Song of The Pipa Lute:

Bai Juyi is one of the greatest Tang poets, who stove for such simplicity and clarity that his poems were understood by the housekeepers. His long elegiac verses of epic proportions are memorized to this day including the Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhenge 長恨歌), still a required piece even in Japanese schools, and Song of the Pipa-Lute (Pipaxing琵琶行) below The latter describes a chance meeting with an accomplished pipa-lutenist, a former courtesan from the capital. Bai himself was at the time in imperial disfavour banned in 815 to a lower outpost as Magistrate of the then-no-man’s land of Jiujiang along the Yangzi River. The poem describes an evening as he rode to the shore to send off his guests, friends who had visited the banished scholar-official and were now boarding their boat to return to the city. Bai himself had boarded their boat and raised his wine cup in farewell, when all around them there was no music but the forlorn cries of native wildlife. Suddenly they heard wafting across the waters the sound of a mournful pipa-lute. The playing was no ruffian’s strain but exquisite of high cultivation. Out of curiosity, they maneuvered their boat next to the source of the music and beckoned the musician to join them. The lute player emerged and sang of her painful present circumstances, revealing how, once her beauty had faded in the capital city she had consented to marry a local tea merchant and now, a woman of fallen fortunes, she was living all alone as her husband traveled in pursuit of profits and gains. Bai instantly empathized with the lutenist as a fellow-wayfarer in exile, beseeched her to sing for them some more, in return for which he would compose (this) song of the lutenist for her.

XinXin Nanguan Ensemble:

The Xin Xin Nanguan Company was founded in 2002 by Wang Xin Xin for the preservation, study and promulgation of this ancient and aristocratic art form. It is not only a gathering place of music connoisseurs but is committed to put down deep roots, hoping by Nanguan tuition and training to cultivate future teachers and performers of this rare genre of refined enjoyment. The Company sows seeds and propagates the voices from antiquity in today’s contemporary garden, praying that this tradition will bloom in the peaceful humanitarian spirit of the past, to assuage the spiritual chaos of the present.