How to Play Erhu, the Chinese Violin: The Advanced Skills: How to Play Erhu, the Chinese Violin, #2

By H.H. Lee

This book will teach you how to play erhu, the Chinese violin, at the advanced level. Various fingering and bowing techniques, the uncommon key signatures, as well as the ways to maintain an erhu will be taught in this book with illustrations and external videos. Likewise, a number of sheet music will be provided for practices. After reading the whole book, you should know more about erhu and can play songs with greater difficulty by yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H.H. Lee
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386580676

H.H. Lee

H.H. Lee is a Chinese who has played the erhu for around 20 years. Having joined the Chinese orchestra for long, he knows various Chinese musical instruments well and hopes to introduce their elegance to people outside China.

Book preview

How to Play Erhu, the Chinese Violin

-  the Advanced Skills

By H.H. Lee

How to Play Erhu, the Chinese Violin – the Advanced Skills

Copyright © 2017 by H.H. Lee

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

First published on 15 June 2017

Edition 1.4 on 5 May 2020

Table of Contents

Preface

The Fingering Techniques

The Bowing Techniques

The Remaining Signatures of Erhu

Maintenance of the Erhu

The Ten Masterpieces of LIU Tianhua

Online Materials

Preface

We have learnt the basic skills in Book 1, and will acquire the advanced skills as listed in the following table in Book 2.  Some of these skills are difficult in nature, so we need to put more efforts into practices.

In this book, we will focus on various fingering and bowing techniques, including glissando, vibrato, trill, natural and artificial harmonics, as well as pizzicato (fingering techniques); legato, martelé, staccato, spiccato, tremolo, ricochet, double stop and bow hitting (bowing techniques), as well as neck bending.

Moreover, we will also learn to play the remaining 5 majors (E, E♭, B, A♭ and D♭) for the sake of playing non-traditional erhu songs, especially pop songs.  In view of the growing number of songs composed in these majors, we cannot turn a blind eye to them.

Apart from these, I will introduce ways to maintain the erhu, repair damaged parts, as well as some accessories necessary for the erhu to function well.

Without further ado, let’s begin with the fingering techniques.

The Fingering Techniques

The major kinds of fingering techniques include:

[Hereinafter all the notes are played under 1 = D ( ).]

Glissando

Glissando, originating from the French word "glisser", means the gliding of notes from a pitch to another pitch.  Glissandos are child’s play for string instruments like the erhu as their notes are continuous but not discrete (unlike wind and keyboard instruments).

To produce a glissando, press the strings at a note from which our finger glides upward or downward to another note.  The range of glissandos can be within a whole tone or