 North American Guqin Association |
It is with a heavy heart that I pass on the sad news that Fred Lieberman passed away on Saturday morning May 4th, 2013, after a cardiac arrest. Born in 1940, Fred Lieberman was a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz, and one of the pioneers of Chinese music research in the western world. As a guqin player, I respect what he did
for the guqin; his English translation of
the Meian Qinpu was a major contribution to the understanding of the guqin in the western world. He also helped the guqin to be declared by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of
Humanity in 2003 - this is something very important he did for the guqin, but which he never mentioned in
public himself, nor did he want to me to talk about it within the guqin community; he felt what he did was not important.I now mention it for the first time. When the
China Ministry of Culture submitted their document to UNESCO, the panelists
could not recognize the importance of the guqin.
When Fred heard this from one of the panelists who knew him, he immediately
drove over 2 hours to my house to discuss with me how we could help. We spent
many hours and wrote comments, then he drove back to
his Santa Cruz mountain home to continue working on it, and to write letters of
recommendation to the UNESCO panel. I respect him a lot as my personal mentor. When I pursued my career in the
technology field in 2000 after I completed my MA in multimedia, I still
remembered what he said to me: “there are many people doing multimedia in
Silicon Valley, but you are the only one who can teach, perform and promote the
art of the guqin”. He introduced me
and my guqin music to many universities, musicians and scholars, taught me how to do guqin presentations, edited my English, and
mastered my guqin demo audio CD. He taught me to remain true to my Chinese origins but also to have an open mind. He introduced me to other cultures and music. He gave me a lot of priceless books and CDs he worked with such musicians as the Grateful Dead, John Cage, Lou Harrison. I still remember how I enjoyed playing guqin at a small qin gathering with him and his friend Lou Harrison in Lou's house: he asked Lou to write a piece of music for my guqin. On another occasion we drove 3 hours to Mickey Harts' house to introduce him to guqin music. Throughout the trip we listened to music and laughed; that memory is still very vivid more than 10 years later... What he said and what he did for me encouraged me to pursue my guqin dream in the US, and that is one of the reasons why I have devoted much of my career to being a guqin performer and teacher in the US for over a
decade.(Fred Lieberman and Wang Fei, April, 2007,photo by Micheal Cohen) I saw he was very active in linkedIn recently and can hardly believe he has left us for heaven. But, he
will never leave our hearts. We should all remember him and miss him.
Wang Fei About NAGA
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