张铁

Gufeng (古风, literally “ancient style”) is a modern Chinese pop-adjacent style that evokes the sound-world, imagery, and poetics of premodern China. It blends traditional instruments, pentatonic melodies, and classical literary diction with contemporary songwriting, recording, and distribution practices. Emerging largely from online communities and ACG (anime–comics–games/donghua) fandoms, Gufeng favors lyrical themes such as mountains-and-rivers landscapes, courtly romance, martial-arts chivalry, and historical fantasy. The production commonly combines guzheng, pipa, dizi, xiao, and erhu with soft pop arrangements, cinematic pads, and subtle electronic beats, resulting in a nostalgic yet fresh sound that is distinct from mainstream Mandopop.

Pipa denotes both the Chinese pear‑shaped, four‑string, plucked lute and the repertory and performance practice centered on it. Held vertically and played with artificial fingernails, the pipa produces brilliant attacks, cascading tremolos, and extremely agile figurations. Its idiom features vivid programmatic narratives (civil/lyrical “wen” pieces and martial/virtuosic “wu” pieces), modal pentatonic pitch organization, and a rich vocabulary of right‑hand strokes (pi, pa, tiao, mo, gou, lun) and left‑hand ornaments (slides, bends, vibrato, harmonics). Repertoires developed in courts and urban ensembles, and later in regional schools, before being expanded in the 20th century by conservatory composers and global soloists.