Learning a Traditional Instrument

The student is holding an erhu, which is a traditional Chinese string instrument. I can tell because it has a long neck with a small round sound box at the bottom covered with skin, and it is played with a bow that sits between the two strings. She is holding it upright, resting on her lap, with the bow in her right hand. What I also noticed is that there is sheet music on a stand in front of her, so she is learning to read music as well as to play.

I tried learning the guzheng for about a year in Primary 4. What surprised me was how much my fingers hurt at first, because you pluck the strings with picks taped to your fingertips and the skin underneath gets sore. My teacher told me the soreness would pass once I built up calluses, and she was right, although I stopped after the year because of my studies. I still remember the first piece I could play from beginning to end without stopping.

I feel they will survive, but only if young people are given a reason to care about them. Fewer children take up traditional instruments today because there are so many other activities competing for their time, and these instruments take years to sound good. However, I have seen performances that combine the erhu or the angklung with modern music, and those make people my age listen properly instead of thinking it is old-fashioned. That is why I believe traditional arts survive not by staying exactly the same, but by finding new ways to be heard.