Dressed in a cap and gown, Liu Wenwen was easy to lose in the crowd at this year’s Shanghai Conservatory of Music graduation ceremony. But the achievement that brought her on stage that morning was historic: The 34-year-old had just earned China’s first Ph.D. in the suona, a traditional folk instrument.

Long associated with grassroots celebrations — weddings, funerals, and village gatherings — the suona has become a topic of academic interest in China in recent decades, as the country’s musicians look to integrate traditional instruments into orchestras and symphonies.

Even so, it was only in the late 2010s that two of China’s most prestigious music institutions — the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music — established doctoral programs dedicated to the study of suona. In 2020, Liu became the first in the country to pass the qualifying examinations and become a doctoral candidate in suona studies.

Over the next four years, Liu split her time between practice and academic research: To earn her degree, she needed to perform three solo recitals and write an original dissertation.

When she took the stage to receive her diploma, no one was prouder than her mother, Liu Hongmei. One of the country’s first female suona musicians, the elder Liu spent 30 years teaching her daughter to play the instrument — in direct contravention of Chinese tradition, in which folk musicians pass their knowledge on only to their sons.

“Thinking back to my childhood, I endured so much scolding and hardship in order to teach myself suona,” Liu Hongmei told Sixth Tone in June. “I didn’t even finish high school, and now my daughter has China’s first doctorate in suona studies!”

“She’s achieved what I never could.”

1.

Liu Wenwen’s musical lineage can be traced back over a dozen generations. Her father, Liu Baobin, is a practitioner of a suona tradition native to the southwestern corner of Shandong province, not far from China’s ancient heartland. Her mother also comes from a long line of suona players: By the time Liu Hongmei was born in 1964, her family had been practicing “Liu Clan Kaxi” suona — a musical tradition that seeks to imitate animal sounds — for 12 generations.

But while Liu Hongmei was interested in continuing that tradition, her family gave her little in the way of support. After both her grandfather and father refused to teach her, she began to practice in secret.

Finally, when she was about 6 years old, Liu Hongmei went to her father and played a segment of Kaxi she had taught herself. Her father, seeing her talent — and recognizing that their household could use another skilled player — began to formally teach her.

Even then, it wasn’t easy. Liu Hongmei was born and raised in the countryside around the eastern city of Xuzhou — a region known for its cultural conservatism even today. When her relatives and neighbors learned that Liu Baobin was teaching his daughter to play suona, they quickly distanced themselves. “How will your daughter ever find a husband if she plays the suona?” Liu Hongmei remembers them asking.

Although a necessary part of almost any village celebration, suona players were and are often poorly treated and paid. After she had mastered the basics of the instrument, Liu Hongmei began following her father and grandfather as they crisscrossed the region for weddings and funerals.

One night they played at a wedding until midnight, then took to the road for an 80-kilometer bicycle ride through heavy snow for a funeral the next morning. Exhausted and sleep-deprived, Liu Hongmei says she fell off the bike and into a ditch.

On another occasion, their boat capsized while crossing a river. Clinging to the hull, they waited desperately for someone to rescue them. Liu Hongmei still remembers how her grandfather tried to reassure them: “We are doing virtuous work, sending people off and welcoming new ones. Heaven won’t let us die here!”

At 15, Liu Hongmei won first place in a suona competition held by a local radio station. This victory led to invitations from several performing arts troupes. At 17, she decided to leave home — and the rigors of the road — behind.

“Playing suona in the countryside was incredibly tough,” she says. “My grandfather and great-grandfather both died before 50, worn out from the constant work.”

“I loved playing suona, but I didn’t want to live that kind of life anymore.”

Liu spent the next few years bouncing from troupe to troupe before landing with a group of acrobats based in the small eastern city of Suqian, in northern Jiangsu province. The troupe leader appreciated Liu Hongmei’s talent so much that he arranged for her to perform solos during the shows’ intermissions.

In 1985, the troupe booked a performance at Shanghai’s once renowned Great World entertainment complex. It was there that she met Liu Baobin, a suona player from a different troupe, this one based across the provincial border in Shandong. Their shared passion for the instrument quickly blossomed into love. The pair married and, in 1990, Liu Wenwen was born.

2.

According to Liu Hongmei, there was never any question whether Liu Wenwen would learn to play suona. “Her father and I and all her elders are suona players,” she says.

Her daughter’s preferences didn’t matter. “When I was little, I didn’t really want to learn the suona; I preferred dancing or piano,” Liu Wenwen tells Sixth Tone. “But I had no choice. I couldn’t resist my parents, especially my mother.”

No measure seemed too extreme to a woman who grew up traveling the highways and byways of rural Jiangsu. According to Liu Wenwen, in elementary school, her mother would wake her up at 4 a.m. every day and take her to the nearby botanical garden so she could practice before class. Liu Hongmei would nail the day’s piece to a tree trunk and watch while Liu Wenwen played through mosquito bites in summer and freezing temperatures in winter.

The end of school brought the resumption of practice, this time in their thin-walled apartment. “She didn’t even need to ask if I had practiced,” Liu Wenwen says. “She would just touch the reed; if it wasn’t wet enough, she’d slap me. Crying didn’t help. My mom would say, ‘You can cry after you practice!’”

“I can still remember the banging of the neighbors hitting the wall,” Liu Wenwen says. “And my parents’ constant quarreling with the neighbors because of my suona practice.”

Looking back, Liu Hongmei admits that she was “a bit harsh” on her daughter, but stresses that she was kinder to her daughter than she had been to herself.

“I was a lot harsher on myself!” Liu Hongwen says. “When I was learning the suona, I would play even if it meant not eating or sleeping. If I didn’t play well, I would hit myself.”

When Liu Wenwen was 8, her mother began taking her to bigger cities like Beijing during holidays for lessons with well-known musicians. They would take the late train from Shandong to Beijing, arriving in the middle of the night. There, mother and daughter would nap beneath the underpasses of the capital’s Chang’an Street, waiting until morning for a text message from the teacher to go for their lesson.

It wasn’t until the second year of middle school that Liu Wenwen finally got a regular teacher: Liu Ying, a non-relative who taught at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and is known as one of the country’s best contemporary suona musicians. Knowing the family’s financial difficulties, Liu Ying did not charge any tuition for their weekly lessons, which continued until Liu Wenwen formally enrolled in the Conservatory’s folk music program four years later.

3.

According to Liu Wenwen, her enrollment in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music marked a new chapter, not just in her life, but in her relationship to the suona. Not only did she pick up new skills, she also discovered a newfound appreciation for the instrument.

For years, playing suona had been an arduous and disheartening experience. Even the chances she had to perform in public were marred by prejudice: The suona was considered too noisy and coarse for the concert hall.

“When I performed the suona at school, my classmates would tease me,” Liu Wenwen recalls. “They’d ask, ‘Why are you playing that? Is your family in the funeral business?’”

At the Shanghai Conservatory, Liu Wenwen gradually found pride in being a suona player. What she once saw as the embarrassing flaws of the instrument became its strengths.

For example, the reed, which determines the suona’s timbre, is handmade and has no standard size. This makes pitch control difficult, unlike Western instruments like the oboe.

This uncontrollability and lack of scientific precision make the suona a highly personalized instrument, allowing players to showcase their skills in unique ways.

“Exceptional suona players leverage their skills and experiences to express distinct flavors and styles,” Liu Wenwen explains. “They can even turn ‘out-of-tune’ or ‘cracked’ notes into virtuosic showcases.”

At the end of 2016, Liu Wenwen got a rare performance opportunity. She was invited to Australia to perform with the composer and conductor Tan Dun, who had arranged “Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix” for a Western orchestra. This is perhaps the most famous suona piece, its essence lying in the player’s ability to mimic the calls of various birds such as the cuckoo, partridge, swallow, mountain finch, and bluebird.

Liu Hongmei encouraged her daughter to incorporate her family’s Kaxi tradition into her solo — more precisely, the way Kaxi players mimic rooster crowing and hen egg-laying.

But Liu Wenwen was hesitant. Adding the sounds of roosters and hens into the delicate bird calls seemed inappropriate.

Reluctantly, Liu Wenwen recorded a segment and sent it to Tan for his opinion. To her surprise, Tan liked it. “Play it just like that! We will tell the story of 13 generations of your family to the world.”

Thus, on Feb. 11, 2017, Liu Wenwen found herself playing rooster calls on stage at the Sydney Opera House as the audience cheered and laughed. Even members of the orchestra couldn’t help but crack a smile.

4.

By a stroke of luck, Liu Wenwen’s career took off just as the suona was experiencing a cultural moment. What was once considered a rustic, marginalized folk instrument teetering on obsolescence became an internet sensation in the late 2010s, as social media users joked about its “rascally” character and ability to drown out everything else.

The film “Our Shining Days,” also released in 2017, highlighted this new image. In a standout scene, students from the Western and traditional Chinese music departments of a music school engage in a musical “duel.” The tension escalates until a suona player performs “Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix,” leaving the Western faction in stunned silence.

As interest in the instrument grew, Liu had no problem securing a post-graduation teaching position at the Shanghai Conservatory — or lining up concerts for herself. With a full performance schedule, she saw little need to pursue a doctorate, even after the Conservatory began offering one in 2019.

Then the pandemic struck. In early 2020, as COVID-19 spread around the world, one performance after another was canceled, and Liu’s classes were pushed online. With all her work coming to a halt and still six months left until the first doctoral qualifying exam, Liu Wenwen decided to give it a shot.

She wasn’t surprised when she passed, but the reaction from the suona community caught her off guard, she says.

“I belong to several WeChat groups filled with suona players, and for a couple of days those groups were completely flooded with messages,” Liu Wenwen says. “Everyone was congratulating me, sending celebratory emojis. Many expressed their amazement that the suona, long looked down upon, finally had a Ph.D. program!”

During her doctoral studies, Liu Wenwen delved deeper into the academic side of the suona, exploring the unique forms and styles of the instrument across different regions of China. For instance, in the central Henan province, the suona is closely associated with Yu opera; in Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, it incorporates more folk song elements and evokes a deeper emotional response; and in Northeast China, the suona often accompanies “errenzhuan,” or two-person rotation comic performances, giving them a livelier, more mischievous sound.

But the regional variant she was most interested in was that of her father’s homeland — the small bronze suona of southwestern Shandong. Her doctoral thesis systematically described the development of wind and percussion music in the area and cataloged a number of endangered pieces.

Beyond her academic research and regular performances — which she has resumed in recent years — Liu Wenwen has also begun experimenting with cross-disciplinary works. For example, since last year, she has been touring cities like Shenzhen and Beijing with jazz musicians. More recently, she’s begun a collaboration with the pianist Kong Xiangdong to fuse the suona with the piano to create new Buddhist music.

In her view, there’s nothing strange about these mashups. Although the suona, introduced to China’s Central Plains via the Silk Road in the 3rd century AD, has been thoroughly Sinicized, she believes it is a global instrument.

Not everyone agrees. After a recent jazz suona show in Beijing, an audience member told her there was no place for such “experimentation” in the nation’s political and cultural capital.

Maybe it’s a Shanghai thing, she says: “After living and working here for so many years, I’ve acclimated to this city. I believe in having an open mind and constantly trying new things.”

(Header image: Liu Wenwen gives a performance in Shanghai, 2024. Courtesy of Liu Wenwen)