Between Breath and Brass: Hearing the Sheng in Contemporary London

Julia Luo playing the sheng at the
London International Chinese Music Festival

The sheng is mouth-blown reed instrument that is one of the oldest Chinese instruments with images of it dating back to 1100BCE.

It is an instrument that can look deceptively still. Held vertically in front of the player, its pipes rise from a small wind chamber; the hands move, but often without the immediately visible physical drama of a string player’s bow or a percussionist’s attack. Yet the sound it produces is anything but static. It breathes, bends, overlaps and changes colour with remarkably small adjustments from the player.

For Julia Luo, a Chinese musician now developing her performance practice in London, learning to hear those details has involved moving between two rather different instrumental worlds.

Luo originally trained as a euphonium player at Xinghai Conservatory of Music before completing postgraduate study in music education in Britain. The sheng entered her musical life alongside that Western brass training, rather than replacing it. She studied the instrument with Luo Qixuan, a representative inheritor of Guangdong Han music, and over time the two instruments began to shape the way she approached one another.

At first sight, the pairing seems improbable. The euphonium belongs comfortably within the architecture of the Western wind band and brass tradition: long melodic lines, controlled projection, blended ensemble sound and a highly standardised relationship between notation and execution. The sheng, one of China’s oldest free-reed instruments, carries a different history of sound and musical gesture.

But both begin with breath.

That common physical principle has become increasingly important in Luo’s work. On the euphonium, breath supports a phrase and gives it direction. On the sheng, breathing is part of the instrument’s continuous mechanism: sound can be produced through both inhalation and exhalation. The result is a different sense of musical continuity. A line does not necessarily have to stop where a brass player expects to breathe.

This difference becomes particularly interesting when the sheng moves into contemporary ensemble music.

In August, Luo performed as part of the fourth London International Chinese Music Festival, appearing with the UK Chinese Orchestra in programmes that placed traditional Chinese instruments alongside new and recent composition. Among the works performed was Michael Ellison’s Curve, receiving its UK premiere.

Ellison’s music provided a useful example of a question that extends well beyond a single piece: what happens when an instrument carrying its own performance traditions enters a contemporary score?

For the performer, the answer is not simply a matter of playing the written notes.

The sheng has a vocabulary of pitch movement, articulation and ornament that does not always map neatly onto Western notation. A grace note on the page, for example, may identify an event without fully describing its weight, speed or relationship to the principal note. Similarly, a curved or sliding gesture can suggest movement between pitches, but the musical character of that movement depends on how the player shapes the breath and how the instrument responds.

This is where rehearsal becomes part of the creative process.

Julia Luo with composer Michael Ellison
London International Chinese Music Festival

Luo was not the soloist in Curve; she played within the sheng section of the ensemble. That position is significant. Much of the encounter between musical traditions happens not through spectacular solo moments but through the quieter business of balancing colour, articulation and timing inside an ensemble.

A sheng player reading a contemporary score is constantly making small decisions. How prominent should an ornament become? Should a pitch movement sound decorative, structural or almost vocal? How sharply should a note speak? How should a traditional instrumental gesture behave when it is surrounded by a completely different harmonic and timbral environment?

None of these questions necessarily requires abandoning notation. Rather, they reveal where notation stops being the whole story.

For Luo, this is also where her euphonium background becomes unexpectedly useful. Years of orchestral and wind-band playing created habits of listening horizontally across an ensemble: matching attacks, balancing chords, finding a place within a section and responding to a conductor’s larger conception of the music. The sheng asks her to bring those habits into contact with another set of instincts — ones concerned with ornament, flexibility of pitch and a different relationship between breath and musical gesture.

The interesting territory lies between the two.

It would be easy to describe this simply as “fusion”, but that word can flatten the process. What is happening in rehearsal is often less about combining two finished musical systems than about musicians learning how another instrument thinks. The productive moments are frequently small: a composer asking what a gesture can physically do; a performer finding that a familiar notation produces an unfamiliar result; an ensemble adjusting its balance because the sheng occupies a different acoustic space from the instruments around it.

London provides an unusually active setting for these encounters. Chinese instruments can now be heard not only in programmes devoted to traditional repertoire, but increasingly in new works, mixed ensembles and projects where their presence is not treated as an exotic interruption. For performers, that creates both opportunity and responsibility. The instrument has to retain enough of its own identity to remain meaningful, while also becoming flexible enough to participate in musical situations its earlier repertoire could never have anticipated.

Luo’s own path between euphonium and sheng makes that negotiation particularly tangible. The two instruments do not need to be reconciled into a single style. Instead, each sharpens her hearing of the other. Brass training makes her attentive to ensemble architecture, breath planning and projection; the sheng makes her more conscious of the spaces between written symbols and performed sound.

Perhaps that is the more interesting form of cross-cultural exchange: not the moment when two traditions are declared to have merged, but the slower process by which one way of listening begins to alter another.

For a sheng player in contemporary London, that process is still unfolding — one rehearsal, one new score and one breath at a time.

Guest post by Julia Luo

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