Liu Guofu

01 · Lineage & Regional School

At the age of sixteen he began learning the craft under his grandfather and father, and he has devoted himself to transmitting the wuyin horn for more than forty years. Within the regional tradition and school record of Suona Art in Nanzhang, Hubei: At present only five wu-yin trumpet troupes are active in the Xiaokou area and fewer than sixty people can play it; among them the Liu family troupe has been transmitted through six generations and has considerable influence in the Jingmen, Yuan'an and Baokang areas adjoining NanZhang. Suona is a transliteration of the Arabic “surna” (zurna), called in antiquity “suoliao” or “su'ernai”, and widely current in many countries of Asia, Africa and Europe; it came into China at the latest in the Jin and Yuan periods. In addition, the small suona used in the performance of Fujian nanqu is called the “aizi” or “nan'ai”; the suona used to accompany Puxian opera is called the “meihua” or “chuibian”, and a larger kind is called the “dalong” or “dahaidi”; the all-wood suona of the Uyghur is called the “su'ernai”; and the Tibetan, Miao, Mongol and Korean peoples each have suona of different form. In the 1980s experts and scholars from Hubei carried out exploration and collation of the wu-yin trumpet.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, of Han ethnicity, born in November 1957 in Nanzhang County, Hubei Province. He is able to transmit the entire body of performance techniques, in particular the wu tone produced by combining hand tone, mouth tone and kneaded tone, and he can play more than one hundred tune titles, including Kao Gu, Guan Diao, Ye Ye Luo, Shang Shan Po, Yue Yue Gao, Hu Bao Tou, Bai He Yao, Yue Yue Qing and Bie Zhi Zi. Because of the richness of his repertoire and his superb skill, he is often invited to perform at weddings and funerals in the surrounding villages and at county, municipal and township events. Within the documented technical tradition of Suona Art in Nanzhang, Hubei: In Chinese folk usage it also has the names of bronze flute, tin flute, pear blossom and sea flute. The suona is made up of the reed, the staple, the air disc, the body and the bronze bell; its finger-holes are arranged in order according to the heptatonic scale, the distances between them being basically equal, it can turn through seven modes, and its range is generally two octaves and a major second. It has such blowing techniques as portamento, tonguing, arched-breath tone, top-breath tone, the rolling “du-lu” and circular breathing (blowing without a break for a long time), and is a solo instrument of very strong expressiveness. Its volume is great and its tone high and ringing, making it one of the indispensable instruments of the wind-and-percussion band; in antiquity, besides playing military music, it was used for the drum-and-wind music of the yamen and as accompaniment to opera, song and dance, and in the daily life of the people it is mostly used for festivals, weddings and funerals and theatrical scenes. The wu-yin trumpet is now mainly prevalent in the Xiaokou of Xunjian town in NanZhang county, Hubei and the area adjoining Baokang; its origin may be traced back to the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, when it was originally court music of the state of Chu and afterwards flowed out among the people; it has more than a hundred traditional named tunes and is a living survival of the musical culture of the ancient land of Chu, called by musical historians a “living fossil” of Chu music. Its leading instruments are the long trumpet, the trumpet, the side drum, the protruding gong, the great cymbals, the small cymbals and the hooked gong. In the application of named tunes it strictly observes the ancestral instruction of playing different tunes on different occasions, the saying being “entering the door do not play Ye Ye Luo, going out do not play Up the Hillside”. Its common named tunes fall into the two kinds of the joyful tune and the sorrowful tune: such joyful tunes as The Wedding Tune, The Tiger's Head and He Xiangu are used for joyful affairs, and such sorrowful tunes as Up the Hillside, Ye Ye Luo and Pu Tian Luo for funerals. Its melody is mostly in the zhi mode and its musical structure is very close to that of the Nine Songs and the Li Sao. There are no written records of its notation; it depends wholly on oral transmission from the masters of successive generations, and it is taught within the family and not outside it. On the whole, however, the old artists who command this traditional folk performing craft are daily growing fewer, while the young who come after are unwilling to learn and inherit it. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Named Tunes of the Joyful Kind": Such joyful tunes as The Wedding Tune, The Tiger's Head and He Xiangu, used on joyful occasions such as weddings. "Named Tunes of the Sorrowful Kind": Such sorrowful tunes as Up the Hillside, Ye Ye Luo and Pu Tian Luo, used exclusively for funerals. "The “Shamanic Tone” Playing Technique": The “shamanic tone” produced by combining hand tone, mouth tone and kneaded tone is the most representative sound of the wu-yin trumpet.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Suona Art (Wuyin Horn), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. His apprentices are spread across the three counties of Nanzhang, Baokang and Yuan'an, numbering more than twenty.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Liu Guofu · National Representative Bearer Archive