Immeasurable Light

Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man explores the extraordinary historical range of the pipa repertoire, both in collaborations with the Kronos Quartet on Buddhist and ancient shadow puppet theater songs, and in many solo pieces that trace and elaborate for the first time on record melodies from the 8th-12th century stashed away in caves, temples and aristocratic and imperial libraries for hundreds of years. Working for over a decade with ethnomusicologist, Rembrandt F. Wolpert, who supplied her with Tang Dynasty melodies transnotated from rare sources, Wu Man has woven together original lyrical pipa pieces that recall the Central Asian origins of the instrument, explore the Buddhist associations of some of its greatest repertoire and experiment, John Cage-style, with strings and sound. An unprecedented collection that extends and reinvents one of the great solo modal traditions of early world music.