Wu Man was just 16 when she attended a master class led by the celebrated violinist Isaac Stern. The room at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing was packed, “people from all over China.” Scoring a place was like winning the lottery, she remembered. The session was full of surprises—and for the teen-aged pipa player, revelations.
“For me, it was fascinating to see an open class like that,” she said. Her own musical instruction had begun when she was barely bigger than the instrument she went on to master. Unlike the group session she was now taking part in, her instruction until then had been highly individualized: “We were always very private, one-to-one.”
She was at once floored and intrigued when Stern, who died in 2001, asked one of her classmates why she wanted to be a musician. No one had ever probed her own musical soul like that. And when he continued, “Can you feel the audience? Can you reach out to the last row of the audience?,” she was stunned by the intimacy of his questions.
“We were taught to play music for yourself, not for other people,” she said.
She was no less taken aback when Stern, asked by someone in the audience which orchestra he belonged to, said he was a freelancer. In Chinese, she said with a small laugh, that word translates to “I have no job.”
Wait, she wondered, you can be a musician and work for yourself?
Her determination to set out on her own was first kindled by an earlier master class with another United States musical superstar, the late Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa. But she told no one. After she graduated from the conservatory’s high school division at 18, she went straight to the college and then graduate programs. Hers was the first master’s degree the conservatory had awarded in pipa, the traditional Chinese stringed instrument that predates the violin by around 1500 years.
By then Wu Man was known throughout China for her mastery of the pipa. The pear-shaped instrument resembles a lute and takes its name from the “pi” and “pa” sounds made by the forward and backward plucking motion first heard in the instrument’s early iterations in the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 B.C.-220 A.D.). Most families in their native Hangzhou were unfamiliar with Western instruments when she was a child, so her parents chose this most traditional of Chinese instruments for their 9-year-old daughter.
She was quickly hailed as a prodigy, such a sensation that her final audition to the conservatory made national news. The audition process was grueling, “so difficult,” she said, “from around the whole nation, so many kids, thousands of kids, talented kids, very much like acceptance to the Ivy League colleges in the U.S.
At 13, Wu Man was the youngest student ever admitted to the Central Conservatory.
“At that moment, I already knew, this is my life,” she said.
By the time she finished her master’s and was immediately offered a coveted faculty position at the conservatory, her parents—not to mention all their friends and neighbors—were overjoyed. The faculty job was a sinecure, more or less a guarantee of lifetime, salaried employment.
But Wu Man had other plans. “Because of Isaac Stern and Seiji Ozawa,” she wanted to go to America.
So in 1990, she and her husband, Peng Wang, set off for New Haven, Conn. Peng Wang immersed himself in postdoctoral research in chemistry, while Wu Man enrolled in an international language center. Her classmates came from around the world, oblivious to the fact that the young Chinese woman who was struggling to learn English like everyone else was musical royalty in her home country.
“Nobody knew I was a ‘musician’ ”—she made air quotes around the word—“a ‘star,’ or that I already had a master’s degree.”
Her luggage as she and Peng Wang made their way to the U.S. included two pipas. The instrument was virtually unknown in America, but Wu Man was undeterred. While focusing on her English-language studies during the week, she hopped a train on weekends to play with Chinese street musicians in New York City. There was no pay and no formal structure, “just gathering with local amateurs, people who maybe worked in restaurants or owned a laundromat.”
She loved playing in these groups. Sometimes there were works composed by doctoral students, “modern music for traditional instruments.” Sometimes she would provide accompaniment for Cantonese operas—slightly strange, she admitted, because as a Mandarin speaker, she does not understand Cantonese.
“But for me it was learning, doing, rediscovering Chinese music,” she said. “To me, this was a learning process. I was so happy, so happy.”
For a young woman far from her own country, she also felt at home. Riding the train to Manhattan, she would gaze out the window and marvel at homes that looked like mansions by Chinese standards, and at miles of trees not seen outside U.S. borders.
“It looked beautiful, but it was not mine,” she said. “As soon as I got to Chinatown, I felt at home.”
Through her Chinese musician friends, she connected with the fabled Kronos Quartet. The San Francisco-based troupe was known as much for its skilled interpretation of classical music as for its bold enthusiasm for modern works. Kronos performed Mexican folk music, as well as movie soundtracks. Jazz and tango were among the Kronos repertoire, along with adaptations of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The Kronos artists welcomed international input, ranging from a Bollywood singer to a Mexican rocker to a Romanian gypsy band.
With the Kronos Quartet, Wu Man found an equally warm embrace. By the early 1990s, she was a regular Kronos performer. It was around that same time that Kronos had a huge hit called “Pieces of Africa.” The group was always looking for works outside the standard classical box, so a Chinese pipa player was right up their avant-garde alley.
“The first time I rehearsed with the Kronos, they had never seen my instrument,” she said. “They had never played with a Chinese musician.”
For Wu Man, the experience was just as novel: “First time I played with Westerners, or what we called ‘foreigners,’ “ she said. The interaction among the musicians was something new: “I listened to the musicians talk to each other, how to make their instruments work together. That to me was very new, the talking, the collaboration. In China, we don’t have that.”
In 1992, Wu Man and the Kronos premiered “Pipa and the String Quartet” at the New Music Festival in Pittsburgh. The performance was a huge success, garnering the musicians a standing ovation.
“Right time, right moment,” she said.
The audience reaction in Pittsburgh bolstered her confidence. As the audience stood and clapped, “I said to myself, ‘I can do this.’ “
She realized then that in working with Western groups, and especially in working with contemporary compositions, “This is a way that I can introduce my instrument, the pipa. I can use these contemporary pieces to share this instrument, to go in a way into the mainstream.”
What she was doing, she discovered, was both Westernizing her instrument—adapting it to sounds it was not intended for—and pipa-izing Western composers and orchestras.
“I had to teach them,” she said.
It was a steep pedagogic climb. “I remember the first time I got a New York Times review,” she said. “The review only described my clothes, the pretty woman who played the pipa. Where was my music? There was nothing at all about my music.”
Still, the work with Kronos proved to be Wu Man’s career turning point in the United States. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris. Like Wu Man, he was a musical prodigy. Like his friends at the Kronos Quartet, he was known not only for his superb syncopy with his instrument, but for his willingness to leap across conventional musical boundaries.
Ma captivated symphony audiences wherever he went. But he also played movie soundtracks, Blue Grass, jazz and tango, as well as traditional Chinese music. Ma played alongside popular singers such as Carlos Santana, Diana Krall, James Taylor and Miley Cyrus.
“Music, like all culture,” Ma writes on his website, “helps us to understand our environment, each other and ourselves. Culture helps us to imagine a better future. Culture helps turn ‘them’ into ‘us.’ And these things have never been more important.”
In 2000, Ma assembled the Silk Road Ensemble, named for the trade route that for 2,000 years connected Europe and Asia. The group was made up of artists performing on instruments seldom heard outside their home countries–including Wu Man on the pipa. Ma envisioned the troupe as a way to bring together innovative performers and composers–and also to blend cultures and traditions from around the globe.
It was through his friends at Kronos that Ma knew of Wu Man and her mastery of the pipa. Wu Man was thrilled at the prospect not only of playing with the cello superstar, but of venturing into music that would connect Asian and Western cultures.
“I remember Mr. Yo-Yo Ma told me he had this idea for a musical band that would reflect the history from Central Asia to China to Europe,” she said. The intention was “to remind people, we are not isolated, we are one world.”
Wu Man responded eagerly. “I said, the globe is round. Where is the East? Where is the West? It doesn’t matter, East or West.”
So in 1998, the year the nonprofit Silk Road Ensemble was launched as a vehicle to foster cross-cultural communication through music, Wu Man became a founding member. The same year, she was awarded a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard. One year later, she performed with Yo-Yo Ma at the White House.
She calls her work with Yo-Yo Ma a meeting of “mind-alike musicians. We don’t even have to say anything. We just look at each other and the music starts.”
The same chemistry extends to all the Silk Road musicians: “It is something beyond music, and the audiences can see that,” she said. “They get that communication. They can see how we enjoy being together.”
Through her work with Kronos and with Yo-Yo Ma, “gradually, people began to think of me as a symbol of traditional Chinese music.”
Which is fine, except that Wu Man refuses to be pigeonholed as “traditional” anything.
“I love both,” she said, “very traditional and very modern. I don’t want to do any (one) thing my whole life. I want to do different things. I do not want to be only ‘the girl who plays the pipa.’ I hate that. I really hate that.”
Yet the association is unavoidable. In 2013 she was named Musical America’s “Instrumentalist of the Year,” marking the first time such acclaim had been bestowed on a non-Western instrument. “Thanks to her,” Musical America proclaimed, “the pipa is no longer an exotic curiosity, let alone a complete mystery.”
Wu Man has curated concerts at Carnegie Hall. She has traveled to Taiwan to study the music of that island’s aborigines. She received an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music. She has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, many of which she has composed herself. Wu Man has performed with orchestras across America, including her recent appearance with the Oregon Symphony. Her discography numbers more than 40 albums, reflecting her determination to establish the pipa as a presence in all genres.
She returns regularly to teach master classes and to visit friends and family—“to reconnect,” as she puts it. With her husband and son, she lives near San Diego.
Here is her advice for young musicians: “First of all, what is it that you are looking for?”
Decide why you want to play a particular instrument, she counsels. Be prepared to work hard and to focus on the instrument for its own intrinsic qualities. If that instrument happens to be the pipa, of course you can play music for opera or in chamber groups. You can play jazz, or music intended for electronic devices. You can, as Wu Man has done, bring the pipa to theater, film or in collaboration with visual artists.
But always remember that the pipa is an elegant instrument that must be respected for its history, its place in Chinese culture, its adaptability and most of all, the purity of its sound. The pipa can be gentle, and it can be fierce.
Still, Wu Man cautions, if by chance you are misguided enough to think of the pipa as some kind of (Very) Old School guitar, just forget it.
“If you want to play guitar,” she counsels, “play guitar.”