The Sanxian Tradition

Long-necked and fretless, the sanxian underpins northern drum singing and Suzhou pingtan storytelling

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Sanxian

Time and place

The sanxian appears in documents by the Yuan dynasty and spread with storytelling and opera in the Ming and Qing. The large northern sanxian belongs to the drum-singing houses of Beijing and Tianjin; the small southern one belongs to the pingtan halls of Suzhou and Shanghai. Yi villages in Yunnan keep a large sanxian of their own for torch festival dancing.

What happened

Storytelling needed an instrument that could follow speech and leave gaps, and a long, fretless neck with a hard plectrum did that. Peking drum singing uses sanxian, sihu and pipa; Suzhou pingtan pairs pipa and sanxian; Peking opera uses sanxian with the yueqin to fill points. After the 1950s the instrument entered conservatories with solos and concertos, while remaining in ballad and opera bands.

Musical features

The sanxian has a long neck, a fretless fingerboard and a wooden body with snakeskin or wood faces, three strings and a bone or plastic plectrum. The northern large instrument is tuned low and sounds thick; the southern small one is tuned high and sounds crisp. Its range is about three octaves, and the absence of frets frees slides and vibrato while putting intonation on the ear. Techniques include plucking, tremolo, sweeps, rubbing, slides and strikes; in storytelling the first duty is to shadow the words.

What to listen for

Hear the hard plectrum and the fretless slide, then how it fills the gaps in a sung line. Northern drum singing is dense and word-bound; pingtan sets sanxian against pipa with more space. The library's Yueliang Wanwan Zhao Jiuzhou from Suzhou, Daxixiang from Beijing and Zou Xikou from Hequ are a Jiangnan tune, a Beijing drum-story subject and a northwestern tune, not sanxian recordings.

Common misunderstandings

The sanxian is often taken for a Japanese shamisen, or assumed to be an accompanist only. The shamisen developed from the sanxian but has a different body skin and plectrum; in China the sanxian leads ballads, opera and dance music. Another mistake is to think there is one sanxian: the large and small instruments differ in register, tuning and use.

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.