So how exactly do you pronounce "dizi"?

Welcome back!

On this blog adventure, I will discuss my newest flutey hobby: the dizi.

Short back story:  My husband went to a conference in San Francisco and brought me home a dizi.  He did this because he knows I love collecting flutes from all over the world (Mexico, Italy, Hawaii, etc.).  The end.  Oh, and in a matter of seconds of holding the Chinese flute, I broke the membrane that gives the flute its unique sound quality.  I have since ordered some items on Amazon to remedy the situation.  The items will arrive in September...ugh.

I am currently working on figuring out how the instrument plays via the fingering chart that is not in English that the people who sold the dizi to my husband were kind enough to include.

I have dabbled a little bit in recorder, traverse flute (of the baroque variety, of course), and ocarina.  But the dizi is throwing me for a bit of a loop.  The notation, all of it, is completely foreign to me.  There are numbers and dots and at first I had no idea what to do with them.  Can I also throw in that these flutes come in various pitches and I did not know what my dizi was pitched at?!  My initial guess were either C or G.  Seems reasonable considering western flutes...except that this flute is not western.  I discovered that my dizi is pitched in D.  Which maybe I should have guessed from the "D" carved into the side of my dizi??

I read that the letter carved into the flute is the pitch heard when you play with all three of the left holes covered.  This is also, according to my fingering chart, "1".  So that solves that.  Next mystery!

My modified fingering chart.

The piece below is called "Liu Yang He" and other than the dynamics, bar lines, breath marks(?), and what I am thinking are slurs, I could not read this.

Liu Yang He

So, I went to the Wikipedia and did some reading. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_musical_notation)  I also went to this youtube channel and found this woman very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/user/hulusi2008#g/c/39849143E3F86F2B .  And now here are my findings as I begin my amateur career as a dizi-ist(?).

Translation of "Liu Yang He" into Western Notation.

Although I made a "translation" from the Numeric Notation into the standard Western Notation, and it was a great experience because it definitely made me figure some things out, I think going forward I would like to treat the Numeric Notation as a foreign language.  Meaning, I am only going to get better at it if I actually practice reading it and playing from it.

But again, I did learn a bit from seeing it.  And of course I look at the rhythm from as much of a mathematical perspective as possible.  A single line under the pitch number indicates a eighth note, two lines a sixteenth.  Straight forward enough.  Dots are used the exact same way, it seems, as in the musical notation I was brought up with.  Cool.  So now, the dashes ( - ) after the pitch number.  As of right now, I treat them like quarter note lengths.  So, a 5-, for example, is a half note (the pitch number counts as a quarter and any dash following it as a quarter note length to it).  Therefore, 5-- is a dotted half note, 5----- a dotted whole note, and so on.  Again, if I treat the dots the same as I always have, a 5. is a quarter note with an eighth, so a dotted quarter.  Seems straightforward enough...so far.

I think the rhythm will come easy enough.  I honestly think the numeric pitches are going to be what throws me the most in the beginning.  But as I said before, it's just a foreign language I have to get used to.  I need to get over fixed "do" for sure though, because my "1" or "do" is a D, not a C.  The register system, a dot below to signify the lower octave, no dot signifying the middle register, and a dot or even two above to signify the upper registers, is simple enough to follow.  I think the best way to start going about this is just playing scales so I master the fingerings and learn to control the different registers better than I am at present.

Who knows, maybe I will put up some recordings in the near future! Wouldn't that be interesting?  I hope you found my initial exploration of the world of dizi, pronounced "DEE-tzuh" (in case you were wondering), as fun and intriguing as I did.  :)