As I ponder this disturbing image of the Haunted Pencil, as a solo effort he shouldn’t find it too challenging, but it calls to mind (OK, my mind) the learning process in Chinese folk ensembles.

Left, Li Qishan’s band, Shaanbei.
Right, I accompany the Hua family band, funeral.
Both images 2001.

Youngsters in a family shawm band begin with the gong, which merely marks the first beat of every bar as the tempo accelerates. This seems simple enough, but as the illustrious Yoyo Ma discovered at the 2002 Silk Road Festival in Washington DC, the novice still needs to acclimatise to the bewildering rhythmic patterns of drum and shawm, which subvert the regular duple metre:

Only somewhat harder to learn is the yunluo, a frame of ten pitched gongs that makes an exquisite part of the shengguan ensemble in ritual groups of north China. While it does involve learning the outline of the melody, it’s still considered the easiest instrument to learn—as a proverb in Hebei goes, “A thousand days for the guanzi, a hundred days for the sheng; you can learn the yunluo by the fifth watch”.

Gaoqiao village ritual association, Bazhou, Hebei 1993;
one player on two frames of yunluo.

Further afield, fatuous Tory toffs like the former Minister for the 18th Century are just as unlikely to apply to join a gamelan ensemble. Cf. Batman’s mum calling him to supper.