ABD attended a lecture at a local university, South China Normal University 华南师范 that was presented by a local music teacher who teaches the erhu 二胡. Actually it was kind of half lecture interrupted with brief musical demonstrations of the presentation content. The erhu is known as the Chinese violin and is played by sitting the instrument on the knee and using a bow to vibrate one of or both of its two strings. AD can tell you more about it. All I know is that it can sound like a dying cat. Or, if played by a virtuoso this professor, a marvelous and characteristically Asian sound. We’ll post some more pictures here of this unique musical instrument. It was really made popular worldwide by the Chinese “12 Girls Band” who made their debut in Japan. All too typically, the erhu has a bit of a reputation of being the Chinese bum’s song bird of choice. In fact there’s a quintet of what appear to be blind guys in Tianhe that regularly play fascinating street tunes.
Anyway, learned learned something special from this lecture that may be interesting to pass on. (more…)
