World Instruments You Should Hear Immediately - Part 2: GUZHENG

Since the dawn of human invention, our opposable-thumb-weilding ancestors have been stretching animal skins and innards over wood and shells to create different kinds of sounds. It’s easy to forget that our modern western culture of guitars, pianos, drums, and orchestral instruments are all, relatively speaking, quite new inventions to the human population. Eastern culture has been cultivating musical instruments for a striking amount of time, and the Guzheng, with a history of more than 2,500 years, is one of the most beautiful, and my personal favorite from the region now known as China.

The guzheng is the Chinese version of a zither, which is the precursor to the modern day guitar. A zither is, technically, any instrument with strings stretched across wood, but our modern understanding makes it out to be a stringed instrument that doesn’t have a neck or a chromatic pitch shifting mechanism like frets. Instead, the strings are plucked on one side of a wooden bridge and affected on the other side to create pitch bending and vibrato. The guezheng is usually played by the fingers of the right hand, which are taped with picks on each finger. The attack of these picks from a skilled player is quite beautiful to watch, actually