Musical travels: Opera in Beijing

In the summer of 2018 I travelle 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 tenor suona with keys is remarkably similar visually to the Catalan instrument (see fig. 1). This discovery and an exploration of the reason behind it was 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, 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.