The Yueqin Tradition

A short-necked lute with a round body, the yueqin plucks points in Peking opera and drives Yi torch-festival dancing

Related

Yueqin (moon lute)Ruan

Time and place

The yueqin's round body and short neck were fixed by the Ming and Qing, branching off from the ruan and pipa family. It has two centres: the Peking opera band in Beijing and the Yi villages of the southwest. Teahouse theatres around Qianmen and Tianqiao, and torch festival grounds in Chuxiong, Honghe and Liangshan, are its places.

What happened

The Peking opera wind band pairs the jinghu, yueqin and sanxian, the yueqin plucking skeleton notes and filling between sung syllables; when the jing'erhu joined in the 1920s the texture thickened but the yueqin kept its role. In the southwest the Yi use the instrument for torch festival and wedding dancing, played while moving, the melody keeping company with the steps. After the 1950s it entered the modern orchestra and was redesigned as a solo instrument with twenty-four frets.

Musical features

The body is round or octagonal, the neck short, the four strings paired in two unison courses, the neck fretted, the strings struck with a plectrum. Tuning follows use: in opera it matches the jinghu's xipi or erhuang tuning, in Yi dance it is often tuned in fifths. The range is about two octaves, the attack short and granular, good for points rather than long lines. Techniques include plucking, tremolo, sweeps, slides and strikes.

What to listen for

Hear the grain first, then which beat it occupies. In opera the yueqin never covers the voice, filling only between words; in Yi dance the accents are exposed and lock with the feet. The library's Fangma Shangge and Cai Cha from Yunnan and Xiao Kanxi from Beijing are a Yunnan mountain song, a Yunnan tea-picking tune and a Beijing teahouse tune, not yueqin recordings.

Common misunderstandings

The yueqin is often confused with the ruan. The ruan has a long neck, four single strings and a deep round body; the yueqin has a short neck, paired strings and a shorter, brighter sound. Another mistake is to treat it as an opera accompanist only: in Yi music it leads the dance, with a different construction and tuning.

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.