Erhu Recommendations?

[dh]

Hello, I'm totally new to this type of music (discovered it yesterday, actually) so if I'm wrong, I'm sorry.

I casually came across a song yesterday called Galloping War Horses, and another song that went unnamed, it was just titled "Chinese Traditional - PEKING OPERA MELODIES - TREASURE HOUSE OF CHINESE FOLK MUSIC.mp3"

It's a music that is foreign to me, and instantly fell in love with it, and tried looking for more, but couldn't find any. Could any of you recommend me some traditional music that has strong use of the erhu, or just traditional music all together? Erhu would be preferred, though.

[paulv]

Hi dh, and welcome to the forum.

I've been learning erhu for almost 2 years now and also fell in love with traditional Chinese music. I've found some various CDs at my library by just doing a search with the word "erhu". If you want to buy, there are plenty on the Internet. Some sites even have several mp3 snippets that you could listen to.

The famous erhu players are Liu Tian Hua and A-Bing (Hua Yan Jun) amongst others, and you should be able to find their songs played by others.

Peking Opera's tend to use the higher-pitched cousin to the erhu called a jinghu in the lead role and it's about half the size of an erhu.

By the way, Galloping War Horses is an erhu standard that every erhu student eventually learns how to play -- kinda like going from an adolescent to an adult!

Good luck and enjoy the music.

Regards,
paul......

[dh]

I'll look into it, thanks for the information.