Traditional Chinese music to feature at UK festival

A series of concerts, workshops, and master classes will be held during the 2024 London International Chinese Music Festival in London and Cambridge next week, from July 22 to 27.

One of the highlight concerts will be Lutes on the Silk Road on Thursday, in which musicians from different regions along the ancient trade route will play their versions of traditional lutes together, including the Chinese pipa, Kazakhstan dombra, Turkish baglama, Iranian tar, and Syrian oud.

The Sound of Silk and Bamboo concert, featuring guqin master Li Pengpeng from China and other Chinese musicians based in the United Kingdom, will be held at St. Giles Church in Cambridge on Wednesday.

The festival will also include a five-day summer school and grading exams for students learning various traditional Chinese instruments, including the guqin, which is a seven-stringed zither, the pipa, which is a type of lute, the erhu, a kind of fiddle, and the xiao, which is a flute.

The festival has been organized by China Arts and the London Youlan Qin Society, a London-based voluntary cultural organization which aims to promote interest in and understanding of Chinese music, in partnership with SOAS University of London. Last year, it drew participants from 13 countries.

Cheng Yu, the founder of the London Youlan Qin Society, said: "We want it to be a platform where lovers of traditional Chinese instruments and Chinese culture can gather to communicate, share, perform, and make friends."

Jiang Duo contributed to the story.