Fishing Boats Singing at Dusk

Introduction

Lou Shuhua's guzheng piece of the 1930s, named after a line in Wang Bo's Preface to the Prince of Teng's Pavilion.

Yuzhou Changwan is a solo piece for the guzheng whose title comes from a line in the Tang writer Wang Bo's Preface to the Prince of Teng's Pavilion. It is usually credited to the zither player Lou Shuhua, who shaped it in the 1930s from an older tune called Guiqulai. Another account holds that the Shandong player Jin Zhuonan first adapted it from zither tunes of the Linqing area such as Shuangban and later taught it to Lou. The widely played Lou version shares its first half with Jin's version, while the longer second half is Lou's own. Its unhurried pace paints fishermen rowing home under the setting sun. In the early 1980s Pu Qizhang arranged it for electronic keyboard, and that version long served as background music for the weather forecast on China Central Television.