Elements in Motion: Pipa and the Sea
What to Listen For
Wu Xing (The Five Elements):
Qigang Chen’s Wu Xing (The Five Elements) is a dazzling orchestral suite that maps ancient Chinese philosophy with modern Western musical textures. It is an abstract work that explores the traditional Chinese philosophical concepts of water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. The work is a sonic exploration of color, timbre, and motion. Because the suite contains five fast, two-minute movements representing the traditional cycle of generation, it is important to listen for the contrasting atmospheres of each element as well as the relationships between the materials, so that each element generates the next one, as if the last was the consequence of the first.
Water (水): begins with rapid pizzicato (plucked strings) resembling water droplets. Listen for the contrast between the clear, impressionistic harp arpeggios and the atonal, turbulent dissonances used to capture the calm yet forceful nature of water.
Wood (木): is the richest movement. Listen for warm string themes in the violas that transition into fierce outbursts, chaotic aleatoric (chance-based) playing, and deep, percussive resonances.
Fire (火): is the element that represents life and warmth, rather than sheer destruction. Listen to the heavy brass chords that provide a steady foundation against erratic, darting woodwinds and snapping percussion, giving a musical picture of fire’s unpredictable energy.
Earth (土): has a tranquil, generative core. Listen for gorgeous, sustained, slow-moving chords that paint a serene landscape, punctuated by delicate, intimate duets between the piccolo and viola.
Metal (金): The series ends with harsh orchestration and continuous forward-driving motion. Listen for angular, metallic percussive sounds, sharp dissonances, and high-frequency brilliance that represent the strength and luster of metal.
Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa:
Listen to how Tan contrasts the east and the west, the pipa and the western orchestra, into two musical forces. The pipa, a traditional Chinese four-stringed lute, produces bright, sharp, and highly percussive attacks. Listen for the rapid lunzhi (a rolling tremolo technique) and harsh sao (strumming) that give the solo part its rhythmic edge, and how the pipa is taken beyond traditional playing by incorporating chanting, vocalizations, and percussive tapping on the body of the instrument.
The accompanying lush strings are rooted in Western classical traditions, but Tan used them in unconventional ways with contemporary avant-garde techniques. Listen for sliding pitches, harsh, aggressive scratching sounds, and driving, asymmetrical rhythms. The composer relies on rhythm, rather than on standard Western melodies and, in particular, syncopation and unpredictable jolts of energy from the rhythm. Silence is treated as if it were an active musical instrument. Listen for how abrupt, explosive musical outbursts are immediately followed by haunting silences, mimicking the acoustics of a cavernous ritual space.
Andante molto: has a slow, atmospheric introduction. Listen for the stomping cello “incantation” that the other strings duplicate. As the tension builds, the momentum rises to an explosive glissando. Once the pipa enters, note the mournful dialogue between the pipa and the strings, which sets a spiritual tone.
Allegro: contains a sudden appearance of rhythmic tension that highlights the percussive and aggressive possibilities of both the pipa and the strings. Note the colorful effects throughout, including vocalizations such as the shout of the word “Yao.” Other unusual techniques Tan uses are atypical string harmonics, rolls, and slides.
Adagio: The third movement is the emotional heart of the concerto. Listen for long, sustained notes and microtonal bends. Microtonal bends (often called quarter-tone bends) are subtle pitch alterations that rarely are used in Western music. A microtonal bend raises the pitch of a note by a fraction of a semitone.
Allegro vivace: In the energetic finale, listen for how the pipa and strings clash and merge in a virtuosic ending that builds to a chaotic-sounding climax before dissolving at the end.
Yue Xing (Musical Journey):
Gao Hong’s work for pipa and orchestra joins the many global influences she has experienced into one work, reflecting the joy, inspiration, and freedom she has discovered through cross-cultural collaboration. Yue Xing (樂·行) in Chinese can mean “musical journey” or “happy journey,” as the character for “music” (樂, yue) also means “happiness.”
Following the Heart
A reflective pipa solo opens the work, evoking Hong’s early memories and the daunting uncertainties of life ahead. Listen for the shifting harmonies that follow next, which mirror her youthful questions, her wondering about the future, unsure where music would lead her. As the orchestra enters, the mood changes. Listen for how the ensemble projects the unfolding of her journey: unexpected joy, vibrant experiences, and a sense of renewal. The use of the Chinese pentatonic scale metaphorically returns her to her cultural roots. With the pentatonic scale, Hong expresses her deep connection to China, her native land. She explains, “Although I left my family and country at a young age, that identity has always stayed with me.”
Paths and Cultures Entwined
In the second movement, Gao recalls her travels around the world; she has played with musicians from Japan, India, the Middle East, and the Americas. In this movement, listening for influences of world music and even jazz will help audiences trace the trajectory of Hong’s adult life. In the middle of the movement, Arabic scales are highlighted, taking us to the cadenza, where Gao explores the shared Silk Road roots of the pipa and the barbat, an ancient Persian plucked lute.
Music Beyond the Horizon
In the third movement, listen to how the music returns to the Chinese pentatonic scale. Gao brings everything back to her beginnings as the music depicts her deep, eternal connection and immersion in the culture of China. The concerto concludes in a jubilant celebration, honoring how music transcends language, background, and geography.
La Mer:
De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea)
Instead of traditional symphonic themes that are repeated and developed, listen for brief thematic fragments that seem to take shape, but then break up and disappear. Listen for the ebb and flow of the cello lines and the rhythmic wave-like phrases that increase in speed, suggesting the ocean gathering energy. Note the shimmering solos from the violin, oboe, and flute that glimmer through the orchestra in the heart of the movement.
Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
This swirling middle movement showcases Debussy’s orchestration skills. Listen to how he treats the orchestra as akin to an artist’s palette, introducing instrumental sounds to evoke light and dark colors on a seascape canvas. Especially listen for the trumpet, which adds a striking, contrasting color above the fluttering woodwind and string background.
Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and Sea)
Listen carefully to the opening of this final movement; it has a stormy beginning, initially producing a foreboding, wary, and ominous build-up in the lower strings and a cautious sound in the woodwinds. Note the ethereal melody from the oboe, English horn, and bassoon, which almost sounds like a mermaid singing. As the piece approaches its shimmering conclusion, Debussy reintroduces repeated motifs and familiar rhythms from the first movement to suggest a feeling of final arrival and culmination.
Qigang Chen: Wu Xing (The Five Elements)
Born: 1951 in China
Date of composition: 1998 - 1999; commissioned in 1998 by Radio France
Premiere: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra debuted Wu Xing on tour on August 14 in Wolf Trap and on August 16, 2010, at Ravinia
Orchestration: 3 flutes (3rd = piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (2nd = E-flat clarinet, 3rd = bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd = contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (bamboo chimes, bass drum, glockenspiel, log drum, marimba, metal chimes, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, temple blocks, triangle, tubular bells, vibraphone, wood blocks, xylophone), 1 harp, 1 piano (= celesta), and strings
Qigang Chen came from an intellectual family and began his musical studies as a young child. But in his early teens, when the Cultural Revolution occurred, he had to spend three years locked up in a barracks undergoing an ‘ideological reeducation.’ Nevertheless, his passion for music remained, and despite the social and political pressures, he pursued studies in composition.
In 1977, Chen was one of 26 candidates out of 2000 to be accepted at the Beijing Central Conservatory. After five years of study, he entered its national composition competition, won first place and was the only one authorized to go abroad for graduate study in music composition.
In 1984, Chen became composer Olivier Messiaen’s last student. Messiaen wrote: “His compositions display real inventiveness, very great talent, and a total assimilation of Chinese thinking to European musical concepts. All his works … are remarkable for their thought, their poetry, and their instrumentation.”
In France, Chen learned more about 20th-century music. In 1990, he traveled around the world and gradually became less attached to the Parisian musical universe. During his international travels, Chen composed the following symphonic works: Reflet d’un temps disparu, for cello and orchestra, which debuted with Yo-Yo Ma and the Orchestre National de France, and Wu Xing, a finalist at the 2001 Masterprize competition in London.
“A commission for a short orchestral piece came from Radio France in 1998. This commission immediately raised all my interest, for the proposition coincided with a period of personal quest,” Chen wrote. “The challenge pleased me, and I took it up as a style exercise.... Before going further in my process, I undertook to characterize each piece by a different symbol. From there was born the idea of representing the five elements (Wu Xing). Because according to the Yi King, five elements constitute the universe: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth.”
“To characterize musically a symbol in an extremely short time and to present a tangible material in an abstract language were my lines of strength. But even more, to establish relationships between the materials, so that each element generated the next one, as if the last was the consequence of the first.”
“The result was a small suite of five two-minute movements, with the five Chinese elements in an order based on generation (other orders traditionally suggest other themes, such as production or overcoming).” According to the foreword in the score, water is the strongest element for Chen, but it is characterized by calmness. Wood is the richest element with many variations; fire represents life (warm, but not aggressive); earth, a generative principle, is the matrix; and metal refers to strength and light.
Elected ‘World’s Best Classical Musician in the Chinese Language’ by the Chinese press in 2004 and 2012, Chen received the SACEM Grand Prize for Symphonic Music in 2005. He was appointed music director for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, a position that has opened a broader artistic universe for him.
Tan Dun: Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa
Born: August 18, 1957, in Si Mao village in central Hunan Province, China
Date of Composition: 1994, using music from his very popular Ghost Opera
Premiere: 1999, in Tokyo, Japan
Orchestration: Pipa and strings
Tan Dun, a leading figure in contemporary classical music, is a Chinese-born American composer and conductor who successfully combines elements of Chinese traditional music with contemporary Western compositional techniques. He draws from a variety of Western and Chinese influences. His creations can be populist, radically experimental, or, most frequently, both. He spent his early childhood with his grandmother in the Chinese countryside, where he was strongly affected by the region's folk traditions and experienced the shamanistic culture of a rural Chinese village. His early influences included both Chinese music and 20th-century classical music.
In the mid-1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to live among the peasants of the Huangjin Commune, planting rice for two years. Music offered a type of liberation for Tan, who began to collect folk songs and music from his peasant neighbors and led musical celebrations and rituals from weddings to funerals. Performing his own ad hoc arrangements, the villagers played on whatever folk instruments or household items were available; his music sometimes achieved fantastic aural effects.
Tan came to New York, where he still lives, in 1986 to study and earn a DMA at Columbia University. His compositions often include audiovisual elements, and his use of instruments constructed from organic materials, such as paper, water, and stone are often inspired by traditional sources. Currently, he travels widely and frequently, eagerly absorbing the cultures of the world. He understands his mission is to share his experience of shamanistic ritual as well as that of the culture of high technology with wide audiences.
Among Tan's compositions is Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind), premiered by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the Imperial Bells Ensemble of China, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic to commemorate Hong Kong’s unification with China. Tan wrote the music for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His work for the operatic stage, The First Emperor, composed in 2006, fulfilled a Metropolitan Opera commission; although the opera is in English, it tells the story of the unification of China that Tan co-authored with Chinese novelist Ha Jin.
Tan’s Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa does not follow Chinese musical tradition but is an innovation in Western musical performance as there were no pipa concertos before the 1980s. Since then, a dozen pipa concertos have been written. The pipa is a traditional Chinese four-stringed, pear-shaped plucked lute, often called the "Chinese lute." Known for its expressive, versatile sound, the pipa it is used in Chinese solo, folk, and opera music. It first appeared during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534). Its twisted silk strings were plucked with a large triangular plectrum held in the right hand of the player. The word pipa describes the plectrum’s plucking strokes: pi, “to play forward,” pa, “to play backward.” During the Tang Dynasty (618–907), musicians began using their fingernails to pluck the strings and to hold the instrument in a more upright position.
Tan began composing his Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa in 1994, and reworks music from one of his most popular works, Ghost Opera for pipa and strings. Tan’s inspiration came from China's 4000-year-old traditional ceremonies performed at Taoist funerals, which he attended as a child. There, shamans (traditional spiritual intermediaries), communicated with spirits, deities, and ancestors before these worldly spirits returned to the earth’s eternal soil. Tan notes that this dialogue “produces a new counterpoint of different ages, different sound worlds and different cultures.”
Gao Hong: Yue Xing (Musical Journey)
Born: 1964 in Luoyang, Henan Province, China
Date of composition: commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2025 for pipa and Western orchestra. The pipa and wind band version was commissioned in 2026 by the University of Texas at Austin, Wind Ensemble.
Premiere: Bates Recital Hall, U of Texas at Austin, Austin Wind Ensemble, Feb 11, 2026.
Orchestration: 1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 1 piccolo trumpet in B-flat, 2 trumpets in B-flat, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (tom-toms, triangle, tambourine, Chinese small gong, suspended cymbal, Chinese small cymbals, glockenspiel, and wood blocks), and strings
The acclaimed Chinese-American composer, pipa virtuoso and master, composer, educator, and improviser Gao Hong has championed the pipa. Gao Hong was inducted in 2025 to the Transglobal World Music Hall of Fame. She graduated from China’s Central Conservatory of Music. Since coming to the U.S., she has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and South America and collaborated with musicians from Japan, India, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas in various genres of music, from jazz to blues, and classical to world music. Her pipa artistry joins her many global influences into one musical unit, reflecting the joy, inspiration, and freedom she has discovered through cross-cultural collaboration.
Music scholar Frank Kouwenhoven observes: “She performs gospel, Afro-American jazz, bluegrass, Arabian music, Indian music, pop, symphonic music, Chinese traditional pipa, Chinese storytelling—all of that with the same vigor and passion and (seemingly) the same ease, as if all these territories had already struck roots with her at the time of her birth.” Her Gao’s vision is to create a powerful cultural fusion connecting Eastern and Western musical traditions, one that also fosters a deeper appreciation and understanding between the different musical worlds.
Gaohas written that Yue Xing (樂·⾏) in Chinese can mean "musical journey" or "happy journey,' as the character for “music” (樂, yue) also means “happiness.” A reflective pipa solo opens the work, with shifting harmonies mirroring her youthful questions, which included her uncertainty about where music would lead her. As the accompaniment enters, it symbolizes the unfolding of her journey: unexpected joy, vibrant experiences, and a sense of renewal.
In the second part, she recalls her move from China to Japan in 1993, the first time she left home, then her subsequent move to the U.S. in 1994, where she began collaborating with musicians from diverse traditions. The music draws upon Japanese, Indian, Arabic, and Western influences.
She has written, “Yue Xing is more than just a composition -- it is my musical autobiography. This piece is like a sequel to Flying Dragon, which represents my youth -- my struggles, my strength, and my will to survive. Musical Journey continues that story, reflecting where I am now: a life enriched, shaped, and in many ways saved by music.”
With thanks to Gao Hong for her program notes.
Claude Debussy: La Mer (The Sea)
Born: August 22, 1862, in St.-Germain-en-Laye, France
Died: March 25, 1918, in Paris
Date of composition: between 1903 and 1905
Premiere: Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris on October 15, 1905; revised version January 19, 1908
Orchestration: piccolo and two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, glockenspiel or celesta, two harps, and strings
Claude Debussy might be called an Impressionist if the designation of composers in Paris in the years of the Impressionist painters followed the lead of the art world, but he was not part of a group, and he created music that was entirely different from that of the Wagnerian style currently in fashion then in Paris. Debussy felt much more comfortable with painters and poets than with most of the established composers of his time. Among his colleagues were the painters Monet and Renoir, as well as the symbolist poets, Mallarmé and Verlaine. Debussy’s work, like that of the Impressionist painters, displays an emphasis on light and color and also shows the influence of the symbolist poets’ hallucinatory images as he succeeded in translating the symbolists’ aesthetic principles into musical terms, giving many of his compositions descriptive titles, like The Sea (La Mer). Debussy’s music, like the work of the artists he admired, does not offer literal representations of his subjects but attempts to evoke aural pictures of them with subtle references to their essence. Ironically, Debussy despised the term ‘Impressionism,’ and did not like it ascribed to his music. He considered his work the pursuit of “something new – realities - as it were: what imbeciles call ‘Impressionism.’” Despite the limitations of the label, the genuine novelties of Debussy’s music are evident: no other figure of his era did more to expand the possibilities of form, harmony, voice leading, and timbre.
Debussy loved the sea but never traveled farther on it than across the English Channel. In 1899, he pictured it in Sirènes, a Nocturne for women’s voices and orchestra. Then, in 1903, he wrote from Burgundy to a friend, “I am working on three symphonic sketches with the general title of La Mer. You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life, and that only chance led me in another direction. Nevertheless, I have always kept a sincere passion for it. You will say that the ocean does not exactly bathe the hills of Burgundy, and my seascapes may be studio landscapes, but I have an endless store of memories, and in my mind, they are worth more than reality, whose beauty often deadens thought.”
La Mer was first performed by the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris on October 15, 1905, where it was not very well received, perhaps because the conductor understood nothing of its delicate subtlety. On January 19, 1908, Debussy himself conducted a revised version with the Orchestra of the Colonne Concerts. He was an inexperienced conductor, nervous and stiff, but he stressed the music’s atmospheric qualities, and the applause of his friends in the audience drowned out some hissing. When Debussy conducted La Mer in London two weeks later, it was finally a success.
Debussy gave atmospheric rather than concretely descriptive titles to the work’s three movements: De l’aube a midi sur la mer (“From Dawn to Noon at Sea”) Jeux de vagues (“The Play of the Waves”), and Dialogue du vent et de la mer (“Dialogue of the Wind and Sea”).
© Susan Halpern, 2026