Yi Guren: remembering an old friend

Li Xiangting

One of the most authoritative living players of the guqin, the seven-stringed zither of the Chinese literati, played for three thousand years less as performance than as self-cultivation and as a way of tuning oneself to nature. He taught for decades at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and China named him a representative inheritor of the guqin as intangible cultural heritage.