Wu Man: Silk Road Ensemble member, musical ambassador, in Hop residency

HANOVER, NH—Wu Man, a Grammy-nominated musician who has bridged East and West, ancient and modern, and China’s glittering urban centers and its poor but musically rich rural outposts, comes to Dartmouth College for a week-long residency that includes a performance on Friday, January 27, at 8 pm in the Hop’s Spaulding Auditorium.

The reigning virtuoso on the ancient four-stringed, lute-like pipa, Wu has popularized the instrument in the West through her collaborations with composers and artists including Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Tan Dun, the Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, jazz innovator Henry Threadgill and English folk guitarist Martin Simpson, to name a handful.

“She, more than anyone, is responsible for the globalization of the pipa,” said ethnomusicologist Ted Levin, Dartmouth’s Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music Professor of Music.” She arguably has done that better than anyone else in the world—by stimulating a new repertoire for the instrument, not only in China but also in the West, because of her extraordinary virtuosity and musicianship.” Levin first came to know Wu Man 20 years ago when she had only recently arrived in the West as a prodigy on a then little-understood classical Chinese instrument. Later, they became colleagues in the Silk Road Ensemble, which Wu Man joined in 1993 and for which Levin stills serves as a board member.

Critics agree. Wrote The Boston Globe, “The charismatic Wu Man is a fabulous musician. In her hands the pipa makes most Western instruments sound blunt…the responsiveness, intimacy, variety and subtlety of her playing are astonishing.”

Wu Man’s Hop concert will include traditional classical works that musically depict a famous 3^rd-century-BCE battle and a scene of bucolic serenity; arrangements of the folk tunes of some of China’s ethnic minorities; and a new suite based on 8^th-century Chinese poetry and projections of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Wu Man is joined by Boston-based percussionist Robert Schulz and the New Jersey-based Yang Yi, a world-renowned performer on the zheng, a 21-string Chinese zither.

Wu Man’s Dartmouth residency also touches on another of Wu Man’s passions, the little-known musics and musicians of China’s rural ethnic minorities. Wednesday, January 25, at 4:30 pm in Room 41 of Dartmouth’s Haldeman Hall, the Hop will screen Discovering a Musical Heartland, a 30-minute documentary following Wu Man as she explores remote parts of China that preserve traditional music that is all but unknown, even to most Chinese. The screening is followed by a discussion with Wu Man and Levin. There is no charge for admission.

Levin and Wu Man have collaborated on several projects, the most recent of which is Borderlands, the tenth and final volume of a series co-produced by the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia and the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The volume includes audio and video recordings made by Levin in 2010 of Wu Man’s collaborations with Uyghur musicians in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China, who play a wild, hypnotic blend of Persian, Chinese and Indian musical influences. Borderlands is scheduled to be released later this month.

Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso and as a leading ambassador of Chinese music, US-based, Wu Man has carved out a career creating and fostering projects that give this ancient instrument a new role in today’s music world.

Born in Hangzhou, China, she studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. Since moving to the US in 1990, she has continually collaborated with some of the most distinguished musicians and conductors performing today and has performed in major concert halls worldwide as a soloist with many of the world’s leading orchestras. She is a principal member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project and since 1993 she has also regularly performed and recorded with the Kronos Quartet, their most recent work together being the multi-media work, A Chinese Home directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. She is also the first artist from China to have performed at the White House.

A pear-shaped wooden body with frets ranging from 12–26, the pipa is one of the most popular Chinese instruments and has been played for 2,000 years in China. To play it, the right fingers pluck the strings while the left fingers touching the strings in a variety of ways to create rolls, slaps, pizzicato, harmonics, and other sounds. More than 60 distinct pipa techniques have been developed over the centuries.