Liu Zhengguo

Liu Zhengguo is a renowned Chinese pipe and yue (bone flute) performer and a music historian. He is the inventor of the national patented instruments the nine-hole yue and the seven-hole dizi. He is also the official sound testing player and safeguarding keeper of the unearthed original artefacts of the national treasure Jiahu Guyue.  Currently, he is a distinguished professor at the Music College of the Shanghai Normal University, National Class One Performer, Director of the Research Institute of Chinese Yue Culture and Principal Specialist of the National Social Science Foundation’s major projects.

A performer, composer, theorist and pedagogue all in one, Liu covers many areas of knowledge, from music literature, archaeology, instrumentation, historical Chinese semantics and cultural anthropology. He has made remarkable achievements in his thesis that the yue is the archetype of all ancient Chinese wind instruments, and discovers the invention, performance and development of the instrument in physical form. Not only did he theoretically unravel the all-time mystery regarding the meaning of the historic account “yue is similar to dizi”, he also successfully replicated and created a variety of yue-type wind instruments, developed the related performing techniques, and thus revived the long-lost ancient yue on the concert stage. His efforts in paving the way for yue as a performing art form have won him the praise as “the first person to restore the glory of the ancient yue”.

In recent years, Liu has been invited to give lectures and performances on yue at leading music institutions in China, such as the Central Conservatory of Music, China Conservatory of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Tianjin Conservatory of Music. He was also invited to Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, the United States, South Korea and Japan for cultural exchange, to give performance tours and lectures on the ancient yue. He has therefore spread the influence of the distinctive Chinese yue culture of nine thousand years to audiences at home and abroad.