The Konghou Tradition

The konghou came from Central Asia, flourished in Sui-Tang court music, vanished, and was rebuilt in the twentieth century

Related

KonghouYanyue (Banquet Music)

Time and place

The konghou was current by the Han dynasty in three forms: the horizontal wokonghou, the angular vertical shukonghou, and the bow-shaped phoenix-headed fengshou konghou. The vertical type came through Central Asia and India along the Silk Road and appears in Sui-Tang court entertainment; Dunhuang murals and a wooden harp from the Zaghunluq cemetery at Qiemo in Xinjiang preserve its traces. It faded after the Song, and by the Ming no instruments survived.

What happened

Its sound came from a row of taut strings, wide in range and easy for arpeggios, suited to court entertainment and Buddhist music. Tang court musicians played it to the point that Li He wrote a poem on Li Ping's playing; after the Song, as musical life moved downward, the many strings and difficult tuning lost ground to the zheng and pipa. In the 1970s and 1980s musicians and workshops rebuilt a modern konghou with double courses and a modulating mechanism.

Musical features

The ancient vertical harp had an angular soundbox and from a few to more than twenty strings, plucked with both hands and unable to modulate. The modern instrument uses two crossed rows of strings with pedals or hand levers, extends to about five octaves, and sounds close to a Western harp. Playing is built on arpeggios, chords, glissandi and harmonics, the hands alternating between rows; the dense courses make fast figures easier than on the zheng.

What to listen for

Hear the width of the arpeggio and the brightness of harmonics, then the difference from the zheng. A konghou's strings stand vertical, so the sound is emptier and more diffuse; a zheng has movable bridges and bends more freely. The library's Kan Yangge from Qitai, the Yinchuan song and Pao Han Chuan from Shaanxi are a northern Xinjiang seasonal dance, a Silk Road region song and a Guanzhong tune, not konghou recordings.

Common misunderstandings

The konghou is often called simply the Chinese harp, or assumed to have been played continuously to the present. The modern instrument borrows from the harp, but the ancient angular body and stringing were different; the horizontal wokonghou was a fretted, horizontally played instrument, not the same family as the vertical harp. Another mistake is to treat it as a poetic fiction: archaeology and murals show it was really played.

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.