“Ballad of the Pipa” for String Quartet and Narration (2023)
Duration: 11'00"

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“Pipa Xing (Ballad of the Pipa)” is a Tang Dynasty Chinese poem by Bai Ju-Yi, composed in the year 816. It vividly and extravagantly depicts a virtuoso pipa performance on a boat. The poem follows the poet saying his farewells to a friend along the banks of the Yangtze River on a windy autumn night, when suddingly they hear faint pipa playing coming from the water. Boarding a boat to approach the music, they meet a woman, a master pipa artisan who was once a prodigy favoured in the imperial court, who tells her tragic life story of losing her family in the turmoil of war and ending up an outcast, performing the pipa for a living on a boat day by day.

The poem was written when the poet, once a court official with high social status, was cast out and exiled to hold an insignificant position in the remote town of Xunyang. Towards the end of the poem after learning the woman's life story, the poet write a soliloquy of how lonely and miserable he feels in this distant, strange place, away from his beloved arts and any friends to resonate with, and how he sees himself in the pipa player's life. "Both fallen souls at the edge of the world, it does not take acquaintance to cross paths in our destiny", along with many other verses, have become tremendously famous and celebrated for the past millennia, even becoming part of the everyday Chinese conversations and proverbs.

My composition virtually sets the poem into music in the fashion of a tone poem. Originally it is conceived to be performed by Dashan as the narrator with string quartet, whereas it eventually became clear to me that the ensemble is really a quintet, in which he functions as a soloist. It is also my aim that the music may stand up as a musical work of its own right without narration.

Commissioned by "Dashan" Mark Rowswell

Video Courtesy of Dashan

Dashan, narration

Odin Quartet:

Alex Toskov, violin I

Tanya Charles, violin II

Matthew Antal, viola

Samuel Bisson, cello

Text by Bai Ju-Yi (772-846 AD, Tang Dynasty China)

Recorded May 22, 2024, St. Anne's Anglican Church, Toronto

Working with the legendary "Dashan"

The story of Mark Rowswell, a young Canadian exchange student to China in the late 1980's who became famous as "Big Mountain (Dashan)" for a role of the same name he played on national television, was not only marvelous and captivating, but one that was part of my life. Growing up in China for countless times I saw this friendly Canadian face, performing traditional Chinese arts and comedy in fluent Mandarin Chinese. Since COVID-19, Dashan resided in Canada, and devoted himself in learning, performing, and promoting classical Chinese poetry in unique, musical collaborations. There now exist a collection of such musical renditions of Chinese poems created by Dashan and various musicians, and I am lucky to be responsible for one of them. It was a meaningful collaboration to me personally, one which my younger self would have never dared to dream of.

To Dashan, the most effective way of retelling the story of the Ballad of the Pipa, is not to compose a piece that is historically or culturally authentic to the time period, but to create music that is unmistakably contemporary, personal, and close to all of us. In these ancient poems, he sees universality, and feels timeless, profound human emotions. Telling the story in a contemporary perspective and vocabularies most personal and sincere to me, therefore, as we both agreed, was the way to do the poem justice. To address my cultural heritage, I would like to think that I have also exercised a respectful level of homage to traditional Chinese music in this piece. I thank Dashan for his utmost dedication and respect for Chinese poetry, his insightful feedback in the composition process, and his patience and trust.

Ballad of Pipa (without Narration)Artist Name

00:00 / 10:35

String Quartet Only

Recorded October 6, 2023, University of Toronto, conducted by Kevin Zi-Xiao He