Composing for Chinese Instruments

[Music] hi everyone my name is ian chen and i'm a taiwanese-canadian composer working in films tv and video games today i will introduce you to a variety of traditional chinese instruments and at the end i will show you how these instruments may be used in the context of western orchestral music taking examples from my soundtrack to indie game fantastic creatures which was nominated for music of the year at last year's game audio network's guild awards now before i start i must mention that i'm by no means a real expert or an ethnomusicologist on the subject matter my knowledge came mainly through discoveries i made along the way when arranging and writing for these instruments as well as from my time in college when i managed a small chinese music ensemble in upstate new york

in comparison in china as well as taiwan traditional chinese music has their own conservatory systems separate from that of western music and just like western music there are many branches sub-genres and regional differences within this overarching thing we call chinese music and since china is geographically enormous there can be astonishing differences between the music of different regions and some of the most popular chinese instruments they actually all came from different regions of china today i will attempt to go through some of the most popular instruments as well as some lesser known ones that are unique to the chinese music hall sound first let's look at the different family groups now there are many ways to categorize chinese instruments and traditionally chinese instruments are grouped into these eight categories you see on the screen known as the bain

these are the metal on the left stone silk bamboo gourd clay skin or leather and at the end wood and for the purpose of today's discussion i want to use the more modern way of categorizing them and will broadly divide them into both strings plugged with struct strings woodwinds and percussions now in the family of both strings the most famous one is probably the erhu which is also sometimes called the chinese fiddle even though the one we are most familiar with is really only a specific regional variant of the family of the huichin from the southern part of china and i actually have one right here with me i want to use this to show you the construction as you can see on the face there is a little bridge sitting on sitting on the

python skin and and this is actually so when i when i brought this instrument into the us i actually had to um declare it because of the python skin here and as you can see the ball actually sits in between uh the outer and the inner strings um so when you play the inner strings you kind of um pull towards you and when you uh when you play the outer one you push you push it out [Music] and uh in some with the samples it sounds like this [Music] as you can hear the oahu is very expressive and melancholy and is

suitable for sentimental solo passages but even though it is in the bold family both string family like a violin i would advise against using erhu in an ensemble set up the way violence violence and chelya used in western orchestras i know there have been attempts in recent decades to reinvent chinese music using the western orchestral setup as a model and as such many modern chinese orchestras employ an ensemble of urhuists to replicate the string section in the western orchestra here i have some example pictures to show i think this is the chinese orchestra as you can see on the left and the right there are groups of urhu players and then here's the shanghai chinese orchestra see that who players and there have also been attempts to reinvent new instruments

for this purpose for example the gohu which was invented in the 1950s to to replace the cello in in in the modern chinese orchestra um it's kind of like it's the size of a cello but with the python skin and such now my problem with this approach is that the sound of anuhou is i think fundamentally different from the son of a strings family in western orchestra um is really strong and piercing as a solo instrument but in an ensemble setting the sound of each instruments don't really add up the same way violins do for example and as a result the sounds produced become kind of bland and non-expressive um but this is my personal opinion and of course you should see cloud recordings and just for yourself now this leads me to my the next instrument family group the plugged or struck strings

you can see the back in a large ensemble setting i think these would be the instruments i used to provide a strong foundation and harmonic structure to the music similar to how strings are used in western orchestras and in particular the the zhongran the daran the pipa do ching and yang ching are the most popular ensemble instruments used in this way and each of these instruments is also great for solo one of the most famous in this category is the p e power which can be heard in the soundtracks for uh zhang emo's 2004 film house of the flying dagger as well as for example uh stephen charles from kung fu from the same year yeah i have a very i have so i have the little chin here which is a smaller kind of like a smaller version of the p bar as well as the dong run on the right i'll show you

now as you can see it has four strings sitting on a um wooden body and it sounds like this play with the pick and there's a technique uh often used called shake that uh that sounds a little bit like this no i'm not a legend player [Music] [Applause] and then of course you can bend the strings and this is the don't run or the medium loot and it sounds like this [Music] now it's much louder because the body is bigger and and it has a rich low tone

[Music] and you can also do a shake now if i remember correctly these instruments come actually come from western part of china so and i'll show you what the samples sound like so this is the p paw of course you don't have to do this shake you can do [Music] um and the next one another popular instrument in this family is called the guten which is zither-like instrument and basically the ancestor of the japanese koto um and in an orchestral setting it can be thought of as similar to a harp

and here's a picture here we go and it sounds like this oh actually hold on so as you pluck on one side you can use the other hand to push down on the string on the other side to raise the tone and to make this kind of and i mentioned how you can use like a harp um when you play glitzando on it a very tiny sounding thing and next we have the winds family which includes the swana and hulu's just to name a few

the most famous one i guess to the western ear is probably the deeds which is uh which is a flu made from bamboo with a main brim attached to create a kazoo-like tambra it sounds like this please note that the diesel is in itself a family of flutes of different sizes and tones and you would often pick the kind you want based on the music and the register of the passage kind of similar to how you might pick an english horn over an oboe or a piccolo of a flute a dj player often carry a bag of a variety of these instruments and use them based on the key and characteristics of the music and speaking of which it might be good to know that many chinese instruments especially those in the wobin family are key specific just like the western

counterparts the difference is that chinese instruments are now fitted with keys to help with semitones since chinese music is traditionally played in seven tone equal temperament rather than the western system of total and as such you'll find that a chinese dz player might switch between a c flute and a d flute depending on the music written even though these are pretty close in register and i have some pictures i think hold on ah there you go as you can see this is a picture i took of the hulus and dj player who came in to record for the soundtrack at the back you see a bunch of these that he brought for different different passages of the music and finally don't forget that percussion instruments are some of the most important and widely used instruments in all sorts of chinese ensembles from

small to large for example in beijing beijing opera the drum symbols roblox and clave play some of the most critical role in dictating the proceedings of the play and often also signify important story events in opera percussion instruments can take center stage much more often than what happens in traditional western orchestral music uh examples can be heard in films such as only's oscar winning from crouching tiger hidden dragon during the fight scene you only hear a few percussions playing but it's kind of captivating and pushes the the drama forward i also used a passage like that in my soundtrack uh well i'll just show you right now quickly some intense of the yellow river [Music]

this is really cool because you don't often hear this kind of passage in western music [Music] and then later um [Music] hear the this is the peapod which we discussed earlier [Applause]

yeah um so that concludes the most um i guess in the most part the more popular instruments that i was going to talk about but there are also a few uh lesser-known instruments that i want to talk about which i incorporated in my in into my soundtrack uh in the plug-in instructions family we have the yangching uh which looks like this oh no not that one this one as you can see it's basically a dulcimer and it's very useful in a supportive role doing things like trails chords and arpeggio runs it sounds like this [Music] and another interesting instrument in this category um is the lesson on visitor called gucci which is one of the most ancient instruments and one with many romantic stories associated with it it is favored by

scholars as an instrument of great subtlety and refinement and is often used to symbolize the concept of music as a whole in chinese culture and that one looks like this and when you play you move the thumb around um so kind of like the remains of the the plucking sound can change notes as you go so it's kind of hard to sample um i did use a little bit of it in the beginning of one of my trucks uh i don't can't find it anyway um oh it sounds like this [Music] um it's a little hard to show because when you move the thumb around it changes the tone anyway

next we have the the hulu which is in the which is the gourd category and this in the woodwinds family um it's made from three bamboo pipes attached to a gourd making a beautiful rounded and mellow sound i think i showed it earlier yeah it's this thing sitting in the front and the whole thing looks like that um it's originally used by just a few ethnic minorities in the yunnan province and later gained popularity through throughout china here's what it sounds like [Music] i i did use it as a solo instrument in some of my passages nope not that one this here

yeah that's the lucy [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that the passage is uh hulu's on top of strings and at the end during this hit you actually hear the chinese gong as well as uh well i

may make the chinese gone with like metal balls as well as a arpeggio on the on the yang chin as i demonstrated earlier uh finally we have the sun which is a really cool instrument it's it's basically a mouth organ made with bamboo pipes of different lengths it has one of the most unique sounds not really heard in western music and it is also the grandfather of many instruments found throughout asia and southeast asia such as the japanese show it looks like this and when they play they hold the instruments with both hands so it is also very expressive and i used in actually let me show you how it sounds [Music]

so you can play multiple notes at once so and in in the more modern chinese circus address there are more versions of this invented that are larger um and it creates support for the uh for the music um let me see if i can oh i i also used it uh in a way to play off the brass section in an orchestra uh let me see [Music] so there are a lot of different techniques in all the instruments that um that i briefly mentioned today

and sometimes it's difficult to know all the details of the instruments but what's great about these folk instruments of these folk instruments is that once you hire an instrumentalist in they can provide articulations or ornaments that you didn't even think was possible and that really adds a lot to the music as well and now i want to briefly talk about how well let me just show you some passages and different examples of the music for so for dj i use as a solo [Music] it's very piercing so it's really easy to cut through [Music] [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] so that was a combination of these and the and the plugin family with the strings um yeah and and that so so that's a more of a fusion sound and whereas here i'll show you a more traditional sound again percussions with the pipa so small ensemble is more common in traditional change music and then later [Music] [Applause] [Music] on [Music]

as i mentioned i prefer to use [Music] and now uh cello is also very useful even though it's not a chinese instrument um traditionally i feel like if you use the traditional chinese instruments you kind of lack that sort of low end string sound because it just didn't exist so in fact a lot of modern chinese orchestras just simply use the cello and just like a western orchestra score cello is also very useful in this context what else can i show you uh so i've shown you this one already

[Music] oh so this is this is the bow which is kind of which is a this is like instrument without the the membrane [Music] so it sounds rounder [Music] uh and that's called a baau b-a-w-u and now before i go i want to also briefly mention how when you hire an instrumentalist nowadays there are many who also read western staff however traditionally it's more of an oral tradition and then and then later there's a there's a new way invented to to notate

things which is called the jampu which uses numbers uh instead of uh western staff and here's an example of how that looks like so for example in amazing grace uh so so one one means the for example in the key of c one would be c so this would seem like uh [Music] so as you can see it tells you on the top that's in three four and then uh and then if you see one it means the c and then three is three is e and so on so forth and the dots means the octave and uh so this is traditionally how well recent traditionally how how things are read uh and you can even see it in uh score form as you can see uh this is like an uh a large a large score with the woodwinds on the top the

the strings here and the percussions uh the plugins and so on and so forth and i when i had when i had the instrumentalist come in to record for my soundtrack i had to handwrite all the to try basically transcribe about the the score into the gemful form as you can see uh oh oh it's going to be hard to see oh there we go like that so for each instrument i had to make the jampu version of it now i know i'm based in l.a and there are actually many artists here who or many instrumentalists here who also read western staff um i mean they could be more expensive um and it is not the the the way that they probably learned the instrument originally so if possible i would suggest to just to see if you could um

make a jump version of it for them especially if um the people you're hiring for example for me i hired them from uh the eastern region of la where there's a lot of chinese population and um and a lot of them don't actually read western staff so this is useful to know of course if you don't if you if there's no way for you to translate it then by all means hire someone who knows how to read a western staff but like i said it is really important i think especially when you write for chinese instruments to hire a chinese instrumentalists to come in and they will add so much to the music all right i think that concludes my talk today um i hope it was useful and i'll see you next time thank you [Music]