Towards Brightness

Introduction

Liu Tianhua's 1931 erhu march, written to show that Chinese music was anything but listless.

Guangming xing is an erhu solo that Liu Tianhua composed in 1931 in the style of a march, energetic and uplifting in mood. Liu explained that foreigners called Chinese music listless, and he wrote the piece to prove them wrong. It is in compound ternary form, built largely on broken tonic chords and march rhythms, with frequent shifts of key by fourths and fifths, and it closes with a long tremolo passage depicting a crowd on the move. The score was printed in the tenth issue of the first volume of Music Magazine. Lin Shicheng arranged it for pipa in 1958, and Peng Xiuwen later arranged it for Chinese orchestra.