The erhu is a popular folk instrument in China, how did it come about?

The erhu has been used in Beijing opera for a long time, but it was not used much, unlike now when the erhu is accompanied by the jinghu, which has become an indispensable musical instrument for the singing of Qingyi.

I want to talk about how the erhu was used in the past. The erhu is known in the pear world as "Su Hu", because it is a piece of Shanghai singing "Suzhou beach yellow" with the instrument. In Shanghai, it is called "Erhu".

Previously, the Peking Opera stage performed "Danghu Boat", which sang "haunted five nights", "eighteen touches", which is accompanied by the erhu, and even the section of the face of the number of boards are also mixed with the accompaniment of the Su Hu. The master of the piano is not prepared erhu, but by the singing of "swing lake boat" of the role of their own with, with the package before the singing to the master of the piano, after the play the master of the piano and then handed the erhu with the package, which is what I know of the past use of the erhu.

Remember 1923 in Beijing, we rehearsed a new play "Xishi", Mr. Mei felt that the musical accompaniment is thin, and I discussed, precisely I had the same feeling at that time, we used a lot of musical instruments to listen to, first of all, the four hu, think that after adding it, but weakened the Jinghu brittle tone, with a big Kurenai small Kurenai try, think it's very messy, and finally used the most common erhu to try, we heard it, are! After we listened to it, we all felt that it was quite smooth, and after the Jinghu was set off, it sounded better, so we decided to use the erhu. Mr. Wang Shaoqing also played the erhu (because Mr. Wang Shaoqing accompanied his father, Mr. Wang Fengqing, to play the zither), but he did not add it to the singing, but added it to the places where the singing was beautiful.

When the first erhu piece of jinghu appeared on the stage, the audience felt very fresh; there were also objections that there was no Yueqin crisp and clear. At that time, there was a lot of discussion, after some time, people's ears also changed over, dissatisfied with the people also have no opinion. Then a new problem arose, which was the monotony of the accompaniment method. After research, we used the relationship between the Beijing Hu and Erhu octave difference added some changes, such as the Beijing Hu pulls the Xipi guide plate is from the 6 tone of the inner string, Erhu is turned to the outer string to pull the middle tone 6, for a short time, and then feel monotonous, the reason is that although add some changes, basically is still the same play. Later, Mr. Wang Shaoqing and I made a more detailed study and decided to absorb the accompaniment method of the Lao Sheng, which was juxtaposed with the accompaniment of the Jinghu, and at the same time, we adopted the singing method of the big and small voices of "tuning surface" and "tuning bottom" combined with the singing method of the two instruments, and we sang the melody, which was the main melody. The melody is mainly in the base of the unison playing, each change, in the tune of the progress of the tune sometimes go hand in hand, and sometimes different paths and the same, time and again, sounds much better than the pure unison playing.