Dear qin friends,

Our NAGA Guqin events for March 2005 went very well. Everyone had a great time on any part of event on March 20^th. Please see the photos of the yaji taken by Michael Cohen. Now it's time to start thinking about next month's.

Spring is in the air, so the next master class will have a Spring theme. Our intention is that in addition to continuing with the topics we began this month, we shall do some creative scholarly activities to enhance your enjoyment of the beauty of spring and enable you to experience something of the flavour of the yajis of ancient times. This is also a good time for you to study qin learning. Even an overall view of the piece titles will show you something of the richness of qin sources in Chinese cultural and musical history. Even studying the title of pieces is like reading Chinese poetry. Just to give you an idea, I did a quick search for qin pieces with spring in the title in Cunjian Guqin Qupu Jilan (Zha Fuxi's catalog of qin scores and music), and found 31!

Even if you cannot come to the master class you are still welcome to email me your list.

So please bring to the class anything related to spring. It may be a poem, a recording of a qin piece about spring, a piece of calligraphy, a painting, even a type of food or drink etc. To spice it up a bit and increase your motivation, we shall have a scoring system:

 

Item	Points
List of spring-related qin pieces	2 points
Recording of a spring-related qin piece	5 points each
Recording of a spring-related piece for another Chinese instrument	2 points each
Play a spring-related qin piece	8 – 10 points each, depending on how well you play it
Chinese poem, calligraphy or painting about spring, food or drink about spring etc	1 point each (3 if the poet, calligrapher or painter was a qin player and you made the food or drink yourself)

Duties for the food pot lot gathering in May will be allocated according to each person's score. Those with the highest scores will have to do less cooking and those with lower scores more cooking and cleaning up!

Our master classes are held once a month. Please see details at http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/newsletters/guqinmasterclass.htm

Good luck!

Wang Fei

Director

North American Guqin Association

http://www.guqin.org/