Guzheng for the globe

Young musician entertains foreign audiences with her traditional Chinese zither playing, Cai Hong reports.

When Peng Jingxuan began playing the guzheng, a Chinese plucked zither, on the streets of France in 2018, she did not expect the traditional instrument to change her life.

Peng, 28, has become a social media sensation for her online video performances in French cities. She has shared more than 200 original videos on YouTube tagged under "@jingxuanGuzheng", with the most popular clip viewed over 16.61 million times.

The square outside the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux, France, is one of the places where Peng performs. The mesmerizing melodies from her zither always draw huge applause from listeners.

"I love how she's representing her culture in a setting where people are not familiar with it. You can tell she's proud of her background and her music," one YouTube user under the moniker "mariaacosta8920" commented about Peng's video.

The guzheng is an ancient, major musical instrument, tracing back more than 2,500 years. There are 21-26 strings on the modern guzheng. The length of a traditional Chinese guzheng is 1.63 meters and it is usually played by a female musician sitting on a chair in front of the instrument. Players, who often perform solo, always wear finger-picks made from materials such as plastic, resin and tortoiseshell on one or both hands. Modern guzheng instruments are often played by pinching the strings to play heptatonic notes and chords.

Peng began to study the guzheng when she was 7. After graduating from the Wuhan Conservatory of Music in Central China's Hubei province in June 2017, she went to the Universite Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3 of France where she received her master's degree in musicology.

In 2017, her first year in France, Peng was deeply drawn to the romantic and free artistic atmosphere on the streets, enjoying the various performances by artists playing music instruments like the piano, violin, saxophone and harp.

But Peng found that she seldom saw Chinese instruments played on the streets. So, in the summer of 2018, Peng took along her guzheng and began her street performances. She was surprised to find that very few people in France knew about the Chinese zither, though her teachers and classmates at the conservatory had some knowledge of it.

"I wanted to make this instrument known to more people," Peng said.

She began her street performances to sharpen her skills. The more Peng busked on the streets, the more she felt a greater sense of responsibility to spread Chinese music and culture.

"Many Western instruments are already well-accepted in China, like the piano. But Westerners' understanding of Chinese music can be rather shallow," Peng said.

To make this traditional Chinese instrument better known and accepted by people in the West, Peng carefully selected and arranged each repertoire.

She chose traditional guzheng pieces and a number of pop songs with strong Chinese influences every time.

Considering that her audience's unfamiliarity with Chinese songs may create barriers to better understanding of her performances, Peng made ingenious adaptations of the songs and received positive responses from her audiences.

In Da Yu ("Big Fish"), from the soundtrack of a Chinese animated film, Peng added two French narrations, briefly introducing the movie plot.

"A lot of people would come up to me and ask me what the name of the song was, and show their great interest in the film," Peng said.

She also played Western pop songs that local people could relate to. "Because they may have heard these songs before, they will be more interested and easily immersed in my performance," Peng said.

The musical pieces were refreshingly played in a more Chinese style by adding some unique techniques of playing the guzheng, such as strumming. One YouTuber user commented, "Never in a million years I would've thought that Smooth Criminal (a song by the late US pop star Michael Jackson) could be played by a Chinese traditional instrument, but she did it cleverly and beautifully."

Peng also always prepared small booklets in French, introducing her audience to the guzheng and its history.

"This is the guzheng, do you know? The Chinese guzheng," a little boy said proudly to his friends beside Peng, when she played the instrument on the street one day.

The encounter made her feel that what she was doing was very meaningful, Peng said. She was able to get people, including children, to know the name guzheng "just by busking".

After each performance, people were always amazed at the beauty of the instrument and the music, Peng said. They came to her and asked her the name of the instrument and the country it came from. "I am very happy to tell them it comes from China," she said.

Her audiences also appreciated her for bringing beautiful Chinese music to them since they rarely had access to it, Peng said.

Playing for all

One day, an elderly man sitting next to Peng told her after her performance, "You should take the guzheng to more European cities and share the beauty of Chinese music with more people because a lot of them, myself included, don't know about this."

It was exactly one of her major plans, Peng said, to take her guzheng on a "global journey".

To that effect, she has visited four countries so far — Italy, Switzerland, Spain and France. Peng said she hopes to perform in more cities in Europe so that more Westerners will have the chance to know about the charm of the guzheng and Chinese music.

To improve her performance and make it more understandable, Peng would also like to make more attempts to fuse Chinese music with Western music.

In addition to some improvised collaborative performances with local street artists, Peng tries to combine traditional guzheng music with avant-garde electronic music originating from France.

"Nowadays, many guzheng techniques are being innovated, and a lot of contemporary compositions are also making great breakthroughs," Peng said.

"To see the guzheng go global and get more people to know of it, understand it, and love it, I think this is our biggest wish of Chinese artists playing traditional musical instruments, " Peng she said.

Renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang also encouraged Peng when she performed with him in a TV show in 2019.

He said to her, "What you are doing now is a very meaningful thing, to promote and spread our Chinese national instruments to the world."

Cao Chenyuan and Yan Yuqing contributed to this story.

Contact the writers at caihong@chinadaily.com.cn