Prof. Burns decided to make it as a yaji (elegant gathering). He bought Chinese black tea to share with his students through the class.
The calligraphy teacher Xiuwen and calligraphy classmate Andy came to listen to my presentation as well. I was very happy to see them.
It was the day before Chinese full moon festival, so I decided to play "Song Of A Pleasant Night" to start my presentation.
Outline of my presentation.
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| total 30 slides |
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The questions students asked included:
Is this instrument difficult to learn?
How old were you when you started learning this instrument?
Does it play chords?
If the harmonic dots are a mirror image, why do you have to play same tone in different position?
and the student asked this question also commented that she thinks it creates a choreography style for the hand movement.
Do people play modern music on the qin?
How do you carry the table and qin if going out?
Is the sliding difficult for the fingers?
How about the tuning?
Andy commented that he heard a blue jazz guitar player the other day, and the guitar player said that playing vibrato, when you reached the note, you wait a second then do the vibrato and Andy sees that is happening on the qin playing too.
I took two qins, one was silk string, the other one was nylon string. I performed on the silk string qin with an amplifier. At the beginning I was trying not to use the amplifier. Although it can be heard, the audience has to concentrate without making any noise. After the first piece, I decided to use an amplifier for the rest of the playing. Many thanks to my husband's help on the slides and sound settings.
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| Picture courtesy to Xiuwen Li |
In the last 5 minutes, prof. Burns asked me if I could play another piece on the nylon string qin? So I played the Yu Lou Chun Xiao 玉樓春曉 (Jade Mansion Spring Dawn) to finish the elegant gathering.
I was very happy to be with Prof. Burns and his students at this mid autumn day and to share my music with them.
