Listening to Dombra

Yanxiazi Gao

Chinese University of Hong Kong

On the twilight of August 24, 2023, I came to Baisha old town in the car north down from Lijiang, Yunnan province of southwest China. The August night, peeled lemon air night. Immersion under the ancient aura of the Landmark. A testament. The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain was towering in the distance. Its dark silhouette held a Naxi spirit, longer than the beats of horse hooves and melodious jingle bells along the Ancient Tea Horse Road. The performance started in a Naxi-style lounge bar, which had a gray and straw roof and encompassed a square backyard and stage. It was afar, far away modern. It was another part of the world. Remoteness? Resistance? Content? I saw the audience dance in a circle around the warmth of a crackling bonfire. The repeated Kazakh chorus was seductive, whirling, trancelike, like a shamanic ecstasy spiraling downward to contact Dante’s inferno.

Figure 1. The CoArt Village, Shuhe District, Lijiang City. Photo by author.

Zhang Zhi, a singer-songwriter, sang pointless letters “me—yi—na—yi—e,” gentle legatos, long-necked two-string dombra accompaniment. His words, low voice, and the experimental fusion arrangement of Xinjiang folk-pop wove a glacial world to the audience. The world of little somethings were growing. Snow lotus? Newborn skins? Or humanistic desires. My right foot was tapping. So was an audience member’s next to me. A mild namaste fragrance of incense sticks diffused, I smelled it and smiled, inhaling and exhaling. The samples of sound effects were improvised on dripping water, working giant machinery, talking kids, and shrieking seagulls. I listened to balaban circular breathing—mystery, waste, and vastness made from this double-reed wind instrument. The desolate diatonic melody was telling the tragic tale of the Kazakh swan. Then, dombra participated in an uplifting C minor in a fast tempo; the electronic bass guitar joined in with quick sweep picking, like a crazy waltz; then bursting out tuplets, and fingers flying.

Figure 2. At the Baisha Thatched. Photos by author.
Top: The backyard — Down: Performance stage

His improvisation “Lost River” was uttered with minimal vocabularies, as a simplest talk, a stimulus, to amplify the cultural subjectivity of Kazakh dombra in the other side of China. The same to the migrant singer himself, 2300 miles southwest settled down from the capital of Xinjiang to Lijiang. The Zhang family’s migration went back in 1966. As the son of Han immigrants who came to work in Xinjiang’s petroleum industry. Zhang considers himself a Xinjiang native. And this is the man’s candor. “Dombra is my toy, it comforts my soul.” 

A pair of hands construct the world of dombra musicking. The dombra and horse are a pair of wings of the Kazakhs, the symbolization of the rhythms on the horseback of nomadic lives. When I touch this instrument, its chubby half-pear-shaped body with seven concave pieces, mellow and satisfied, recalling a childhood companion with my grandma, in her living room. I hold it, a trusty fit to my belly. I plucked two strings, not that easy! How can one transfer a Kazakh spirit on these two thin nylon strings only? What can a pair of hands do with it? 

Zhang’s playing hands showed me techniques and expressions. An invisible line was drawn by his right hand’s index finger. His right arm was suspended from the face of the electronic dombra, moving upside down as if Spiderman swung from building to building. An art of misdirection. He plucked one string yet, in fact, played another string. While I was looking at his practice, I never thought of the hands of a 5’10’’ tall man working more skilled than the hands of Indian embroiderers. His wrists, the most flexible spring wires, making snow crystals of quadruplets, quintuplets, and sextuplets fell from a coldest cyberpunk universe. Ultimately, he transferred untamed nomadic experiences into this intricate handmade fantasy.

Figure 3. Zhang Zhi, playing hand embellishment on the dombra. Photo courtesy of A Gui.

It requires intimate ears to listen and learn, to feel changed states of mind when making and performing music. For musical complexity, two simple strings never cease. Single notes, double stops, and flicks were cascading, like a bud or a wuthering wilderness, a pillow talk or a hovering mountain eagle. How many sounds and species can be expressed through the hands, using two strings to squeeze the cosmos in? 

I found a connection between myself and the universe through a pair of hands, through listening to Zhang’s practice. For the Austrian poet Rainer Rilke, it was a falling hand. “In the nights of the heavy Earth,” everything falls farther into Solitude. “But there is One who holds this fall / Infinitely softly in His hands.” For the fictional character J. Alfred Prufrock, it was an indecision: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” For me then, it was a reflection, to watch and listen to dombra playing and practices, to sense a self-existence in the universe.

And I imagine, it has more, more links between sensory experiences and cultural contemplations. And more absences are behind the music I heard, from many years and generations of creation and passing along by the body of dombra craftsmen, aken improvisational poets and folk singers, oral teachings and heritors, observers, archivers, family members and friends, and listeners. Their faces and names are vague. The root of the music is clear. Their inspirations and imaginations are the music as it is somewhere in time. Now, in Lijiang, at Travelers Band Musician Guesthouse, Zhang moved a Xinjiang-style supa, a raised low platform / performance stage in the courtyard. Together with his band partner Wu Junde, they play traditional dombra pieces, Kazakh folk songs, and Central Asian-influenced improvisations for travelers and friends. Let us imagine their imaginations in the sound of dombra duets, djembe drumming, singing, and flying in this transcending sound for salvation.

Figure 4. At the Travelers Band Musician Guesthouse (courtesy by Yanxiazi Gao)

Left: Wu Junde — Right: Zhang Zhi

References

Eliot, T. S. (1915). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Poetry A Magazine of Verse. Accessed March 30, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock 

Hahn, Tomie. (2001). Singing a Dance: Navigating the Musical Soundscape in “Nihon Buyo.” Asian Music, 33(1), 61–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/834232

____. (2006). “It’s the RUSH”: Sites of the Sensually Extreme. TDR: Drama Review, 50(2), 87–96. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram.2006.50.2.87

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (1902/1918). Autumn. Jessie Lamont translated. Accessed March 30, 2024. https://poets.org/poem/autumn-8