Horse Racing

Introduction

Huang Haihuai's 1959 erhu solo, in which the soloist plucks broken chords beneath the tune.

Horse Racing is an erhu solo written in 1959 by the erhu player Huang Haihuai, picturing horses thundering across the grassland in a race. Huang's earliest version quoted in full the dance-like traditional Inner Mongolian folk song Hongqi. After the second theme the soloist switches to plucking broken chords while the accompaniment takes the melody, a device borrowed from violin pizzicato. When Huang played it at the erhu competition of the fourth Shanghai Spring festival in 1963, it caused a sensation among musicians and listeners alike. At Min Huifen's request Shen Liqun later revised it, cutting the slow free-tempo passage and writing a new tune, so that the piece shrank to about two minutes; this is the version played today.