page_title: Pipa
section_title: Schools
hierarchical_section_title: Pipa / Schools
caption_attribution_description: English: Details of painting, Tao Gu Presents a Poem, ca. 1515, by Tang Yin (1470-1523) Ming Dynasty. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 中文: 明 唐寅 陶穀贈詞圖
context_page_description: The pipa is a four-stringed Chinese musical instrument, belonging to the plucked category of instruments. Sometimes called the Chinese lute, the instrument has a pear-shaped wooden body with a varying number of frets ranging from 12 to 26. Another Chinese four-string plucked lute is the liuqin, which looks like a smaller version of the pipa. The pear-shaped instrument may have existed in China as early as the Han dynasty, and although historically the term pipa was once used to refer to a variety of plucked chordophones, its usage since the Song dynasty refers exclusively to the pear-shaped instrument.
  The pipa is one of the most popular Chinese instruments and has been played for almost two thousand years in China. Several related instruments in East and Southeast Asia are derived from the pipa; these include the Japanese biwa, the Vietnamese đàn tỳ bà, and the Korean bipa. The Korean instrument is the only one of the three that is no longer widely used; examples survive in museums, as attempts to revive the Korean instrument have been partially successful in recent years.
context_section_description: There are a number of different traditions with different styles of playing pipa in various regions of China, some of which then developed into schools.  In the narrative traditions where the pipa is used as an accompaniment to narrative singing, there are the Suzhou tanci (蘇州彈詞), Sichuan qingyin (四川清音), and Northern quyi (北方曲藝) genres.  Pipa is also an important component of regional chamber ensemble traditions such as Jiangnan sizhu, Teochew string music and Nanguan ensemble. In Nanguan music, the pipa is still held in the near-horizontal position or guitar-fashion in the ancient manner instead of the vertical position normally used for solo playing in the present day.
  There were originally two major schools of pipa during the Qing Dynasty — the Northern (Zhili, 直隸派) and Southern (Zhejiang, 浙江派) schools, and from these emerged the five main schools associated with the solo tradition.  Each school is associated with one or more collections of pipa music and named after its place of origin -
  Wuxi school (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 the Qing Dynasty.  As the first published collection, the Hua Collection had considerable influence on later pipa players.
  Pudong school (浦東派) – associated with the Ju Collection (鞠氏譜) which is based on an 18th-century handwritten manuscript, Xianxu Youyin (閑敘幽音), by Ju Shilin.
  Pinghu school (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 school (崇明派) – associated with Old Melodies of Yingzhou (瀛洲古調) compiled by Shen Zhaozhou (沈肇州, 1859–1930) in 1916.
  Shanghai or Wang school (汪派) – named after Wang Yuting (汪昱庭) who created this style of playing. It 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 on to his students.
  These schools of the solo tradition emerged by students learning playing the pipa from a master, and each school has its 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 sometimes 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.
caption: Scene from a Ming dynasty painting, Tao Gu Presents a Poem, c. 1515, by Tang Yin.
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