Today I will be talking about a special section of the Chinese Orchestra, the pluck string section. To be very honest, it is a weird but very important part of CO. It provides the bass and the rhythm feels to the group, allowing everyone to stick to each other closely. This section has mainly 5 instruments,
1: 柳琴 (LiuQin)
2: 琵琶 (PiPa)
3: 中阮 (ZhongRuan)
4: 大阮 (DaRuan)
5: 三弦 (SanXian)
Let's start with the LiuQin. LiuQin is a pear-looking instrument with 4 strings tuned as GDGD. I have a love/hate relationship with this instrument. On good times, the instrument sounds brightly beautiful, adding Chinese textures to the arrangement. On bad times, strings are hard to tune as they are very tight. Moreover, the brittle first string snaps easily and trust me, it is worse than a paper cut when the string cuts you. There is actually a 1-to-1 comparison with the LiuQin and that is XiaoRuan. However, since many years, many people feel that Liuqin has a better texture and sound compared to XiaoRuan and thus you seldom see arrangements involving XiaoRuan. A good LiuQin concerto to listened to is 雨后庭院. A very technically challenging LiuQin piece that requires the musician to use old and new techniques.
柳琴
Next, we have the PiPa. A bigger pear-looking instrument that is sometimes named as the Chinese Lute. It also has 4 strings and mainly tuned as AEDA. Yes, it is a very weird tuning that many western musicians do not get it. I do not really know how or why this tuning was made but it has been like that for hundreds of years. While other pluck instruments use a pick to strum or play the instruments. the PiPa using artificial nails to play. It is different from the ones GuZheng uses. As such, this allows PiPa players to do special techniques to the PiPa that cannot be done on other pluck instruments. I think PiPa is a very unique instrument with its own rights. It can be played solo with a sorrowful tone, or help the ensemble/orchestra to have a deeper texture as it belongs in the tenor range. A PiPa concerto that I would recommend listening is 云想花想. A very modern piece inspired by an ancient Chinese poem, <<清平乐>>.
琵琶
Next, we have the Ruans, or Chinese guitar. Like the LiuQin, it is tuned GDGD but what makes it special is the high resonance in the instrument. It is the loudest and resounding instrument in the pluck strings family. This allows many power chords to be played and support the ensemble/orchestra. I absolutely love the Ruan. One can play many modern songs/pieces on the Ruan and it will still sound as good. A notable Ruan concerto would be 北方民族生活素描. Its a 4 movement concerto depicting about the northern tribe and their daily life.
Ruan
Last but not least we have the SanXian. The only pluck instruments that do not have frets and only has 3 strings. Unlike the other pluck mentions where the sound is produced by resonating on a piece of wood, the SanXian resonated on a dried phyton skin, just like the erhu. It creates a deep resounding sound and its also personally one of my favorites. Unfortunately, there are no SanXian concertos that I know of but you will see SanXian a lot in ensemble pieces and classic CO pieces.
SanXian
That's all for today, have a great day everyone!
