Henan Museum hosts a guqin concert on Saturday evening in Zhengzhou, Henan province. [Photo by Qi Xin/for chinadaily.com.cn]
Henan Museum in Zhengzhou, Henan province, hosted a guqin concert Saturday evening that showcased decades of research into ancient Chinese music and called for broader academic collaboration to preserve endangered classical traditions.
The concert was held as part of Henan's 2025 Intangible Cultural Heritage Special Fund and aimed to boost the preservation of ancient musical artifacts and reconstruct classical melodies. A public guqin training workshop preceded the performance.
"Our goal is to integrate more specialized groups to enhance academic research into stage performance, allowing us to carry forward ancient music more systematically," said Lin Xiaoping, director of the Department of Ancient Music Inheritance and Conservation at Henan Museum.
Luo Suli, Henan's provincial-level representative inheritor of guqin art, called the seven-stringed instrument an irreplaceable vessel of traditional Chinese humanistic thought.
Henan Museum hosts a guqin concert on Saturday evening in Zhengzhou, Henan province. [Photo provided for chinadaily.com.cn]
"We want to draw seasoned scholars and guqin lovers from all walks of life to join us in promoting excellent traditional Chinese culture," Luo said.
Henan Museum founded its Ancient Music Orchestra in 2000. For more than two decades, the group has studied the wealth of musical relics unearthed across the Central Plains, emerging as one of China's pioneering museum programs focused on comprehensive ancient music preservation. Staff musicians have transcribed and arranged nearly 200 regional melodies spanning prehistoric times through the Song Dynasty (960-1279).
Luo served as the lead creator of the concert, which featured prominent guest artists Yang Chunwei, head of the Music Research Institute at the China Conservatory of Music, and Zhang Meng, a rising guqin performer from the Central Conservatory of Music, together with the Huaxia Ancient Music Orchestra. The ensemble has performed nearly 20,000 live shows and toured over 20 countries, including France, Turkey, South Korea, and the United States, for cultural exchange events.
