Anna Guo

Anna Guo (Chinese name: 郭敏清; pinyin: Guō Mǐnqīng), a former professor at the renowned Shanghai Conservatory of Music, has been teaching and playing the yang-qin for more than 30 years. Little is known of Guo's Chinese career. She has been active as a traditional musician since the 1960s. She performed in China under her birth name Guō Mǐnqīng. From 1985 to 1996, Guo was head of the Shanghai Women's Silk String Quintet, a successful Chinese music ensemble that gained a solid reputation worldwide.

Anna Guo (Chinese name: 郭敏清; pinyin: Guō Mǐnqīng), a former professor at the renowned Shanghai Conservatory of Music, has been teaching and playing the yang-qin for more than 30 years. Little is known of Guo's Chinese career. She has been active as a traditional musician since the 1960s. She performed in China under her birth name Guō Mǐnqīng. From 1985 to 1996, Guo was head of the Shanghai Women's Silk String Quintet, a successful Chinese music ensemble that gained a solid reputation worldwide. The quintet recorded two albums that are very hard to find outside of China and toured extensively in Asia and Europe. The release of her two solo albums - Collection of Yang-qin Solos (1992) and Masterpieces performed by Yang-qin Masters (1995) - established Guo as the leading yang-qin musician in China. In 1996, Guo immigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, Ontario, where she adopted the more Western-friendly name of Anna Guo. She resumed teaching and soon formed the Dunhuang Chamber Ensemble, which performs traditional Chinese music across North America. Her two books on the art of playing the yang-qin - New Yang-qin Music Compositions (1996) and Basic Course on the Yang-qin (1998) - are essential texts for students of the instrument. Her CDs and books are available in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they are immensely popular. In 2001 she joined a select roster of Asian-Canadian musicians appearing on the Montreal label Oliver Sudden and released the solo album Chinese Traditional Yang-Qin Music, her most widely available recording to this day. Her extraordinary performances and profound interpretation and knowledge of Chinese music have won Guo both critical and public acclaim as one of the world's best yang-qin players. She leads an active career as a performer and teacher of Chinese traditional music. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..