the last days of guqin camp
at the Royal Academy of Music
London

Following from this post.

I could write a lot about my week at the Royal Academy of Music's summer school, but I won't. I enjoyed the people I met and being in that atmosphere of exploration and excitement about Asian music. There were many people who had never seen a qin before, and others who had practiced half a lifetime.

The campus is near Baker Street and Regents Park, which meant new friends and I could stroll out to smell the roses or buy a sandwich with shops painted with Sherlock Holmes murals.

On the second day, the organizers asked me to translate some talks by Zeng Chengwei, guqin professor at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, and Hu Bin, erhu professor at the Royal Conservatory of Music. It was really a "pre-concert lecture" in which they described the songs they were going to play the next night. Though my music vocabulary was a bit rusty, I got through the technical aspects of the lecture just fine. It was Professor Hu's emotional language of her songs' heroines that stumped me, along with Professor Zeng's rattling off of classical Chinese phrases. I think he was asking me to translate something about sage emperors in the picture on the right.

The next night ZCW performed five songs, the first being Zuiyu Changwan (The Drunken Fisherman Sings at Dusk), which he was also teaching me. After the performance, I congratulated him and told him how marvelous it was to hear him play in that nearly acoustically perfect auditorium. He said in typical Chinese modesty that he "played poorly."

Our class on stage:


Thanks to Peng Hua, scientist and musician extraordinaire, for taking and sending the pics.

Labels: guqin, London