Liu Yaozhang

Liu Yaozhang was a pipa player whose family came from Yin county in Zhejiang. As a boy in Shanghai he studied piano, violin and cello, and he learned the pipa from Wang Yuting. A leading member of the Datong Music Society run by Zheng Jinwen, in 1925 he arranged the pipa piece Xiyang xiaogu for Chinese ensemble as Chunjiang huayue ye, the score on which the society's orchestra was built. In 1927 he prepared a pipa version of Yue'er gao from the Hua family tablature and premiered it at a Datong concert that year. His son is the violinist Liu Hexun. He died in 1996.