Maestro brings ancient Chinese sounds to London

During the afternoon of the second Saturday of every second month, musician Cheng Yu dresses in traditional Chinese attire and takes a guqin and pipa to a special gathering she started in London 20 years ago.

Cheng, who is a virtuoso of the two instruments, trained at Xi’an Conservatory of Music in the 1980s before playing the pipa with the China National Traditional Orchestra. She later studied for master’s and doctoral degrees in ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in the 1990s.

She has been active ever since in teaching and performing Chinese music in the United Kingdom. To Cheng, sharing and promoting Chinese traditional instruments and music brings her the utmost joy and fulfillment.

“This is something that I enjoy doing. It enables them to appreciate a culture that is very unique and different from theirs.”

The gathering Cheng initiated, called yaji, is a tradition among Chinese literati that goes back more than 1,000 years, to when ancient scholars and artists first got together to drink tea, write poems, appreciate art and enjoy music.

The bimonthly yaji in London is now organised by the London Youlan Qin Society and focuses on traditional Chinese music, with attendees playing various pieces of music on Chinese instruments, including the guqin, pipa and flute, and with musicians sharing their understanding of the music.

The guqin, or qin, a seven-stringed Chinese zither, is one of China’s oldest instruments, with a history dating back about 3,000 years. Twenty years ago Unesco proclaimed China’s ancient guqin music a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

Over the years the yaji gatherings in London have drawn professional musicians, scholars, office workers and amateur appreciators of Chinese culture, among others, with attendees coming from all over the UK, and sometimes from elsewhere in Europe.

In July the society marked its 20th anniversary with the 124th yaji gathering in the Djam Lecture Theatre at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Charlie Thomas, who travelled from Birmingham to London for the gathering, as he had done five times before, said: “It’s not just Chinese people who come. I met a German lady who also liked guqin, and I started talking with her. People here are so welcoming, and they have different backgrounds but share similar interests in guqin.”

Thomas has studied guqin with Cheng for about a year. “Compared with violin, the sound of the guqin is very meditative and more calming,” he said, adding that playing the instrument helped him calm down and solved a sleeping problem he had.

Cheng, born into a musical family in Beijing, first studied the pipa, the Chinese plucked lute, with her father when she was seven, and she was then able to study with a guqin master, Li Xiangting, when she was at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music.

“My father is a pipa master, and I still remember receiving the pipa on my seventh birthday as a gift,” Cheng said. “My grandfather plays the guqin, so I was interested in learning both.”

In the early 2000s Cheng conducted research to recreate the five-string pipa, which was lost in the 8th century in China, with the current pipa having only four strings. For her work she won major awards from Women in Music, the Arts Council of England, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Throughout the years Cheng has been active in performing at various concerts and on special occasions and in collaborating with musicians from different genres and countries. She also co-founded the UK Chinese Ensemble, which performs throughout the UK and the rest of Europe on occasions such as the Chinese Spring Festival when tens of thousands of people gather in Trafalgar Square to watch the annual grand show.

“Three decades have flown by since I first came to London, and I have taught hundreds of students,” Cheng said. “I enjoy what I am doing. I simply feel the joy when watching them progress in their skills and understanding of Chinese music.”