By LILLIAN GLAROS
Courtesy of Strathmore/ Margo Schulman
Qi Yu grew up in Inner Mongolia in China, but her music is a mixture of her homeland and the beats and rhythms of her American home.
Yu, a resident of College Park’s Hollywood neighborhood, plays the guzheng, or Chinese zither, a wooden instrument that rests on a flat surface and usually has 21 strings.
The instrument uses the pentatonic scale, which means it has five notes, Yu said, and she usually plays it using eight picks, four on each hand.
Yu is one of six members of the Strathmore Institute for Artistic Development’s Artist in Residence program in North Bethesda.
“She just brought so much to her audition,” Betty Scott, the program’s director, said. “She’s very, very engaging as a performer.”
Yu’s musical journey started in China, with her father, who enrolled her in a music school. Western instruments, like the piano, proved to be too costly for the family, so Yu looked to more traditional Chinese instruments.
“I looked at a bunch of other instruments, and some of them just put me to sleep,” Yu said. “I was 6 years old, and … nothing was actually catching my interest.”
Then, Yu said, she saw her future teacher playing the zither. Yu said she was “making magic happen” with the instrument.
That moment began a decades-long devotion for the 31-year-old.
To hear Yu tell it, music is a friend, a habit and a part of her.
“It’s just my way of saying my story and sharing my story with everyone,” Yu said.
Introduced to contemporary and Western music while in middle school, Yu encountered other styles like bluegrass and jazz when she moved to the United States around 10 years ago.
Today Western music influences her music style, which is evident in a song she composed for her March 26 concert that she said puts a funk spin on Chinese music.
She graduated with master’s degrees in world music and recording arts from Northern Illinois University in 2020, and then became a live-streaming producer for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
After a season of working in Baltimore, she moved to College Park when she got a job with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., as a coordinating producer for streaming and broadcasting.
However, Yu said she found herself wanting to play music, so she applied to Strathmore’s 10-month program, which pays her $6,000 and offers professional photography and videography sessions and opportunities to perform before live audiences.
“I was just so excited to be able to play with people,” Yu said. “That’s all. … I just wanted to play.”
According to Scott, the participants get mentors and attend 30 hours of professional development seminars on topics such as how to budget time and money.
Scott said the goal of the program is to help professional music artists transition from gig work to a career in music.
After the seminars, each artist gets a month to put on concerts and workshops, Yu said. Her month was March.
At her first performance, “From Ancient to Contemporary: The Guzheng’s Development Over Time,” on March 12, the pieces focused on how the Chinese zither’s music has evolved over time.
During the performance, her songs rose and fell in intensity, at times trilling up and down, or with more separate staccato-like sounds, or notes softly plucked. She moved her upper body as she played, her eyes closed in concentration as her zither lay horizontally.
She was accompanied at times by her husband, Michael McSweeney, on the drums, and fellow artist-in-residence Jack Gruber on the piano.
Tariq Mansour, who attended the concert, said he enjoyed Yu’s music, especially the pieces from Western China, which he compared to Middle Eastern music.
The Columbia resident said he also plays the guzheng, and enjoyed the progression of Yu’s music from high to low notes.
