WOMAD

The Guo Brothers

From China (Peoples Republic)

Guo Yi (b.1954) and Guo Yue (b.1958) were born in Peking, the youngest children in a large musical family. Their father, a highly-respected Erhu (Chinese two-stringed violin) soloist, died when Guo Yue was four years old, leaving their mother to bring up six children in the poor and overcrowded conditions of a musicians’ courtyard in one of the old Peking alleys. With the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the boys’ temple school was closed, and their mother (who taught English in Peking) and four sisters were sent to the countryside to be ‘re-educated’.The brothers continued to live in the courtyard, cooking for themselves and taking lessons from one of their father's colleagues who was too old to be sent to the countryside. Guo Yue began to learn the Bamboo Flutes, the most popular (and cheapest) instrument in China. Guo Yi began to play the Sheng, an ancient bamboo wind instrument whose pipe form was inspired by the phoenix 3,000 years ago. In exchange for their lessons they gave their teacher small measures of cooking oil. Without their family, amid the uncertainty and terror of the Revolution, they put all their feelings and expression into playing these instruments.When Guo Yi was fifteen he joined the Peking Film Orchestra, travelling with other musicians, singers and dancers throughout China, and working on more than two hundred film scores in Peking. Guo Yue was seventeen when he gained a place in the Chinese Army Orchestra, again travelling to many parts of China, including the remote mountain regions, performing traditional music for the troops.In 1982 Guo Yue left China to study music in London, and the following year Guo Yi joined him. Together they formed the Guo Brothers, and were among the first musicians to perform in WOMAD festivals. Their first CD, ‘Yuan’, was released by Real World in 1990. They have played their beautiful traditional music (which describes, like ink-brush paintings, the nature and people of China) in concerts and festivals worldwide, and have worked on a number of film scores (including ‘The Last Emperor’) with leading directors and composers. They have just released a new CD called ‘Our Homeland’ (Bamboo Mountain).Guo Yue has also pursued a successful career as an international soloist and composer: working with film director Phil Agland and composer George Fenton on the soundtrack of the award-winning Channel 4 documentary ‘Beyond the Clouds’ and, more recently, on the sequel, ‘Shanghai Vice’; and writing and performing with the Japanese percussionist Joji Hirota and Irish singer Pol Brennan. In 1999 Guo Yue performed the UK premiere of his Bamboo Flute concerto ‘My Peking Alley’, which tells the story of the brothers’ childhood, at the WOMAD Festival in Reading, UK. From The Guo Brothers 1999