown music and uptown music, and then Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center are in the middle. What do you mean, downtown and uptown? Is that different music?

The first time I played downtown was with a Chinese ensemble in Chinatown. Obviously, neighbors came in, so plenty of the audience was from outside the Chinese community. After I finished one concert, a guy approached me, right in my face, and said: “Hey that was cool! Do you want to join me for a gig next week? I play jazz saxophone.”

I had no idea what jazz was, but I said yes. I wanted to see how the pipa could fit on that kind of stage and step out of the traditional circle. Then Kronos Quartet commissioned a piece for pipa and Western string quartet—the first quintet of its kind in history. We premiered it in 1992, and it was a turning point in my career. It was challenging because in our traditional training, we don’t use Western notation. I do read Western musical notation, but I’d never played with Western musicians in such a small setting, face to face. I was so nervous.

When we premiered that piece—Soul by Chinese composer Zhou Long—at the Pittsburgh New Music Festival, the audience gave us a crazy standing ovation. At that moment, I stood up and looked at the audience cheering, and I said, “This is it. This is what I want to do. I want to share my music with a different audience, and work with composers, and expand this instrument and myself as a musician.”

A lot of orchestras program Lou Harrison’s concerto as American music, but with a Chinese traditional instrument. I’ve played that piece in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. For a Chinese audience, this is a new discovery—a foreigner wrote a piece for this instrument, for our instrument!

When I play with the qanun from Syria, or the dura from Uzbekistan, or the dutar from Tajikistan, or the oud from Turkey, it’s very different. We have an ensemble like that, the Aga Khan Master Musicians—we go to the Edinburgh Festival tomorrow. As soon as I bring a tune from China to play on the qanun, or the oud, the audience just starts dancing.

For a Chinese audience, this is a new discovery—a foreigner wrote a piece for this instrument, for our instrument!

The audience always says, “I’ve never heard of the pipa, but it sounds like a banjo/mandolin/harp/ukulele.” So that means we’re all very similar, it’s just a different interpretation of the musical language. I remember, about a year ago, I played at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. I performed the lyrical solo Flute and Drum Music at Sunset, which I’ll also play at my concert at The Met—and at the Q&A after the concert, one audience member said it sounded like Mississippi blues!

Kerekes:
It's a small world, after all, and that lets you trace these vast networks. I mean, the pipa originally came to China via the Silk Road, right?

Wu Man:
Yes, every time I play with the oud, I joke that the relatives are gathering together for the first time in nine hundred years. There are actually lots of similarities—a lot of ornamentation on the left hand, a different, very microtonal language with lots of small details. You can’t base everything on the piano’s twelve notes, that’s only one type of instrument. The wisdom of the human being, I think that’s the music.

Kerekes:
Tell me about your history with The Knights. What about that ensemble makes them so ripe for collaboration?

Wu Man:
I knew Colin and Eric Jacobsen when they first graduated from school in 2000, through Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—that’s how we first started to play music together, reading a lot of new music with so many musicians from so many countries: Central Asia, China, Japan, Korea, America, Turkey. We toured that program, and from there we sort of grew up together as musicians.

One thing about The Knights is that they’re very young and passionate about music. The younger generation challenges themselves to embrace many different styles of music in their programming—not only Western classical, but also contemporary, pop, and world music. In the twenty-first century, every kid listens to all kinds of music—not like when I grew up in closed-door China, where we only knew ourselves. I think that’s an example for future generations of orchestral musicians.

As a pipa player, my biggest challenge is why the audience comes to my concerts—how can you invite the audience to the concert hall? But I do have confidence that, as soon as they sit down and listen, they will love it. And through music, they might grow interested in other cultures, want to Google Chinese food, scenery, stories, language. I think music is a window to open to different cultures.

Kerekes:
You’ve been in the musical limelight since the age of nine. Now that you've brought the pipa into all of these new conversations, how do you feel your career can inspire the next generation—not only for players of traditional Chinese instruments, but for musicians of any stripe?

Wu Man:
Last night, I came back from the Silk Road Global Musicians Workshop in Boston. We had eighty young musicians from twenty-two countries gathered together at the New England Conservatory. I was one of the faculty, and I shared with them some Chinese music. My band included banjo, cello, dutar, Irani traditional voice, doumbek, violin, viola, piano—all kinds of musicians gathering together not to learn pipa, but to learn music.

Tomorrow, I travel again, and I’ll do this exact same program in my hometown of Hangzhou—Silk Road Global Musicians Workshop in China, with twelve participants from the U.S., and the rest from China. This is how I see myself: as a mentor to young people who want to be musicians, and to share with them my experiences and advice. I also always do outreach programs in high schools, middle schools, even conservatories. I’m not a professor, but through my experience and travels, I feel kind of like a teacher.

I have this weird instrument nobody knows in America, but I'm still playing. I survived; I am the example. It’s a very direct perspective they can't get in the classroom. It's my responsibility.