A quiet seven-string Chinese zither is now drifting beyond the solar system
The guqin is so soft it suits a private room better than a concert hall, yet a recording of it is travelling through interstellar space. Guan Pinghu's performance of Flowing Water was pressed onto the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, chosen because the instrument's scale rests on the physics of vibrating strings.
The guqin is a fretless, plucked zither with seven strings, long the favourite of Chinese scholars and linked with Confucius, who is associated with pieces such as Youlan. For most of its history it was simply the qin. When that word spread to other instruments, including the piano and the violin, the prefix gu, meaning ancient, was added to keep them apart. It should not be mixed up with the guzheng, which has movable bridges.
Legend credits China's mythical founding rulers with inventing it some 5,000 years ago. The firmer record is more modest but still deep: the qin appears in writing nearly 3,000 years old, and instruments have been excavated from tombs around 2,500 years old. More than 3,360 pieces survive from ancient and imperial times, and a Song-era qin sold in 2010 for $22 million, a record price for any musical instrument.
Its range covers about four octaves, reaching down to the cello's lowest note, and it has three families of sound. Plucked open strings give san yin, the unfettered sound. Touching the string lightly at marked points while plucking produces fan yin, floating harmonics. Thirteen inlaid dots of mica or shell, called hui, sit at simple fractions of the string length to guide the fingers, and players commonly use 91 harmonic positions. Sliding the left hand along the string gives a voice reminiscent of a slide guitar.
Scores never simply listed notes. Qin tablature spells out tuning, finger positions and strokes step by step; the oldest surviving notation, a single seventh-century manuscript titled Solitary Orchid in Stone Tablet Mode, describes every move in prose. Players today often meet in monthly or bimonthly gatherings called yaji, or elegant gatherings, and UNESCO recognised guqin music as intangible heritage in 2003.
Source: Guqin
