Entry #4: The Ancient Sheng
I've always been fascinated by learning about new musical instruments. I want to know what they sound like, what they do best, how they're played, how they work, what techniques are employed in playing them, and what goes into caring for them. Usually, that leads me to scouring the internet for information about foreign instruments, instruments lost in time, and videos of them being played. One instrument that caught my eye awhile ago was the sheng, a Chinese wind instrument with roots in ancient periods of China's history.
The sheng is not an instrument that looks familiar to any other common wind instrument. Unlike a trumpet or trombone, it does not stick out forward. Unlike a flute, it does face horizontally, either. Even unlike an oboe, it doesn't face downward. Instead, it features a series of pipes which face straight up.
The appearance of the sheng seems to demand attention, it grows upward from the players hands like a tree. In fact, the arrangement of the pipes on the traditional sheng are made to resemble the folded wings of a phoenix bird (called fenghuang in Chinese, different to the Western conception of the phoenix but translated to "phoenix" nonetheless).
Its tone is said to have been intended to emulate what that mythical bird might sound like as well. No wind instrument or reed instrument sounds quite like the sheng. To modern ears, its pure, high-pitched tones almost sounds like an electronic organ or synthesizer. However, the human elements of the player's vibrato, dynamics, and articulation give it away as something real.
The instrumentalist blows air through a stout mouthpiece, inside of which a small metal reed vibrates, sending the sound throughout the tower of pipes above. However, unless the instrumentalist is holding down holes on the pipes, the energy of the reed will escape through these holes and no sound will be produced. Once sealing off the holes in the pipes with their fingertips, the pipe will resonate with the reed, producing a note.
Like the harmonica, the sheng is a type of "mouth organ". This is a colloquial term used to define wind instruments with a "free reed" that are blown with the mouth. Also, like the harmonica, the sheng's mouthpiece can be blown into and inhaled through to produce sound. The key difference is that, on a harmonica, blowing in will produce one note and inhaling will produce another (often higher) note. On the sheng, the note relies on your fingers and the holes of the pipes. Blowing either in or out will produce the same pitch. This enables sheng players to play interesting rhythms by cycling between exhaling and inhaling. For an experienced sheng player, this means playing complex rhythms and pieces without ever seeming to take a breath.
The similarities between the sheng and the harmonica don't end there, either. Sheng and harmonica players can add expression by creating rhythms using their tongues. This concept is known as 'articulation'. Like a guitarist creating emphasis by picking harder on some notes and softer on others, wind instrument players will say percussive sounds into their instruments to give notes a stronger 'attack'. "Ta", "da", "ka", are common but other sounds are used as well. "Ba" and "pa" bring the parting of the lips into the equation. Jazz trumpetist Louis Armstrong can be heard 'articulating' notes with "za" and "zaht". A particularly beautiful articulation that is somewhat common in sheng playing is fluttering the tongue, like rolling an r into the instrument. This can be done aggressively, like a machine gun, or very gently.
Here is one video I've always liked of a sheng player demonstrating the various techniques of the sheng:
The original sheng had 17 pipes. To digress and, yet again, deliberate on how important its appearance was in its construction, the traditional sheng had 17 pipes but four did not make a sound. These 4 non-musical pipes were added only to fill space, making the pipes of the sheng look more like the folded wings of the Chinese phoenix.
This 17 pipe sheng has been around for centuries. Depictions of it date back to 1100BCE and shengs have been recovered and maintained dating back to the Han dynasty around 200BC. Designed to play traditional Chinese music, which is famously based around diatonic scales, the sheng was originally very limited range. Diatonic scales refer to scales based around 5 notes, much of traditional Chinese music is composed this way. As such, the traditional sheng's range is very limited when compared to more modern wind instruments like the trumpet or trombone.
However, since the mid 1900s, shengs with more pipes were built to play more notes, like modern instruments today play in order to fit in with universal, Western music with 12-tones. Think of a piano, a piano is made of repeating patterns of twelve notes and their "octaves" (nearly identical notes, they just sound lower or higher) all along the keyboard. If you count out all the notes between one note to its octave, you will count out 12 notes. The adjusted modern shengs, just like a piano, were able to play all these in between notes within a certain range. For Western musicians especially, this opened up the sheng's compatibility with other music. In any key, or out of any key, a sheng player with one of these is able to play along with almost any song and limited only by their own skill and innovation.
To leave you with a more musical impression of the instrument, here is an especially pretty piece on the sheng,.I believe it is played on a traditional 17 pipe sheng (meaning 13 pipes that sound) and is pretty limited to certain notes as a result. An instrument's limits aren't necessarily a bad thing, they just need to be accounted for. If an instrumentalist can play the music their instrument can play WELL nobody listening is going to care if they can't play B flat. Case in point:
The sheng is old as dirt, but remains, to this day, as innovative and expressive as anything that came hundreds, even thousands, of years after it. Its remarkable to me that, unlike other instruments the world over, there are very, VERY few parallels to the sheng that weren't directly inspired by it. I think people interested in broadening their musical horizons would do well to look at instruments in different countries and time periods. Whether you play music, write music, or listen, learning about new instruments can be interesting and inspiring.
The sheng is not an instrument that looks familiar to any other common wind instrument. Unlike a trumpet or trombone, it does not stick out forward. Unlike a flute, it does face horizontally, either. Even unlike an oboe, it doesn't face downward. Instead, it features a series of pipes which face straight up.
The appearance of the sheng seems to demand attention, it grows upward from the players hands like a tree. In fact, the arrangement of the pipes on the traditional sheng are made to resemble the folded wings of a phoenix bird (called fenghuang in Chinese, different to the Western conception of the phoenix but translated to "phoenix" nonetheless).
Its tone is said to have been intended to emulate what that mythical bird might sound like as well. No wind instrument or reed instrument sounds quite like the sheng. To modern ears, its pure, high-pitched tones almost sounds like an electronic organ or synthesizer. However, the human elements of the player's vibrato, dynamics, and articulation give it away as something real.
The instrumentalist blows air through a stout mouthpiece, inside of which a small metal reed vibrates, sending the sound throughout the tower of pipes above. However, unless the instrumentalist is holding down holes on the pipes, the energy of the reed will escape through these holes and no sound will be produced. Once sealing off the holes in the pipes with their fingertips, the pipe will resonate with the reed, producing a note.
Like the harmonica, the sheng is a type of "mouth organ". This is a colloquial term used to define wind instruments with a "free reed" that are blown with the mouth. Also, like the harmonica, the sheng's mouthpiece can be blown into and inhaled through to produce sound. The key difference is that, on a harmonica, blowing in will produce one note and inhaling will produce another (often higher) note. On the sheng, the note relies on your fingers and the holes of the pipes. Blowing either in or out will produce the same pitch. This enables sheng players to play interesting rhythms by cycling between exhaling and inhaling. For an experienced sheng player, this means playing complex rhythms and pieces without ever seeming to take a breath.
The similarities between the sheng and the harmonica don't end there, either. Sheng and harmonica players can add expression by creating rhythms using their tongues. This concept is known as 'articulation'. Like a guitarist creating emphasis by picking harder on some notes and softer on others, wind instrument players will say percussive sounds into their instruments to give notes a stronger 'attack'. "Ta", "da", "ka", are common but other sounds are used as well. "Ba" and "pa" bring the parting of the lips into the equation. Jazz trumpetist Louis Armstrong can be heard 'articulating' notes with "za" and "zaht". A particularly beautiful articulation that is somewhat common in sheng playing is fluttering the tongue, like rolling an r into the instrument. This can be done aggressively, like a machine gun, or very gently.
Here is one video I've always liked of a sheng player demonstrating the various techniques of the sheng:
The original sheng had 17 pipes. To digress and, yet again, deliberate on how important its appearance was in its construction, the traditional sheng had 17 pipes but four did not make a sound. These 4 non-musical pipes were added only to fill space, making the pipes of the sheng look more like the folded wings of the Chinese phoenix.
This 17 pipe sheng has been around for centuries. Depictions of it date back to 1100BCE and shengs have been recovered and maintained dating back to the Han dynasty around 200BC. Designed to play traditional Chinese music, which is famously based around diatonic scales, the sheng was originally very limited range. Diatonic scales refer to scales based around 5 notes, much of traditional Chinese music is composed this way. As such, the traditional sheng's range is very limited when compared to more modern wind instruments like the trumpet or trombone.
However, since the mid 1900s, shengs with more pipes were built to play more notes, like modern instruments today play in order to fit in with universal, Western music with 12-tones. Think of a piano, a piano is made of repeating patterns of twelve notes and their "octaves" (nearly identical notes, they just sound lower or higher) all along the keyboard. If you count out all the notes between one note to its octave, you will count out 12 notes. The adjusted modern shengs, just like a piano, were able to play all these in between notes within a certain range. For Western musicians especially, this opened up the sheng's compatibility with other music. In any key, or out of any key, a sheng player with one of these is able to play along with almost any song and limited only by their own skill and innovation.
To leave you with a more musical impression of the instrument, here is an especially pretty piece on the sheng,.I believe it is played on a traditional 17 pipe sheng (meaning 13 pipes that sound) and is pretty limited to certain notes as a result. An instrument's limits aren't necessarily a bad thing, they just need to be accounted for. If an instrumentalist can play the music their instrument can play WELL nobody listening is going to care if they can't play B flat. Case in point:
The sheng is old as dirt, but remains, to this day, as innovative and expressive as anything that came hundreds, even thousands, of years after it. Its remarkable to me that, unlike other instruments the world over, there are very, VERY few parallels to the sheng that weren't directly inspired by it. I think people interested in broadening their musical horizons would do well to look at instruments in different countries and time periods. Whether you play music, write music, or listen, learning about new instruments can be interesting and inspiring.
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