Musical Travels: Instruments in Chinese Museums

In the summer of 2018 I travelled to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to explore the Chinese suona instrument and the Chinese Orchestra. My interest in this particular instrument, a Chinese shawm, comes from its similarity with the Catalan tenora. More precisely, the keyed tenor suona is remarkably similar visually to the Catalan instrument. This discovery and an exploration of the reason behind were detailed in a previous article [https://sonograma.org/2017/10/north-korea-catalonia-enora-suona-jangsaenap/]. Having exhausted the information sources I could access in Europe about Chinese ‘improved instruments’, I decided to travel to China and Hong Kong to search for the suona; this fieldwork was funded by the American Musical Instrument Society and the Roland Levinsky Memorial Fund.

My usual modus operandi for finding and researching instruments, particularly historical ones, is to work in instrument collections. These are often housed in music, history or art museums or held by individual collectors. Depending on the mission and purpose of the collection, musical instruments are conserved, displayed and/or played there. I was curious to discover how and where instrument collections were shown and handled in Chinese museums.