The Guanzi Tradition

With a large double reed and a cylindrical bore, the guanzi leads sheng-and-guan ritual ensembles and northern wind bands

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GuanziSheng

Time and place

The guanzi descends from the bili, a double-reed pipe that entered China with Central Asian music and served in Sui-Tang court entertainment. By the Ming and Qing it divided into two lives: the sheng-and-guan ritual ensembles of temples and courts, and the wind ensembles of village weddings and festivals. Dingzhou and Xushui in Hebei, the Zhihua Temple in Beijing, the Wutai suites in Shanxi and the northeast sheng-guan bands all put the guanzi in front.

What happened

Sheng-guan music is tuned around the guanzi. At temple rites, fairs, funerals and New Year processions the guanzi carries the melody, the sheng fills in harmony, the dizi and cloud gongs add colour, and drum and clappers mark the sections. After the 1950s conservatories took the instrument into teaching, composers wrote solos and concertos, and the guanzi moved from ritual grounds to the stage while keeping its dark, reedy voice.

Musical features

The body is a cylindrical wooden pipe with eight holes, seven in front and one at the back, topped by a large double reed wider and softer than a suona's. High, middle and low guanzi exist; the middle instrument is the most used, with a range of about two and a half octaves. Players use strikes, trills, slides, a turning ornament, flutter tonguing, tonguing and circular breathing. In chuige, fast tonguing alternates with slides imitating animals. In ensembles the guanzi states the labelled tune while the sheng stacks fourths and fifths beneath it.

What to listen for

Hear the sandy thickness of the big reed, then how a long phrase is held through circular breathing. The guanzi darkens in lament and turns crisp in chuige, and the two manners should be heard apart. The library's Molihua and La Meihua from Hebei and Jingyun from Beijing are a southern Hebei tune, a Shijiazhuang tune and a temple chant, not guanzi recordings, but they carry the speech of the regions where sheng-guan music lives.

Common misunderstandings

The guanzi is often mistaken for a kind of suona, or assumed to belong only to funerals. Both are double-reed instruments, but the guanzi has a cylindrical bore and a larger, softer reed, so its tone is dark rather than splitting; it leads the Zhihua Temple repertory and the Shanxi suites and can be comic in chuige. Another mistake is to think it plays only slow laments; the fast tonguing and flutter of chuige are just as demanding.

Sources

• 《中国音乐词典》编辑部编，中国音乐词典（人民音乐出版社）— 条目与年代核对，未引用
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — framework and dates checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.