Daniel Lei plays "The Shepherd's Piccolo"

Daniel Lei and Lei Tan (piano) play The Shepherd's Piccolo (Chinese: 牧童短笛) for PureGold festival 2023, an annual music festival that celebrates and showcases the selected work coming out of the Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Tcherepnin, He Luting and The Shepherd's Piccolo

by Daniel Lei

When the Russian pianist Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) toured to China in 1934, he launched a call for scores of piano solos featuring Chinese characteristics. The country, which had undergone centuries of closed-door policy, was at a time when Western arts were first introduced to the masses.

He Luting, a young music student who decades later headed the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, was studying Western art music composition under the Leipzig-trained Wang Zhi in Shanghai. His The Shepherd's Piccolo, featuring a polyphonic pentatonic scale in a ternary form, won Tcherepnin’s recognition.

In 1957, the conservatory-trained composer and folk music enthusiast Li Huanzhi arranged a version for bamboo flute and piano that echoed the authorities' quest to nationalise Western art music by transposing works to traditional instruments and writing new works imbued with folk music styles. Interestingly, even in China, this version is played not on the bamboo flute, but more often on the Western concert flute, and the special timbres associated with the bamboo flute part are thus hidden. By a wonderful coincidence, the library of the SOAS, University of London holds a copy of the score of this version, which is interpreted and revived in this video.

© Daniel Lei 李梓成 2023. All rights reserved.