There are some confusions and disagreements about the origin of pipa. Painted panel of the sarcophagus of Y Hung, depicts one of the Persian or Sogdian figures playing pipa. With turned wrist, he gathered the strings to pluck and strum faster. The biwa became known as an instrument commonly played at the Japanese Imperial court, where biwa players, known as biwa hshi, found employment and patronage. This may be due to the fact that the word pipa was used in ancient texts to describe a variety of plucked chordophones of the period from the Qin to the Tang dynasty, including the long-necked spiked lute and the short-necked lute, as well as the differing accounts given in these ancient texts. Biwa. NGDMI v.1: 234-237. This music was cherished and protected by the authorities and particularly flourished in the 14th-15th centuries. often-used technique is rubbing the long side of the bachi on the strings to get wind-like sounds. Since biwa pieces were generally performed for small groups, singers did not need to project their voices as opera singers did in Western music tradition. A pipa player playing with the pipa behind his back. Though its origins are unclear, this thinner variant of the biwa was used in ceremonies and religious rites. However, the biwas cultural significance is due to its evolution during the medieval era into a narrative musical instrument. The biwa is a four stringed lute and it is approximately 106 cm long (42 inches). It is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists . shamisen Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection Grinnell This seeming shortcoming is compensated for by the frets height and the low tension of the strings. 36 1/2 7 7/8 5 in. Malm, William P. 1959. These tunings are relative, the actual pitches a given biwa is tuned to being determined by the vocal range of the singer/player. Biwa - Wikipedia Yoko Hiraoka, a member of the Yamato Komyoji ryu, presents a lecture/recital of Japanese Biwa music. Pipa has been played solo, or as part of a large ensemble or small group since the early times. D. SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT A. Write True if the statement is correct and The Biwa is a four-stringed Japanese lute with a short neck that was commonly used in Japanese court music in the seventh and eighth centuries. Heike-biwa is an accompaniment instrument specifically used to chant the Tale of Heike stories () in the traditional way dating from the medieval era. Notes played on the biwa usually begin slow and thin and progress through gradual accelerations, increasing and decreasing tempo throughout the performance. greatest width of resonator [10][11] This may have given rise to the Qin pipa, an instrument with a straight neck and a round sound box, and evolved into ruan, an instrument named after Ruan Xian, one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and known for playing similar instrument. 592 AD, Sui dynasty. They recorded the critically acclaimed CD "Eagle Seizing Swan" together. His well-received compositions, such as November Steps, which incorporated biwa heikyoku with Western orchestral performance, revitalized interest in the biwa and sparked a series of collaborative efforts by other musician in genres ranging from J-Pop and enka to shin-hougaku and gendaigaku. [40] Through time, the neck was raised and by the Qing dynasty the instrument was mostly played upright. The plectrum is usually made from rosewood with boxwood or ivory tips for plucking the strings. Players hold the instrument vertically. In the performers right hand the bachi (plectrum) is held, its upward-pointing tip used to pluck the strings near the string holder. Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded. Heike-biwa is an accompaniment instrument specifically used to chant the Tale of Heike stories () in the traditional way dating from the medieval era. In 2015, pipa player Jiaju Shen () released a mini album composed and produced by Li Zong (),[73] with E-pa music that has a strong Chinese flavor within a modern Western pop music mould. Four or five frets are attached to the body, and it is played with a large wooden plectrum (bachi). As the biwa does not play in tempered tuning, pitches are approximated to the nearest note. [45] Other collections from the Qing dynasty were compiled by Li Fangyuan () and Ju Shilin (), each representing different schools, and many of the pieces currently popular were described in these Qing collections. By the late 1940s, the biwa, a thoroughly Japanese tradition, was nearly completely abandoned for Western instruments; however, thanks to collaborative efforts by Japanese musicians, interest in the biwa is being revived. Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded. In more recent times, many pipa players, especially the younger ones, no longer identify themselves with any specific school. In 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate collapsed, giving way to the Meiji period and the Meiji Restoration, during which the samurai class was abolished, and the Todo lost their patronage. It had a pear-shaped wooden body with two crescent-shaped sound holes, a curved neck, four strings, and four frets. By the Song dynasty, the word pipa was used to refer exclusively to the four-stringed pear-shaped instrument. Public domain data for this object can also be accessed using the Met's Open Access API. The typical 5-stringed Satsuma-biwa classical tuning is: CGCG, from first string to fourth/fifth string, respectively. Of the remaining post-war biwa traditions, only higo-biwa remains a style almost solely performed by blind persons. 17 Traditional Japanese Musical Instruments You Should Know The surface of the frets is constantly shaved down by the strings, and one of the most important points in the maintenance of the biwa is to keep the surfaces as flat as possible to get goodsawari, The narrative biwa music adopts a relative tuning; the pitch is decided to match with the players range of voice. The instrument is tuned to match the key of the singer. The instrument was invented in China in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, during the Jin dynasty. It is an instrument in Japan, that is a two-stringed fiddle (violin). The fingers normally strike the strings of pipa in the opposite direction to the way a guitar is usually played, i.e. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. Cheng Yu researched the old Tang dynasty five-stringed pipa in the early 2000s and developed a modern version of it for contemporary use. He also qualified as a doctor of Chinese medicine. 4. The pear-shaped instrument may have existed in China as early as the Han dynasty, and although historically the term pipa was once used to refer to a variety of plucked chordophones, its usage since the Song dynasty refers exclusively to the pear-shaped instrument. The surface of the frets is constantly shaved down by the strings, and one of the most important points in the maintenance of the biwa is to keep the surfaces as flat as possible to get goodsawari. The strings are made of wound silk. These monophonic do not follow a set harmony. A string instrument which is made of Paulownia wood that is used in an ensemble in gagaku or a solo instrument. [24] However, it continued to be played as a folk instrument that also gained the interest of the literati. Its pick or bachi () is the largest among all types of biwa it sometimes used to strike the hard soundboard sharply to create percussive effects, adding a more dynamic flavor to the music. Since the biwas pegs do not move smoothly, tuning the instrument to a different mode requires time. Several schools of biwa playing evolved from the ms tradition, one of which, founded in the 1890s by Tachibana Chij and others and called the Asahi-kai, was based on the style of the Chikuzen region of Kyushu. The 4 wedge-shaped frets on the neck became 6 during the 20th century. The biwa, originally an instrument of high society, gradually spread among wandering blind monks who used this instrument to tell stories. Rubbing the strings: The plectrum is used to rub an open string. It is the most widely used system for classifying musical . Modern notation systems, new compositions as well as recordings are now widely available and it is no longer crucial for a pipa players to learn from the master of any particular school to know how to play a score. A new way to classify the acoustical properties of woods and clearly separate these two groups is proposed in this paper. In modern biwa, particularly in Satsuma-biwa, one sometimes strikes the soundboard sharply to get percussive effects. Considering that the metronome marking of this music rarely exceeds the quarter-note at 54, and that the biwa plays mostly on the 1st beat of each measure, it is the authors impression that hazusu and/or tataku may help the biwa player keep time by providing material/action that cuts the duration of a measure in two, even if it cannot be heard. Most contemporary performers use the five string version. Typically 60 centimetres (24 in) to 106 centimetres (42 in) in length, the instrument is . By the Ming dynasty, fingers replaced plectrum as the popular technique for playing pipa, although finger-playing techniques existed as early as Tang. It is possible to include a fingered pitch among the lower grace-notes but that pitch should preferably be chosen among those playable on the 4th fret. The main part of the music is vocal and the biwa part mostly plays short interludes. Player - Instrument Interface and Sound Production. The plectrum also contributes to the texture of biwa music. [17][18] The pear-shaped pipa may have been introduced during the Han dynasty and was referred to as Han pipa. Multiple strings are often played in one pluck like an arpeggio. Hazusu: This is a sequence of two pitches, where the first one is attacked, and leades to a second one which is not attacked. During the war time in early 20th century, biwa music was easily adapted to the nationalism of Imperial Japan, and many songs that emphasized the virtue of loyalty and sacrifice for the country were created and widely played. This is the original form of biwa that came to Japan in the 8th century. As a result, younger musicians turned to other instruments and interest in biwa music decreased. The wen style is more lyrical and slower in tempo, with softer dynamic and subtler colour, and such pieces typically describe love, sorrow, and scenes of nature. Chordophone-Lute-plucked-fretted, Credit Line: Like the heike-biwa, it is played held on its side, similar to a guitar, with the player sitting cross-legged. The six fret type is tuned to B, E, B and b. One of the biwa's most famous uses is for reciting The Tale of the Heike, a war chronicle from the Kamakura period (11851333). At first the chikuzen biwa, like the one pictured in gallery #1, had four strings and five frets, but by the 1910s Tachibana and his sons had developed a five-string model (gallery #2) that, since the 1920s, has been the most common form of the instrument. PDF A Comparison of String Instruments Based on Wood Properties Updates? This overlap resulted in a rapid evolution of the biwa and its usage and made it one of the most popular instruments in Japan. Although typically it is used to play short standardized phrases between lines of vocal text, it may be used for longer programmatic pieces depicting battles, storms, or other dramatic events. Performers on the instrument frequently pluck two notes simultaneously, producing a variety of intervals, especially when the singer is silent. Blind priests would play them in order to tell stories and tales of ancient war. As well as being one of the leading pipa players of his generation, Li held many academic positions and also carried out research on pipa scales and temperament. Bodmin, Cornwall, Great Britain: MPG Books, pp. These, according to the Han dynasty text by Liu Xi, refer to the way the instrument is played "p" is to strike outward with the right hand, and "p" is to pluck inward towards the palm of the hand. An English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961. This is due to the fact that the space between the strings on the first three frets is so short that a fingered 1st fret on the 3rd string, for example, would damp the following 4th string, as shown on Figure 7. In the 13th century, the story "The Tale of Heike" ()was created and told by them. The body is narrower and smaller than the other types of biwa. Not to be confused with the five-stringed variants of modern biwa, such as chikuzen-biwa. Depictions of the pear-shaped pipas appeared in abundance from the Southern and Northern dynasties onwards, and pipas from this time to the Tang dynasty were given various names, such as Hu pipa (), bent-neck pipa (, quxiang pipa), some of these terms however may refer to the same pipa. L 31 1/2 W. 11 13/16 D. 1 5/16 in. 2000. Exploiting the sound of the open strings increases the overall sounds volume. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments. The biwa is a stringed instrument used in Japan as a sort of story telling method. Taiko | musical instrument | Britannica Once assembled, four wound silk strings of varying thicknesses are at one of their ends tied to the string holder bridge (detail #4) and the other to the tuning pegs. Several related instruments are derived from the pipa, including the Japanese biwa and Korean bipa in East Asia, and the Vietnamese n t b in Southeast Asia. [18], As biwa music declined in post-Pacific War Japan, many Japanese composers and musicians found ways to revitalize interest in it. It always starts from the 4th string and stops on either the 3rd, 2nd, or 1st string depending if the arpeggio contains 2, 3, or 4 pitches, respectively. This minute design detail gives rise to sawari, the distinctive raspy tone of a vibrating string. [67] It is very much the same as the modern pipa in construction save for being a bit wider to allow for the extra string and the reintroduction of the soundholes at the front. [19], Other musicians, such as Yamashika Yoshiyuki, considered by most ethnomusicologists to be the last of the biwa hshi, preserved scores of songs that were almost lost forever. The sound can be totally different depending on where the instrument is hit, how the plectrum is held, and which part of the plectrum hits the surface. Figure 6 shows a spectral analysis of the arpeggio read at the attack and one second later. For the left hand, as mentioned above under the Construction section, bending of the strings (oshikan, ) and delicate control of it to create a vibrato effect (yuri. ) The pipa pieces in the common repertoire can be categorized as wen (, civil) or wu (, martial), and da (, large or suite) or xiao (, small). The instrument itself resembles gaku-biwa but is slightly smaller, and is held horizontally. Instrument Classification | Mary K. Oyer African Music Archive | Goshen The biwa ( Japanese: ) is a Japanese short-necked wooden lute traditionally used in narrative storytelling. Shakuhachi 2. By the Kamakura period (11851333), the heike-biwa had emerged as a more popular instrument, a cross between both the gaku-biwa and ms-biwa, retaining the rounded shape of the gaku-biwa and played with a large plectrum like the ms-biwa. The loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) is a large evergreen shrub or tree, grown commercially for its orange fruit and for its leaves, which are used to make herbal tea.It is also cultivated as an ornamental plant.. Ms Biwa () Japanese. A player holds it horizontally, and mostly plays rhythmic arpeggios in orchestra or ensemble. The left hand techniques are important for the expressiveness of pipa music. A number of Western pipa players have experimented with amplified pipa. Thought to be of Persian origin, the biwa was brought to Japan in the 8th century via Central Asia, China and the Korean Peninsula. During the Qing dynasty, scores for pipa were collected in Thirteen Pieces for Strings. This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen. The biwa is a plucked lute chordophone of Japan. The strings are usually tuned to A2 D3 E3 A3 , although there are various other ways of tuning. Plucking in the opposite direction to tan and tiao are called mo () and gou () respectively. Catalogue of the Crosby Brown . About: Biwa In the 18th century, samurai in the Satsuma area (southern part of Kyushu island) adopted the blind monks biwa music into their musical practices. Since the revolutions in Chinese instrument-making during the 20thcentury, the softer twisted silk strings of earlier times have been exchanged for nylon-wound steel strings, which are far too strong for human fingernails, so false nails are now used, constructed of plastic or tortoise-shell, and affixed to the fingertips with the player's choice of elastic tape. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. The four and five-stringed pipas were especially popular during the Tang dynasty, and these instruments were introduced into Japan during the Tang dynasty as well as into other regions such as Korea and Vietnam. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. The Birbyne and Biwa | The Other Instrument - Pennsylvania State University So, here are six traditional Japanese instruments you can listen to today! Nation: Japan. [31] The pipa is mentioned frequently in the Tang dynasty poetry, where it is often praised for its expressiveness, refinement and delicacy of tone, with poems dedicated to well-known players describing their performances. During the 1910s a five-string model was developed that, since the 1920s, has been the most common form of the instrument (gallery #2). Finally, measure 5 shows a rare instance where a melodic tone (F# in this case) is doubled on the second beat of the biwa's pattern. Traditional instruments in japanese and chinese music - SlideShare Pieces in the Wu style are generally more rhythmic and faster, and often depict scenes of battles and are played in a vigorous fashion employing a variety of techniques and sound effects. The stroking motion always starts from the 1st string, sequentially sweeping toward the others until it reaches the arpeggios last string. The instrument itself resembles gaku-biwa but is slightly smaller, and is held horizontally. [23], During the Song dynasty, pipa fell from favour at the imperial court, perhaps a result of the influence of neo-Confucian nativism as pipa had foreign associations. 1. The pipa has also been used in rock music; the California-based band Incubus featured one, borrowed from guitarist Steve Vai, in their 2001 song "Aqueous Transmission," as played by the group's guitarist, Mike Einziger. Tokyo:Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai. The strings are numbered from the lowest (first string) to the highest (fourth string). Through the next several centuries, players of both traditions intersected frequently and developed new music styles and new instruments. Played with a large wooden plectrum, the instrument has four or five strings of twisted silk stretched over four or more . [43] The collection was edited by Hua Qiuping (, 17841859) and published in 1819 in three volumes. The electric pipa was first developed in the late 20th century by adding electric guitarstyle magnetic pickups to a regular acoustic pipa, allowing the instrument to be amplified through an instrument amplifier or PA system. The biwa is a relative of Western lutes and guitars, as well as of the Chinese pipa. As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes. Its pick or bachi () is the largest among all types of biwa it sometimes. The body is narrower and smaller than the other types of biwa. Different sized plectrums produced different textures; for example, the plectrum used on a ms-biwa was much larger than that used on a gaku-biwa, producing a harsher, more vigorous sound. The pipa, pp, or p'i-p'a (Chinese: ) is a traditional Chinese musical instrument, belonging to the plucked category of instruments. The scores were written in tablature form with no information on tuning given, there are therefore uncertainties in the reconstruction of the music as well as deciphering other symbols in the score. Influenced by the recitations of blind priests, the music of the heike biwa reflects the mood of the text. Typically, the duration of each group subdivides the measure into two equal durations. So the previously mentioned tuning can be tuned down to B, F, B, c, d. Asahikai and Tachibanakai are the two major schools of chikuzen-biwa. The biwa strings are plucked with large wooden pick called bachi (, The basic technique is to pluck down and up with the sharp corner. The exception for these methods is for when hazusu or tataku are performed on the 4th string. The Pipa | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline chikuzen biwa Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection Wei Zhongle (; 19031997) played many instruments, including the guqin. This causes a sustained, buzzing noise called sawari () which adds a unique flavor to the biwa sound. Sort by. Players hold the instrument vertically. Yo-sen has 2 tones regarded as auxiliary tones. 5, period of the Northern Wei (384-441 A.D.), A Song dynasty fresco depicts a female pipa player among a group of musicians, Group of female musician from the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-960 AD), A mural from a Yuan dynasty tomb found in Hengshan County, Shaanxi, showing a man playing the pipa, A group of Qing dynasty musicians from Fuzhou. The biwa developed into five different types in its long history: . Shamisen 5. The biwa (Japanese: ) is a Japanese short-necked wooden lute traditionally used in narrative storytelling. Chordophone-Lute-plucked-fretted, Credit Line: A distinctive sound of pipa is the tremolo produced by the lunzhi () technique which involves all the fingers and thumb of the right hand.
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