“You have to get it inside your heart” | Barbora Xu

“When I first touched a guzheng [Chinese zither] I fell in love with it. That’s how the guzheng has been for me.” Barbora Xu is certainly a dedicated musician. Born in Liberec in the north of the Czech Republic, she was always interested in music, singing in a children’s choir and even playing a child’s role in a production of The Magic Flute. But going on to further education her parents wouldn’t allow her to take music, she had to have a ‘proper profession.’ So she chose to study Chinese in Prague. 

“I chose it because I thought Chinese is a bad-ass thing, that if I had Chinese in my pocket I could then do music. I wanted to be some kind of medium between China and the West.” She won a scholarship to study Chinese in Taiwan, but when she returned she became really sick. Fearing she might die without pursuing music, her first love, she decided that if she got better she would pursue it somehow. 

She went to do East Asian studies in Turku, Finland, one of the few programmes that doesn’t require students to also major in business. She took part in a Chinese language and culture competition and the prize was a two-week trip to China. She took with her a Finnish kantele (zither) on which she performed. “They said, ‘if there’s anything you’re interested in, just ask.’ So I said ‘Can you find me a teacher for the guzheng? I will miss anything to do this’.” She then went on to spend a year in Taiwan and continued her guzheng studies. “A Chinese doctor lent me a guzheng and then gave it to me. That’s the instrument I play today.”

Barbora Xu – her performing name is a combination of her Czech and Chinese names – was part of a Making Tracks tour in the UK in 2019. She has now released her debut album, Olin Ennen. On it she sings Chinese poems and runo verse in Finnish, accompanying them with her own music on guzheng, guqin (a zither closer to the Finnish kantele), as well as various types of kantele. “Guzheng is easier for me and it’s my instrument. Kantele has been more difficult. The kantele aesthetics are so cool, it’s not something you can read from music, you have to get it inside your heart, head and fingers and then you improvise with the library of different motifs that you have drilled, which can float up when you are in the mind state. Arja Kastinen is a goddess for me in this field. And it’s the same mind state that I have been aiming for with the recording and performances.”

Olin Ennen is fundamentally a solo album but there are guest musicians on wing kantele and cello; Xu sings and plays everything else and selects the lyrics. “I am using very old poetry that depicts nature and uses symbolism of birds and water. I was surprised that there are so many similarities and both cultures talk about nature a lot.”

She lives on Otava, an island in the Finnish archipelago in the south-west of the country around Turku. “I moved here because as a musician I wanted to live in a small house and get inspired by nature and do music. In the archipelago it is clean and wild, and it’s very powerful. We have been here for five years and I know where different families of animals are living and where to find different bird nests.” The final track on the album, ‘Outro’, features the birds in her garden at 4am, with some improvisations on kantele and guzheng. A real dialogue with nature. 

Read the review of Olin Ennen in the Songlines Reviews Database

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today