Saturday, April 16, 2016

Crossing and Meeting at Musical Boundaries: Reflection #5 on Perspective-Taking

So already, on a recent wintry April Sunday afternoon, I attended a concert at Wellesley College in which the Shanghai Quartet joined forces with Wu Man, a world-renowned player of the traditional Chinese lute-like instrument known as the pipa, to perform a classical program featuring music eastern, western, and eastern-western; music traditional, innovative, and traditional-innovative. Their performance of Tan Dun's "Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa" so thrilled me that I listened to it many times on YouTube on the days following and finally decided to write a poem about it.  Here's that poem. I think a lot now about spring peepers and spring pipas!



On Hearing Tan Dun’s “Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa” in Spring

“At the . . . Conservatory . . . , Wu Man met two of the current members of the Shanghai Quartet, but didn’t make music with them: “’We belonged to different departments. They played Western instruments, and I played a Chinese instrument.”

“The year 1992 marked the first time in history for musical dialogue between a string quartet and a pipa, . . . .”

“’I feel pipa is my voice.’”—Wu Man



Part I

Late Sunday,
early spring.
Snow bright,
late and low.
Sun, clouds,
then sun again,
moving west,
beyond the window’s
black scrim.

SMACK!

Five right feet
stamp unison--
breach silence,
crush notions
of first notes
bowed or plucked.

Pipa, pear-shaped,
vertical, still--
then, suddenly,
strummed and struck,
strings snatched, released
as bows chart arcs,
map sound
between note and note,
rise and fall,
repeat.

Chaos
then stillness
too brittle to hold.


“YOW!”
the five musicians shout.

The briefest pause.

Then, above the quartet’s
shimmering hum,
pipa notes
drop one-by-one
into a moonlit pool.



Part II

Continuities, moods, and changes
as pipa and strings negotiate,
swoop and volley.

Sometimes they play tag,
take turns at chase and flee.
Sometimes they trade stories,
render journeys and home.
Sometimes,
like experienced dancers
newly partnered,
they join full to
leap boundaries for horizons.
Slapping sound boxes like drums,
sliding seasoned bows and hands
with breathless speed and force
the length of well-known strings,
they gallop bold and free
to a new music
that remembers still.

Look only to nature
to see how our tendency
to sort and parse
inclines us to love best or only
what submits
to the order we’ve imposed--
and therefore limits loving.

Daffodils bowed low by April snow,
fluted yellow fans inverted
at the ends of green stems
arching sunward slowly
above the muddy zigzag
of melting snow
and brown earth:
new beauty
for winterspring.





* Quotations from the program entitled “The Wellesley College Concert Series Presents Wu Man and The Shanghai String Quartet: Music from Ancient and New China.



** Pipa Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipa#/media/File:%D0%91%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B0.jpg
 

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