Plate XLIV. — Hu-Ch’in & Bow. Shêng. — San-Hsien. P’i-P’a.
We learn from Mr. J.A. Van Aalst’s comprehensive treatise on Chinese Music, published, it may at first sight appear somewhat oddly, by the Imperial Maritime Customs (Shanghai, 1884), that the Hu-ch’in, the left-hand figure in the Plate, is one of the most popular musical instruments in Peking. The strings, four in number, are of silk, and are tuned in pairs a fifth apart. This instrument is in fact a double-strung Erh-hsien or Urh-hsien (Van Aalst and Dennys; Ur-heen, Engel), and has the same peculiar arrangement by which the bow is fixed between the strings for playing. It is of cane and horsehair, and the rosin for it is stuck upon the body, a hollow cylinder of bamboo, wood, or copper, through which the long neck of the instrument is thrust. The upper end of the body is covered with snakeskin, while the lower is left open. The Erh-hsien, which has a similar bamboo body but two strings only, is more generally popular than the Hu-ch’in, and is met with all over China. The Ti-ch’in, according to Dennys the favourite instrument with blind men, is also similarly bowed, and has half a cocoa-nut shell for the body, covered by a thin board. These bowed instruments, it is believed, found their way into China with the Buddhist religion.
The name for the next instrument, the reed mouth-organ, Shêng, sounds like “shung,” rhyming with “sung.” From this ancient instrument have come the modern popular developments of the “free-reed” organ, first applied about 1780, at the instance of Professor Kratzenstein, to organ reed-stops by a Copenhagen organ-builder named Kirsnick, who had settled at St. Petersburg, an invention soon afterwards carried to Germany by the celebrated Abbé Vogler. The French Harmonium and American Organ, the concertinas and accordion, are well-known examples of the “free-reed” principle, which differs from the Church organ beating-reed inasmuch as the reed or vibrator of metal does not overlap any part of its frame. The Shêng is a gourd with its top cut off and a flat cover cemented upon it. Twenty-one bamboo pipes are inserted round the cover, but four, being intended for convenience in holding the instrument, do not sound. Those intended to sound are provided with small brass reeds. By a peculiar arrangement, unique in reed instruments, the wind, attacking all the reeds simultaneously, at once escapes by ventages in the pipes, until stopped by the fingers for the pipes that are to sound. The lengths of the pipes are merely ornamental, the actual lengths required being determined by slot-like cuttings in the pipes, not seen in front. There are seventeen sounding pipes, as already said, but only eleven notes, as some notes are repeated in the unison or octave. The scale, which the à peu près musicians are satisfied with, may be thus noted—
The succession of notes in the first octave resembles that of the ancient Phrygian mode and that church mode in which Thomas Tallis’s famous service is composed. The exact measurements of the intervals heard at the Health Exhibition are to be found in Mr. A.J. Ellis’s Paper On the Musical Scales of Various Nations, published in the Journal of the Society of Arts, London, 25th March, 1885.
Mr. N.B. Dennys, in his valuable notes on Chinese Musical Instruments read before the North China Branch of the Asiatic Society, 21st October, 1873, gives the name of the three-stringed instrument in the drawing, with a long neck like a tamboura, as San-hsien, with which Mr. Van Aalst agrees. The Peking musicians called it Sien-tzê (pronounced like Shen-zy). Like the Japanese Siamisen the San-hsien has no frets. The drum-like body is covered on the upper side with snakeskin, the under side being left open as in a tambourine or banjo. The three strings were tuned ascending a minor tone between the first and second, and a fifth between the second and third strings: the outer strings being consequently a major sixth apart. The strings were plucked by two bone plectra extended like claws beyond the ends of the fingers, and the player stopped a Pentatonic or five-note scale, thus:
[audio/mpeg] nearly in just intonation.
The P’i-p’a, according to Dennys and Van Aalst, or Balloon Guitar (the Peking musicians called it Phi-pe), has a body nearly a foot in diameter, from which it takes its English name, and four strings played usually with the fingers and tuned as fourth, fifth, and octave from the lowest note. The large semi-elliptical frets above the finger-board were not used by the player at the Health Exhibition; he restricted himself to the twelve frets upon the finger-board. The P’i-p’a is usually played by men who, in the South of China, are hired as minstrels or ballad-singers. The stopping of this instrument was pentatonic, as with the San-hsien, and the scale began upon the same note, but the tuning of the fretted instrument was less good than that noted of the unfretted one. Mr. Van Aalst informs us that the notes are reiterated by rapidly passing the long finger-nail or plectrum backwards and forwards across the string, to produce an effect of sostenuto similarly sought for in Europe for the Mandoline, Bandurria, and Dulcimer. These instruments belong to the Music Class Room of the University of Edinburgh.