Pipa - Schools

Schools

Different traditions with different styles of playing pipa are found in different regions of China which then developed into schools. In the narrative traditions where the pipa is used as an accompaniment to narrative singing, there are the Suzhou (蘇州彈詞), Sichuan (四川清音), and Northern (北方曲藝) styles. A number of other schools are associated with regional chamber ensemble traditions such as the Jiangnan, Chaozhou and Nanguan music. Nanguan pipa is unusual in that it is held in the horizontal position in the ancient manner instead of the vertical position normally used for solo playing in the present day.

There are five main schools associated with the solo tradition, each are associated with one or more collections of pipa music and named after its place of origin -

• Wuxi (無錫派) - associated with the Hua Collection by Hua Qiuping, who studied with Wang Junxi (王君錫) of the Northern school and Chen Mufu (陳牧夫) of the Southern school, and may be considered a synthesis of these two schools of Qing Dynasty. As the first published collection, the Hua Collection had considerable influence on later pipa players.
• Pudong (浦東派) - associated with the Ju Collection (鞠氏譜) which is based on a handwritten manuscript, Xianxu Youyin (閑敘幽音), by Ju Shilin from the 18th century.
• Pinghu (平湖派) - associated with the Li Collection (李氏譜) first published in 1895 and compiled by Li Fangyuan who came from a family of many generations of pipa players.
• Chongming (崇明派) - associated with Old Melodies of Yingzhou (瀛洲古調) compiled by Shen Zhaozhou (沈肇州) in 1916.
• Shanghai (汪派) - the Shanghai or Wang school (named after Wang Yuting (汪昱庭) who created this style of playing) may be considered a synthesis of the other four schools especially the Pudong and Pinghu schools. Wang did not publish his notation book in his lifetime, although handwritten copies were passed onto his students.

These schools of the solo tradition emerged by students learning playing the pipa from a master, and each school has it own style, performance aesthetics, notation system, and may differ in their playing techniques. Different schools have different repertoire in their music collection, and even though these schools share many of the same pieces in their repertoire, a same piece of music from the different schools may differ in their content. For example, a piece like "The Warlord Takes off His Armour" is made up of many sections, some of them metered and some with free meter, and greater freedom in interpretation is possible in the free meter sections. Different schools however can have sections added or removed, and may differ in the number of sections with free meter. The music collections from the 19th century also used the gongche notation which provides only a skeletal melody and approximate rhythms with some playing instructions given (such as tremolo or string-bending), and how this basic framework can become fully fleshed out during performance may only be learnt by the students from the master. The same piece of music can therefore differ significantly when performed by students of different schools, with striking differences in interpretation, phrasing, tempo, dynamics, playing techniques, and ornamentations.

In more recent times, many pipa players, especially the younger ones, no longer identify themselves with any specific school. Modern notation systems, new compositions as well as recordings are now widely available and it is no longer crucial for a pipa players to learn from the master of any particular school to know how to play a score.