Confucious considered that ritual and music were crucial for cultivating virtue, harmony and communication with the dead and with the universe.
The Pipa is a four-string instrument of long tradition and is popular in every kind of repertoire, including the Chinese Opera. Its two-syllable compound
name refers to the two most common ways to play the instrument: pi, playing backwards and pa, playing forwards. The poet Bai Juyi (772 A.D. – 846 A.D.)
wrote the “Pipa Song”, poetry made of 616 chinese characters that describe the sound of the instrument as follows:
“As pearls,
large and small,
on a jade plate fall”.