John Thompson has the largest recorded repertoire for the guqin silk-string zither, and is certainly one of the most listened to players today: he has reconstructed over 200 melodies from 15th and 16th century guqin tablature and, since May 2007, when he placed on his website over 70 of his 150 recordings of this music, his site has received on average over 8,000 hits a day. However, most people listen to this music through China's music download websites, unaware that it is not a Chinese master playing their most ancient surviving music; many are also unaware that his website complements each melody with extensive musicological, historical and philosophical commentary.

Nevertheless, John Thompson is the best-known musician giving historically informed performances of early guqin music. After a college degree in Western musicology (early music) and graduate studies in ethnomusicology, he began in 1974 to study the modern guqin tradition from Sun Yü-Ch'in in Taiwan. He has focused on early repertoire since 1976, gradually gaining a reputation for the fidelity, fluency and feeling of his performances. In 1992 the National Union of Chinese Musicians invited him to Beijing as the focus of a seminar on reconstructing music from the earliest surviving guqin handbook, Shen Qi Mi Pu (1425 CE). While based in Hong Kong as artistic consultant to the Festival of Asian Arts he performed throughout East Asia, and published seven CDs of his musical reconstructions as well as four books of music transcription. In 2001 he moved to New York, since then continuing to perform, teach, research and lecture on the guqin. His website, www.silkqin.com, is the most comprehensive English-language source of information on this instrument.

Education:

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Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a separate page)

1. Shorter biographies
The biography above has about 300 words. Here are two shorter versions: