Internationally recognized for her virtuosity and innovative approach to the pipa, Wu Man is a performer, composer, and educator who grew up in China and is currently based in San Diego. As the first Chinese musician to have performed at the White House and a core member of the Silk Road Ensemble founded by Yo-Yo Ma, Wu takes a cross-cultural approach to collaborations and composition, redefining the role of pipa on the international stage while remaining strongly tied to traditional Chinese folk roots. On October 15th, she gave a solo recital at UCLA’s brand-new Nimoy Theater, a venue described by UCLA’s chancellor as a space to “help Angelenos forge connections through a shared artistic experience.” And Wu’s performance did exactly that, finding unexpected and delightful connections across cultures, geographies, and time.
She opened the evening with traditional pipa repertoire: “The King Doffs His Armor,” which depicts the tragedy of defeat during the Battle of Gaixia and “Dance of the Yi People,” a lively piece based on youthful courtship in the villages of southwestern China.
Wu performs with a deep sensitivity to musical details and a riveting intensity that draws out the underlying drama within many of the pieces, even those that appear at the onset to be peaceful. Aside from her virtuosic technique and genre- and culture-bending approach to creating music, Wu also delights in sharing her knowledge of the pipa and the musical context of the pieces she performs. She explained how the modernization of the pipa saw the transition from silk strings to steel strings like the guitar, a shift from a horizontal hold to a vertical one, and the elongation of the fretboard, all of which allowed the instrument to occupy larger concert halls and support more virtuosic repertoire. These changes, along with the use of plastic fingernails, helped shape the pipa’s characteristically bright timbre. The pipa has also adopted some techniques from the guitar, and at the same time, guitarists have transcribed traditional pipa music.
Wu uses the pipa as a cultural bridge both within the Silk Road ensemble and in her solo repertoire. A great example of this is in her piece, “Kazakh Song,” which was based on a Kazakh tune originally for the dombyra, a close relative of the pipa. Wu adopted this tune for the pipa, and in this piece, she reimagines how a composition from another culture sounds on the pipa and showcases the versatility of the instrument. There were points in the piece where it sounded almost like a banjo playing an American folk tune, and there were definitely moments of cognitive dissonance since it’s fairly uncommon to see the pipa used outside of traditional Chinese pieces.
With several of the pieces performed that evening, Wu took the audience on a musical time travel. One of the most unique selections of the evening were two short pieces from before the 10th century. Wu shared that these pieces, known as the “Dunhuang Scores,” were pipa pieces discovered in the Dunhuang caves in northwest China. They were written in a tablature that took many years of research to decipher and translate into modern notation. The melodies are short and simple–the first passage Man played was more like a scale than a melody–but there was a profound quality about experiencing music that was first played centuries ago in a world drastically different from our own.
Wu also performed some original pieces, including “Night Thoughts,” based on ancient pipa music, specifically a scale that resembles the Japanese pentatonic scale. A wandering, contemplative piece, it fuses ancient patterns with a modern compositional approach and evokes the feeling of ruminating over deeply emotional thoughts in the darkness; thoughts that slowly take shape and become increasingly frantic at the end of the piece. “Leaves Flying in the Autumn” is an original arrangement of a traditional Chinese folk song, and Wu explained how she constructed the piece through a minimalist lens by repeating small musical ideas from the original song. It’s a feisty piece with a driving pulse (and a bit of shredding!) that again weaves the historical with the contemporary.
The evening was an educationally and musically delightful journey through cultures, styles, and history with Wu Man as an engaging guide. It offered the audience an expanded conception of what was possible on the pipa, especially outside of the traditional Chinese repertoire, establishing the instrument’s relevancy in the modern music landscape while honoring the legacies of the past.
