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PORTRAIT
LAN TUNG
Taiwanese-born erhu player Tung is based in
Vancouver, but her playing takes her on extensive,
diverse tours. Often, she’s soloing with an
orchestra one week and playing for a visual
arts/media or dance performance the next. In
between gigs she studies fiddle-instruments
around the globe with players of all stripes—
from the erhu, with principal players in China,
Taiwan, Canada and the U.S. to improvisation
with violinist Mary Oliver in Amsterdam, Hindustani
classical music with Kala Ramnath in
Bombay, Egyptian music
and maqam with Dr. Alfred
Gamil in Cairo,
graphic scores and improvisation
with Barry
Guy in Switzerland, and
vocal music and music
therapy, to boot. Her projects
straddle world, new,
chamber, orchestral, and
multidisciplinary music.
The myriad influences
show up in her compositions
and improvisations.
This is nothing new,
she observes: the meeting
point of cultures “has
been an inspiration for
musicians around the
world for centuries,” she
“
Musicians are interested in hearing
different styles of music being mixed together.
There may be a clash, a contradiction,
but it’s also where you get the
new sounds to come out.
says. “It’s very natural that musicians are interested
in hearing different styles of music being
mixed together. There may be a clash, a contradiction,
but it’s also where you get the new
sounds to come out. I really enjoy playing with
the tension between the differences and the
common places.”
If versatility is her calling card when it comes
to musical genres, ironically, it isn’t when it
comes to her instrument. Although Tung studied
piano and guitar briefly while completing
her post-secondary degrees, she has rarely
strayed from the erhu since picking it up for the
first time at age 10. “I have a collection
of other fiddle instruments
from many different countries that
I think maybe I’ll learn to play—but
I just haven’t got time to learn any
of it!” she says. “There’s still more
to learn with the erhu.” Yet, learning
erhu was no more than a matter
of convenience at the time. “I just
wanted to learn any musical instrument,”
she explains. “Economically,
Taiwan was still in the beginning of the
big rise and so not that many families
could afford a piano, piano lessons.
When the Chinese orchestra [at
school] started, it was a chance to learn
musical instruments for free. I joined
right away.”
The erhu is commonly described as a
Chinese violin. It’s a useful point of
comparison: they’re both wooden
stringed instruments in the soprano
voice range—the
erhu with a smaller
two and a half octave
range—played
with a horse-hair
strung bow. But the
erhu is held vertically
on the player’s
lap and the bow is
placed between the
THE ERHU
The erhu, unlike some other Chinese
instruments, has a lot of ancient repertoire.
The instrument is over 1,000
years old but it was played
mainly in folk or opera
music as accompaniment,
so the standard erhu repertoire’s
earliest pieces
date from the 1920s. To get
initiated, start with Abing’s Erquan
Yingyue, one of the standards.
There are many arrangements and recordings
available, including on The
Norton Recordings, ninth edition.
two—instead of
four—strings. You
put rosin on both
sides of the bow and
one side plays one
string and the other,
the second. The underhand
bow hold is
more similar to a
double bass German
bow hold than the one used for
violin—similar to the way you
hold chopsticks. There is no
fingerboard: fingers press
against the strings suspended over, instead
of on, the wood. All this means
the erhu can be played longer with less
fatigue; pitch can be manipulated not
”
only by moving up and down the fingerboard
but also by varying the pressure
on the strings, allowing for a
second style of vibrato. Of course, there are differences
between the prototypical erhu instruments
and the standard classical erhu—there are
over 50 variations of related folk instruments
from China. The strings were traditionally made
of silk but are now commonly made of
steel; Beijing opera instruments were
made of bamboo, southern ones of
coconut.
Far from being tired of comparing
the violin with the erhu,
Tung believes the interplay between
the familiar and the exotic
is what makes intercultural and intergenre
music affecting and inventive. “When
people listen to music, they naturally reference
what they’re familiar with,” she explains. Listening
to music “is very subjective and based
on people’s experience. It may not be what the
musicians or composer intends, but that’s fine
because that’s what makes it work. For example,
in my compositions I sometimes use Chinese
melodies and then I’ll twist them, make
changes to them: the modes, the notes. That’s
really interesting to me because the ear is used
to something and then you create a challenge
by having a new sound. This is why I haven’t
got time to learn different instruments! I’m
learning music, not just Chinese music or the
erhu. I get to learn musical languages.”
She pauses, then concludes: “There is so
much more in music if you take
away the boundaries between
traditional and contemporary
and see only music.” LSM
www.lantungmusic.com
Lan Tung solos on erhu with the
Orchestre Metropolitain in Mark
Armanini’s Heartland:
• January 25, Église Notre-Damedes-Sept-Douleurs,
Verdun
• January 26, Maison symphonique,
Montreal
• January 28, Salle Désilets du
Cégep Marie-Victorin, Rivière-des-
Prairies
www.orchestremetropolitain.com
PHOTO Art Illman PHOTO TO LEFT Nenad Stevanovic
22
DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012