Name: Paper Boy by wufei
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: Solo guzheng composition (Chinese zither, Chinese: 古筝) .

Soothing sounds... like a good time to me

This track was recorded on June 4, 2023. It is the #799 episode of Wu Fei's Music Daily on Substack.

Every year on this day, I think of my hometown Beijing with a heavy heart. A group of mothers lost their teenage children in a horrific event on this day thirty four years ago in my hometown. I was still a kid. Now as a mother, I created this piece as if playing my child’s favorite song to put him to sleep.

The melodic element from the beginning is typical intonation of traditional story telling art 曲艺 from northern China, especially Beijing and Tianjin 京津 area. This music art form has had more than 1500 years of history. It was already popular during the Tang Dynasty ( 618-907 A.D.) from monks singing stories of the Buddhist sutra and scriptures.

Wu Fei's Album

Baby San’r 宝贝三儿

Solo guzheng composition (Chinese zither, Chinese: 古筝) . 

Paper Boy

Premiere live at Ha Concerts during Made in China Festival in Ghent, Belgium in March 2024

Recorded live during a week-long musical exploration at the Made in China Festival, this album captures a mesmerizing convergence of ancient Chinese tradition and contemporary innovation. Led by virtuoso guzheng player and composer Wu Fei, whose masterful command of her instrument is matched only by her transcendent vocals, the ensemble has created a sonic journey inspired by the eternal dance of ocean tides.

The recording showcases the synergy between Wu Fei's classical Chinese foundation and her collaborators' diverse musical backgrounds: Dijf Sanders weaves intricate electronic textures that ripple through the compositions like moonlit waters. Simon Segers' drumming flows with naturalistic precision, while Louise van den Heuvel's bass work provides a deep, tidal undertow that anchors the ensemble's explorations.

Drawing inspiration from centuries-old Chinese poetry and the rhythmic certainty of lunar tides, the quartet creates a sound that defies easy categorization. Each track pulses with the same inevitability as the ocean's rise and fall in 12-hour, 25-minute cycles. The result is a deeply personal statement that honors both tradition and innovation. 

This album documents a singular moment of creative confluence, where four distinct musical voices found common ground in the universal language of tidal rhythms and poetic expression.



Personnel:
Wu Fei: guzheng, vocals, dan tranh 
Louise van den Heuvel: bass
Dijf Sanders: electronics
Simon Segers: drums, percussions

River Carnival

Magnolia Mulan

Water Melody

Tides and Time

Dreams of The Mekong

Lover’s shoulder

Jackdaw Night Song

Mount Slingshot (vocals multi-track, guzheng). 

Composed / performed / recorded by Wu Fei

It features prepared guzheng and my vocals. I saw my daughter’s elastic hair bands laying around the house right before I went into my studio. By instinct, I grabbed them feeling they maybe useful. Here they are on my guzheng. The sound that gives the percussive noise in the recording is from me pulling the rubber bands which then bounced back to the strings. It felt a bit like shooting with a slingshot.

Mount Slingshot

Composed for pipa & dizi (1998)
Commissioned by Huaxia Chamber Ensemble
Premiered by Zhang Weiliang (dizi) & Chen Yihan (pipa)
Venue: China Conservatory of Music Grand Concert Hall, Beijing, 1998. 
作曲：吴非
为琵琶和笛子而作
委约乐团：华夏室内乐团
首演：中国音乐学院音乐厅， 1998年。
演奏家：张维良（笛子），陈一涵（琵琶）

Bamboo Horse for dizi & pipa

青梅竹马 Bamboo Horse

Wu Fei is a classically trained composer, singer and renowned master of the guzheng — the 21-string Chinese zither. She has taken her music around the world, appearing at such venues as the Forbidden City in Beijing, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery, MoMA (New York), the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. She has performed at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, Vossa Jazz in Norway, the Europalia Festival in Belgium, and Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.

Wu plays in the guzheng’s vernacular — a musical language at least 2,500 years old – mixing Western classical and Chinese traditions with a contemporary, idiosyncratic sound. She composes for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan, and orchestra.  

The Philadelphia Orchestra has performed her composition for chamber orchestra, Hello Gold Mountain. The work was inspired by the real stories of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai from Europe in World War II and built new lives in China, and features Wu Fei herself on guzheng and vocals and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz (of the Silk Road Ensemble) on oud. Hello Gold Mountain has also been performed by the Winnipeg Symphony, Bellingham Symphony, at the National Gallery of Art with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, and by Chatterbird Ensemble at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Wu has appeared in concerts and workshops at numerous universities and institutions around the world, including Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Chautauqua Institution, UNC Chapel Hill, UC Irvine, Butler University, Vanderbilt University, the China Conservatory of Music, the Norwegian Academy of Music and the University of Los Andes of Colombia.

Wu’s work in television has included compositions for AMC’s Hell on Wheels and PBS’ web series The History of White People in America.

Her many commissions have ranged from a composition for Percussions Claviers de Lyon, which premiered in the Forbidden City, to live performances in Paris and Tokyo for luxury brand Hermès.  

Wu has collaborated with artists from many different disciplines and genres, ranging from Emmy-winning directors Pierce Freelon to Grammy-winning musicians Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn and percussionist Billy Martin (Medeski-Martin-Wood) to avant-garde composers John Zorn and Fred Frith. In 2024, she launched House of Wu Fei in Ghent, Belgium with Dijf Sanders, Simon Segers and Louise van den Heuvel.

In solo programs, Wu Fei presents a rich combination of contemporary guzheng compositions and music from the traditional guzheng repertory from the ancient schools of Shandong, Henan, Chaozhou and others. As a singer, she also presents Kunqu opera, Peking opera and Chinese folk music. As a composer, Wu Fei plays her original guzheng solo works inspired by traveling the world while missing her old traditions. As an improviser, she draws on her classical training, the riches of global music of the last decades, and American folk music. Her solo concerts are pure magic, spellbinding the public with her sensitivity, charisma, and virtuosity.

Wu has released two solo recordings and two collaborative albums — one with classical guitarist Gyan Riley, and the other with singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn, released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and listed among the “Best Albums of 2020” by The Times’ culture section. Each of Wu’s recordings exhibits her unique solo improvisational vocabulary, her knowledge of Chinese traditional and folk music, and the craft of her compositions for Western classical chamber orchestras.

She received her early musical education at the China Conservatory of Music and earned a master’s in composition at Mills College in California before immersing herself in New York’s downtown improvisation scene at venues including The Stone, where she has frequently performed and curated. A native of Beijing, Wu currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paper Boy

wufei

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