The Historical Development of the Pipa’s Frets and Ledges

Abstract

The pipa is a plucked stringed instrument with four strings or five strings that, in recent times, has become one of China's most prominent traditional music instruments. While the antecedents of the instrument were first introduced to China from India and Persia, and the pipa is thought to be related to other plucked lutes of the Middle East and Asia such as the oud and veena. , the pipa subsequently underwent a long and complicated indigenization process that is difficult to piece together from the historical record. One of the most significant but poorly understood changes to the instrument over the centuries has been changes in the number and form of the instrument’s frets (pin 品), the thin bamboo strips attached to the instrument’s soundboard, and ledges (xiang 相), the wooden pieces attached to the instrument's neck. Records illustrate that the pipa had four ledges (and no frets) in the Tang era, while today the pipa has six ledges and between 24 and 30 frets. The increases in fret and ledge number have been crucial in giving the a broader pitch range and increased versatility, but understandings of when and why these changes occurred remain limited. This thesis explores the development of the pipa’s frets and ledges from the combined perspectives of historical research and performance. In the first two chapters I provide a brief introduction to the instrument's origin and overall structure, reviewing studies conducted by various scholars to better to understand the history and development of the instrument. I also draw on fieldwork data from sessions with the luthier Yang Ming (Beijing, 2019), to elucidate the processes of producing and affixing of frets and ledges on the contemporary instrument. The central three chapters (chapters 3-5) focus on the development of frets and ledges through score analysis and the performance of three selected works to explore the condition and development of frets and ledges at specific points in time. Chapter 3 considers the four-ledged Late Tang era (923-937) pipa, taking Pin nong (品弄) from the Dunhuang pipa scores as a case study. Chapter 4 is focussed on the four-ledged 10-fretted pipa of the mid Qing era (early 1800s), especially through a case study of The Warlord Disarms (ba wang xie jia 霸王卸甲) from the Hua collection. Chapter 5 turns to the changes in frets and ledges of the pipa since the beginning of the 20th century, with a case study on Terracotta Warriors (Qin yong 秦俑), a 1985 composition by pipa master Liu Dehai. The concluding chapter 6 integrates findings from throughout the thesis, demonstrating that the development of frets and ledges of the instrument contributed to the widespan in pitch range hence contributing to the emergence of new compositions and new extended techniques such as string bending, artificial harmonics and string exchange. The accompanying video-recorded lecture-recital enables me to discuss performance-based findings that are difficult to convey in a written text.