The matouqin, or morinkhuur, horse-head fiddle, is probably the most important musical instrument of the Mongolian ethnic group, and Chiborag is probably the most important contemporary player.

Sixty-year-old Chiborag, who has been playing the matouqin for over half a century, is not only an instrumentalist, but also a composer, a reformer and a promoter of matouqin.

There are now over 1,000 students of Chiborag in the world. Among them are Mongolians, Han, Americans, French and Japanese.

"As long as I have the matouqin with me, I can communicate with people from all over the world," Chiborag said when giving a lecture at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Born for matouqin

Born in 1944 on the Horqin prairie in Inner Mongolia, Chiborag was the 17th of 18 children in his family.

In his childhood, people on the Horqin prairie always invited folk musicians to perform in their villages during festivals. Besides matouqin, sihu (a four-stringed bowed instrument) and sanxian (a three-stringed plucked instrument), the folk musicians also performed narrative songs which told historical stories.

Deeply influenced by the folk musicians, Chiborag started to learn music at the age of 7. Every time he saw a folk music performance, he tried to learn the music by listening and performing for his mother. When he was 8, he could already play many songs with the folk musicians, beginning his musical career.

In 1958, Chiborag was enrolled in the Inner Mongolia Experimental Troupe and became a professional musician. In Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, he had the opportunity to study with famous matouqin master Sangdureng. It was also in Hohhot that he began to study music theories.

However, Chiborag's studying and performing activities were often interrupted by political movements, especially during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

Chiborag was assigned to physical labor with violinist Xiao Annan from Inner Mongolia. They were also assigned to the same dormitory.

Chiborag used this opportunity to study violin with Xiao, which helped him to innovate the technique of matouqin. For example, saltando (playing with a bouncing bow) is a technique that Chiborag borrowed from the violin and used on the matouqin.

Chiborag also reformed the physical material of the matouqin.

In the summer of 1973, he went with his troupe to perform for herdsmen at a Nadam folk festival. As he played a solo piece, it began to rain. The rain did not lower the herdsmen's enthusiasm, as they still watched his performance in the rain, but the moisture dampened the cow skin of the matouqin, which served as a resonator. As the rain became louder and louder, the sound of the matouqin became lower and lower, until there was almost no sound at all.

Chiborag wanted to continue performing for the herdsmen. He decided to replace the cow skin with boa skin, because boa skin has no hair and therefore is not as easily influenced by humidity.

With the help of Zhang Chunhua, a matouqin maker in Hohhot, Chiborag had the first boa-skin matouqin, which had much greater volume.

"It was the herdsmen's love for the matouqin that spurred me to reform the instrument," he said.

However, the boa skin was still not satisfactory, and the matouqin often went out of tune. After many experiments, Chiborag adapted the wood of Chinese parasol, which became the standard material of today's matouqin.

Continuous innovations

As a matouqin player, Chiborag has a wide repertory. The folk music he learned in his childhood and later with various folk musicians is of course the foundation. It is from this source that he goes on to create his own music.

"Ode to the Old Altay Mountain" (Gulao de Aertaishan Zan) is a work Chiborag composed on the basis of a visit to an old folk musician in the Kanas Lake area in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

To go to the folk musician's home he had to ride a horse for 16 hours, yet they missed each other as the musician went out to see him. When they finally met, they played music for one another and had a good time.

As a result, Chiborag composed "Ode to the Old Altay Mountain," a rhythmic work with dance beats that characterize the music of the Mongolian people living in Xinjiang.

"In composing you always have to remember where you are from," he said. "You have to learn from the traditional music, digest it, and then you can write your own works."

Among Chiborag's compositions, horses are a frequent subject. Of course the Mongolians are a people on horseback, but Chiborag also has a personal reason for it.

In 1965, Chiborag and his troupe went to perform at a Nadam festival. There was a horserace of 35 kilometers. He saw the race on a jeep that followed the horses.

Towards the end two horses swayed as if they were going to fall, but they held on until they finished the distance. They then fell to the ground and died. Chiborag cried, as did the owners of the horses and many other herdsmen.

"Human beings often betray others for their own sake, yet the horses would sacrifice themselves for their masters," he said. "Without horses, there would be no Mongolian people."

It was at that time he decided to compose a work to pay tribute to horses.

Coming back from Nadam, he improvised "Thousands of Horses Galloping" (Wanma Benteng) at a performance, and transcribed it afterwards. He revised it for over 10 years, until it won an award at an arts festival celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the People's Republic of China in 1979. It has since become one of his best-known works.

Chiborag also tried new techniques in his composition. A recent work titled "Nine Suns" (Jiu Ge Taiyang) displayed new possibilities for the instrument. Descending chromatic notes, modern dissonances and unconventional timbre jointly created an atmosphere totally different from traditional Mongolian music.

This work was inspired by a trip from Xilin Gol to Hohhot. The vast land which used to be prairie had turned into desert. Mongolian gazelle, who used to run there in large groups, have almost disappeared.

Man's destruction has stimulated the composer to adapt new elements in his music.

"I never tried composing to earn fame or money," he said. "These musical works are my diary."

Besides traditional Mongolian music and his own compositions, Chiborag co-operates with other musicians in various forms, such as jazz, new age and symphonic music.

In November 2000, he and five other Asian traditional instrumental soloists premiered Japanese composer Minoru Miki's "Memory of the Earth" with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.

To explore the possibility of matouqin, Chiborag formed a group called the Wild Horse Ensemble in 1986 and began to compose ensemble works for the matouqin.

Because of the various local styles of matouqin, the instrument had always been played solo, and it was very difficult to combine different players in an ensemble.

However, under the direction of Chiborag, the "wild horses" were tamed into a highly harmonious team.

They worked out a practical way to blend the high-, middle- and low-pitched sections of the group, which accumulated experience for other traditional ensembles in China.

As president of the Matouqin Society of China, Chiborag has always been devoted to the popularization and promotion of the instrument.

His book "Method of Playing the Matouqin" was published in both Mongolian and Chinese, summing up his treasured experience of the instrument.

At the Hohhot International Matouqin Art Festival in 2001, Chiborag led 1,000 matouqin players from home and abroad to play his representative work "Thousands of Horses Galloping," creating a new Guinness record.

Chiborag's next plan is having 2,008 players perform together in 2008 to celebrate the Beijing Olympics.

"The matouqin is an instrument left by Genghis Khan, and it is an instrument blessed by our ancestors," he said. "When I play the matouqin, I see my mother, my child and my people."

(China Daily November 29, 2004)