HISTORY

History of Pipa

The pipa (pronounced "pee-paa") is a four-stringed lute, one of the oldest Chinese musical instruments with over 2000 years of history. The term pipa (琵琶) consists of two Chinese characters symbolizing two playing techniques (denoted as "Tan" and "Tiao" today) while their pronunciations p'i and p'a are imitations of the sounds produced accordingly. The latter fact is however not often mentioned in the literatures about the pipa .

The historical development of the pipa has been a progressive process from its very beginning with few major fusions. The earliest Chinese written texts about the pipa dated back at least to the second century BC. For instance, Xi Liu of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) described in his book, The Definition of Terms - On Musical Instruments, that the name of the instrument pipa originally referred to two finger techniques. The two Chinese characters p'i and p'a stood originally for the two movements, i.e. plucking the strings forwards and backwards, respectively. It is commonly known now that the term "pipa" used to be the generic name for all pluck-string instruments of the ancient times. For instance, in the Qin Dynasty (222-207 BC), there had been a kind of plucked-instrument, known as xiantao, with a straight neck and a round sound-body played horizontally, which is considered one of the predecessors of the pipa. In the preface to his verse Ode to Pipa, Xuan Fu of the Jin Dynasty (265-420 AD) wrote: "...the pipa appeared in the late Qin period. When the people suffered from being forced to build the Great Wall, they played the instrument to express their resentment". By the Han Dynasty (206 BC -- 220 AD), the instrument developed into its form of four strings and twelve frets, plucked with fingernails and known as pipa or qin-pipa (秦琵琶). In the Western Jin Dynasty (256-316), the qin-pipa was named after the famous scholar, one of "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove", Ruan Xian, who was a great master on this instrument. (Note that Ji Kong, grand master of the seven stringed zither qin, was among the seven sages who often met for music and wine). The instrument has been to this day called the ruan(阮) whereas the name pipa specifically referred to a new version in the same family of instruments.

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