The Story of the Piano

Author: Luo Qin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Luo Qin, born in the late 1950s, is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. As a music anthropologist specializing in the study of the relationship between music and culture, the music and musical instruments in his thoughts and ideas are not merely techniques of sound but more the products of human life, society, and culture. Especially, Luo Qin has experienced various life stages, including rural life, factory work, orchestral performance, university teaching, and overseas study. His multiple identities as a laborer, artist, teacher, scholar, and publisher have given him a unique perspective on things and problems. For readers, this is a blessing, as the extraordinary Luo Qin offers us an extraordinary story about the piano. In this story, the piano becomes a super star with countless personas, and its story is the story of a super star. Its birth, growth, development, success, failure, nobility, and superficiality, what it brings to people, what people lose because of it, and all the interesting anecdotes and "scandals" surrounding it all dazzle and enchant us.
In the second half of the 19th century, the piano became a social "piano flu" sweeping across the continents of Europe and America. Old soldiers with wine bottles, drunk on the piano music in cheap bars, lived a life of oblivion. Noble ladies, pampered and refined, whispered intimately in the elegant salons surrounded by piano music. Talented soloists danced and moved with all their might before the piano on the concert hall stage, while tender and sorrowful poets poured their grief and sighs into the melodies of the piano—those beautiful yet unspeakable notes. Just as the once-famous song "I Love the Piano" once sang in the United States and around the world: "I love standing by the upright piano, or a small grand piano is even better. I love running my fingers across the keys, and I love listening to others play the piano."
But today, the piano is everywhere. Where there is music, there is a need for a piano. The piano is the "god of music" and has become a fashion, a lifestyle, and a culture. The piano in our homes is not just an instrument; it has become involved in every aspect of our lives, including material and spiritual, secular and religious, tangible and intangible, concrete and abstract, as well as individual and general. The piano has existed for three hundred years, which is also three hundred years of human culture. The greatness of the piano lies in its being a symbol of our three hundred years of sweetness, bitterness, joy, and sorrow. The Story of the Piano is precisely the "microcosm" of this symbol.
Major publications include: Kun Opera: The Revival of Chinese Classical Drama in Social, Economic, Political, and Cultural Environments (English Edition), Music and Culture, Street Music: A Microcosm of American Society and Culture, Heart Sounds.com—A Humanistic Narrative of World Music, A Century of Jazz: Rise and Fall, Fifty Years of American Rock (A Journey Through Time), and Music in Culture and Culture in Music: An Introduction (among others). Published dozens of academic papers: Selected for Who’s Who in American Universities, awarded the first prize of the "Chen Wanlin Cultural Fund" in the United States, the title of "International Scholar" in the United States, and the "Outstanding Returnee Scholar" by the Shanghai Municipal Government.