Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * Where: Farquhar Auditorium, University of Victoria Tickets: $12.50 to $42.50; for more information, visit victoriasymphony.ca or call 250-385-6515 Silk Road Music’s Qiu Xia He learned to play the traditional Chinese pipa as a girl in the ancient city of Xian — famous for its mausoleum of terra cotta soldiers. She studied and taught music at the Xian Academy, where programs incorporated all styles of classical music.

“We learned our Chinese instruments in tandem with studying Western classical music like Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy,” said He (her full name is pronounced Choo-Shah-Her), who brings her Vancouver-based ensemble to town this week to perform with the Victoria Symphony. “I’ve worked as a professional musician since I was 13 and always liked to collaborate.” He travelled throughout China playing traditional music on her pipa — a plucked string instrument that resembles the lute.

Silk Road Music is named after the extensive trade routes that linked China’s mass to Europe, Asia and Africa not only for silk export but also as a conduit for culture and technology for thousands of years. “There is a long history of music played on Chinese instruments, a lot of repertoire,” He said. When she came to Canada in 1989, the 44-year-old encountered a society where Chinese music was limited to cultural celebrations. She began to perform and work with musicians from other cultures.

“We play Chinese music in the broad sense,” she said. “But we fuse styles of Celtic, Brazilian and Spanish music because of our musicians’ backgrounds.” She founded the group as a duo with her husband, Montreal-born guitarist AndrГ© Thibault. The ensemble now includes Stephen Cihelka on the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument, and Jun Rong on the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle that is more than 1,000 years old.