A scholar – and owner of a zither – pauses in his climb up a mountain; as a rich man he can afford a servant or pupil to carry his heavy instrument to the top. After a while he sits down cross-legged under a pine tree, places his instrument on his lap and begins to play for the gods – or for himself. The wind touches his strings furtively, and he might sing a poem or two, plucking the strings randomly to produce soft sounds: some evasive and questioning slide tones, and a sonorous buzz on the lowest string, reminiscent of the sound of a distant bell; or perhaps some clear and pure harmonics in the highest register, brought forth by touching the strings very lightly. All this is interspersed with contemplative pauses; the music merges delicately with the surrounding silence. The mist on the mountain serves as a reminder of the world’s deep emptiness: vast crags and abysses mock the futility of human strife and ambition.
IS this a real performance? It might be, but more likely it’s just a scene from our imagination, or from an old painting or ink-drawing portraying an age-old ideal of qin performance. Back in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), playing the qin, China’s seven-stringed classical zither, was one of the four ‘gentlemanly skills’, along with chess, calligraphy and painting; one of the pastimes of Chinese intellectuals. Sage-like figures playing the instrument are a popular topic in classical lore; Confucius himself (551–479 BCE) was reputed to be a fine player. Steeped in both Confucian and Daoist philosophy, the qin is strongly associated with the natural world, and with its assumed ability to ‘sound the cosmos’. A performer playing on top of a mountain or in a bamboo grove remains a potent fantasy of what qin players try to achieve: they foster a dream of spiritual communion with nature, even to the extent of themselves vanishing at the end of their music. For thousands of years qin players have aspired to attain wisdom and redemption with their art, and through it to live in blissful harmony with their environment. These ideals are still cherished by some in China today.
The Chinese visual arts abound in pictures of outdoor zither performers – mostly men, but sometimes also women – playing their instrument in garden pavilions, or amid impressive scenery. A vast body of poems, myths and tales portray the qin as mystically connected with nature, though genuine outdoor playing must always have been rare: the soft sound is easily lost in the wind, and the instrument can be damaged through exposure to moist air and outdoor conditions. In overcrowded twenty-first-century China, qin enthusiasts are usually confined to playing in small apartments in skyscrapers, amid the constant din of traffic, or in teahouses. This does not prevent their appreciating the instrument’s associated imagery and philosophical connotations. For many, the seven-stringed zither is a way of life.
‘Listening to the qin’. Part of a scroll kept at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing, this painting is thought to be by Zhao Ji, court painter to the Song dynasty Emperor Huizong (1082–1135). It shows the emperor playing the qin under a fir tree, while two men listen in pensive mood. Their simple attire and the peacefulness of the setting suggest an intimacy far removed from the business of state.
With a history of nearly three millennia, the qin, or guqin (‘gu’ means ‘old’, ‘qin’ simply means ‘instrument’) is at once one of the most humble and haughty of instruments. One thirteenth-century source praises it as an emblem of spirituality and moral virtue, and warns players not to perform in ‘the presence of a vulgar man, a courtesan, an actor’ or in ‘a drunken and noisy atmosphere’. More than ten centuries earlier, another text claimed that ‘of all those things the Superior Man always has around him, he loves the qin best, and he does not suffer it to be separated from him’. Scholars have produced a vast store of notations: some three thousand tablatures, amounting to an estimated 650 individual pieces plus many variants, contained in some 150 handbooks; most date from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, but one piece survives from the seventh century. Notations exist for a number of China’s musical traditions, from medieval Tang court music to eighteenth-century pipa music, and from ‘silk and bamboo’ music to operatic tunes, but there is nothing to match in size or scope the vast body of qin scores, which provide unique insights into the music of the past.
Today it is no longer only ‘superior men’ who play the instrument. A renewed interest in China’s native cultural roots has led to a widespread boom in qin playing, which is now taught in conservatories and art institutes, and privately in teahouses and homes, and it can often be heard on television. From the 1980s onwards, composers such as Tan Dun started to write new pieces for the qin, and some players have taken pride in improvising on it, and in collaborating with jazz and rock musicians. A recording of the piece Gaoshan liushui (‘High Mountains and Flowing Streams’) as played by Guan Pinghu, one of the guqin masters of the twentieth century, was sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as one of the samples of the Earth’s music.
Some purists regret the qin’s modern transformation into an ‘ordinary’ instrument, arguing that ties with the classical tradition have been lost. Qin players of the past often took pupils into their own homes, offering them lodging and a full education into the bargain: the qin did indeed become a way of life. For modern conservatory students the main challenge of the instrument may lie in its technical difficulties, not in the associated metaphysical or moral aspirations, but many view this as a liberation. And although the qin cannot match the popularity of the piano or the Chinese 21-stringed zheng zither among the urban middle classes, more young people than ever before are now learning to pluck a few tones. They may know little of its history, but they understand its importance as an emblem of traditional high culture.
A qin performance speaks both to the ear and the eye. The melancholy sliding tones and the trance-like state of the performers may at times be almost reminiscent of American guitar blues, but the grace of the hand and finger movements, the characteristic timbres, the architecture of the pieces and the poetry, imagery and philosophy which frame the tradition represent an art which is ‘classical’ in every sense of the word.
The term gudian yinyue (‘classical music’) was coined in China in the 1950s to denote Western classical music. It was a translation of the Western term, a contraction of gudai jingdian yinyue, which can be rendered as ‘old’ (gudai) ‘classic’/‘essential’ (jingdian) ‘music’ (yinyue). In recent years it has begun to gain alternative currency as an umbrella term for prestigious native genres, from qin to Buddhist music and beyond. This signals not only increasing sympathy in China for qin and other traditions, but a growing cultural pride, as well as changing attitudes towards foreign music. Before exploring the ‘historical’ qin we must consider the tremendous impact which Western music and culture had on twentieth-century China, and how deeply it changed ideas about native music.
Virtually unknown in China around 1900, Western piano, choral and symphonic music rose to great popularity after the 1940s – despite Maoist criticisms of its ‘decadence’ – and became unstoppable by the 1980s. Today, many urban Chinese would rate Western music – be it classical or pop – higher than any of their own traditions. Western aesthetics, teaching methods, musical structures and concepts quickly found acceptance in the urban China of the 1950s, as music history and musicology were established on the Western model, which was deemed superior. The ideal of educational reformers like Xiao Youmei (who co-founded the Shanghai Conservatory) was not so much to develop Chinese traditional music alongside Western music, as to ‘upgrade’ it by making it conform to Western conventions.
Founded mostly in the 1950s, the conservatories – and the music departments established later in hundreds of universities – dealt primarily with Western music. Most had departments focusing on Chinese traditional music, but the teaching of native instruments came to rely increasingly on Western methods. The qin, being less adaptable to this than many other Chinese instruments, found a foothold in such institutions only with difficulty, if at all. The China Conservatory in Beijing, founded in 1964, was the one exception in that it specialised primarily in native instruments. Even here, however, students of pipa, zheng or erhu soon spent much of their time racing through scales and etudes in major and minor keys, exploring staccato, ritardando, functional harmony and other foreign inventions. Playing techniques, repertoire and even the designs of native instruments were modified to match assumed Western ideals: the composer He Luting criticised them for their ‘unstable pitch’ and for not having a bass register, and he and many others supported innovations such as equal-tempered tuning, enlarged resonance chambers and steel strings to enhance loudness. What began as spontaneous reforms took on the aspect of official directives, even government regulations. In 1958, most mainland Chinese qin players switched from silk to steel strings, and some began to incorporate Western classical ideas of phrasing, rhythm and structuring. But the changes in qin music were still subtle compared to the way in which the erhu two-stringed fiddle was turned into a Chinese bravura equivalent of the Western violin.
The government of the People’s Republic encouraged modernisation of Chinese traditions, and propagated the development of ‘patriotic’ elite music. A new class of professionally-trained urban musicians was expected to raise Chinese traditions to new standards of excellence; this reflected a dream of replaying the glories of the Confucian court music of imperial times. Large ballet and opera troupes and ‘Chinese orchestras’ (minzu yuetuan, modelled after Western symphony orchestras with mostly native instruments) would help foster a new and stronger China, and invigorate native culture. But many rural genres and regional forms did not fit the bill: they were too rough, too religious, and too embedded in village rituals and other ‘backward’ practices which – so the government felt – China should abandon. Folk music was therefore largely ignored, at least in urban music education and in the government’s cultural support policies. And the qin seemed a particularly bad fit with the new policies: its players thought of themselves as sophisticated amateurs rather than modern music professionals, and the idea of becoming concert virtuosos (let alone political propagandists) appealed to few, as did the dream of a new ‘national’ music for the masses. Moreover, many had been landowners before 1949, and preferred to keep a low profile in communist China. Consequently, the voice of the ancient zither was not much heard until the 1980s and ’90s, when China embarked on its boom, opened up once more (and more liberally) to influences from outside, and began to take a fresh look at its own traditions. The qin was still slow to gain wide attention, but the number of commercial recordings increased tenfold. It certainly became more visible, but the question remained: could it be called ‘classical’? A minority of urban intellectual Chinese would say yes, but there was – and still is – no broad consensus.
Gudian yinyue – initially adopted for Western classical music – is now applied differently by different users to a wide variety of native genres, including qin but also rural shawm bands, teahouse ensembles and Tibetan opera (though for some the term still merely points towards Haydn or Beethoven). A shorter term, jingdian yinyue, (‘the very best music’) came into use in the 1990s, mainly in commercial contexts like CD advertisements and names of CD shops, and it signalled a similar broadening of view, with shops selling Western classical as well as Chinese pop and traditional music including qin. This more liberal application of the term jingdian yinyue sits well with history. Antiquity had its own criteria for ‘high’ and ‘low’, but the Confucian elite of ancient imperial times liked all kinds of music, from bangzi (rural opera) to large ceremonial court orchestras, from the rough-and-ready sound of shawm bands, which they employed for their life-cycle rituals, to the ethereal qin, with its role as a vessel through which divine revelation flowed.
The form of this instrument has barely changed through two millennia, with the oldest surviving examples equivalent in size and shape to the modern qin dating from the Tang dynasty. But as stone reliefs and tomb figurines from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) show, the model goes back much further in time. It was during the Western Han (206 BCE–24 CE) that the instrument attained its current size, its familiar trapezoidal form and its seven strings.
This qin is arguably the most famous of all Chinese zithers surviving from antiquity. Believed to be from the Tang (618–907 CE), it is kept at the Forbidden City Museum in Beijing. Its name, Jiu xiao huanpei (‘Heavenly jade jewel’), is inscribed on the instrument’s reverse, above the two soundholes. Poetic lines on the back, probably added later, state that this qin sounds ‘bright and melodious as in former times’ and evoke (in words by the Tang poets Ting Jian and Su Dongpo) scenes from nature. The framed seal carries the characters bao han (‘all-encompassing’), which may have Daoist connotations. The patterns of cracks in the lacquer are known by special names, shifu duan (‘snake stomach’) and xi niumao (‘cow skin’).
A ‘standard’ qin has a body approximately 120 cm long, 20 cm wide at one end and 15 cm at the other, and is made of two pieces of wood joined to make a sound chamber with two holes underneath. The upper board, slightly domed, is made of softer wood, traditionally wutong (firmiana simplex), while the flat lower board is made from hard zi wood (Chinese catalpa). The dome’s top is traditionally said to symbolise heaven and the flat base earth, with the player forming the third point in this triangle. The entire instrument is coated with layer upon layer of hard red or black lacquer whose thickness and quality to a large extent determines the sound quality. The seven strings are fastened to two wooden knobs driven into the bottom board. On the top side the strings fan out between a bridge at the left end and a longer one on the right, where they are spaced out enough for the right hand to pluck them. In between, the strings are freely suspended, and are stopped by being pushed onto the lacquer surface with the left hand. Thirteen mother-of-pearl markers (hui) are inset into the body to indicate harmonic nodes showing where to stop the strings. The left bridge of the qin is poetically known as the ‘harmony pond’, the right is described as the ‘mountain’, and the strings then pass through holes through the instrument to seven ‘precious pegs’ for tuning.
Most of these elements have been in place for many centuries. The earliest known references to the hui stem from a third-century qin essay by Ji Kang; the earliest known picture of them is a fourth- or fifth-century tomb brick relief from Nanjing. This shows a group of Daoist scholars known as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove relaxing outdoors; two sit cross-legged with qin on their laps; one can clearly see the hui on the surface of their instruments.
Some surviving prototypes for the ‘modern’ qin predate the Han period by several centuries, but these are very different in appearance. Their bodies are much smaller (67–82 cm), their shape is different (a broad box with a narrow neck), their playing surface so uneven that probably only open strings were plucked, with the number of strings varying from five to ten. How exactly we got from these instruments to the later versions is unclear, but there is little doubt that these early zithers are qin, too. Their black-lacquered bodies carved from a single piece of wood, their very thick soundboards (up to 48 mm), and the string-count and the use of tuning pegs for fine-tuning all point towards the later instrument.
Following the Han standardisation, individual qin could still vary in contours and size. Modern scholarship identifies fourteen different basic models, ranging from fairly straight and rectangular qin to more curved instruments such as the oval type Jiaoye (‘banana leaf’) or the wavy-lined Luoxia (‘evening cloud’).1 The qin’s colours are subject to variation too, with instruments painted purple, red, vermilion, yellow, brown or a combination of colours, or – in the last few centuries – mainly black. After hundreds of years cracks emerge spontaneously in the lacquer and form distinctive patterns of considerable beauty. No less evocative are the engravings on the underside of many instruments: dates, names of owners, seal impressions, bequests, lines of poetry or laudatory prose, all carved in gracious Chinese characters, often in deliberately ancient pictorial forms to increase the impression of antiquity. Proud owners gave names to their instruments like ‘Celestial Jade Jewel’, ‘Spring Thunder’, ‘Singing bell’ or ‘Dragon’s Thunder’. Traditions of name-giving and calligraphic writing on the bottom of the instrument continue today.
Tablature notation of Jiu kuang (Drunken madness), a piece from the 1425 qin music anthology Shenqi mipu (Handbook of Spiritual and Marvellous Mysteries). The score is read from top to bottom and from right to left. The compound symbols indicate fingering, plucking and stopping modes and string positions.
Except for the engravings most instruments are not decorated, but one surviving qin from the Tang period, now kept at the Shoshoin, the Imperial Treasury at Nara in Japan, is lavishly ornamented, a magnificent artefact with inlaid gold and silver decorations, plant and bird patterns and line drawings of men playing music and drinking wine outdoors. There were also lavishly decorated qin in Han times, but none seem to have survived. After the Tang, instruments became plainer, but they remained collector’s items, semi-sacred objects ideal for decorating a wall. Forgeries of ‘ancient’ qin were probably of all ages, too.
At all events, antiquity matters: qin players are proud of their tradition’s long lines of transmission. This has led some music historians to speak of a ‘static’ or ‘rigid’ tradition, but that may be misleading: two performers in an imagined encounter across time might not really have much in common except for a handful of tunes. What do we truly know about the past of the qin? There are many gaps in our knowledge, the interpretation of data can be problematic, and we constantly run the risk of interpreting China’s musical past too exclusively through the eyes of the country’s ruling elite, whose legacy monopolises our sources. Any attempt to sketch the instrument’s history must be tentative.
In antiquity the qin was played both as a solo instrument and in ceremonial court ensembles in groups of six or twelve qin together with other instruments. Initially, perhaps only the open strings were plucked. Qin was used to accompany dance, presumably in music that was measured and in folk style; some evidence suggests that the qin may have served as a percussion instrument. The oldest surviving literary references to it – in the Shujing (Book of History) and the Shijing (Book of Odes), dating from 1000–600 BCE – state that the qin could be ‘swept or gently touched’ or even ‘drummed’; clay figures of musicians from the Han dynasty, unearthed in Sichuan, show the performance combination of qin and hand drum.2 The qin was also used to accompany songs.
From the Han period onward, the instrument became increasingly the preserve of connoisseurs, but there is no evidence that commoners were ever barred from playing it. Tomb reliefs from the fourth century BCE to the second century CE show large ceremonial court orchestras with bells, stone chimes, drums, pipes, mouth organs, various types of zithers (qin and se) and dancers. Grand ‘heaven and earth’ rituals were held at fixed calendrical dates as sacrificial ceremonies for the gods. The Book of History refers to chimes and zithers being ‘struck loudly or gently’ to summon the spirits of imperial ancestors, but the qin also featured in more intimate contexts of entertainment and courtship. A tomb relief from the fifth century CE shows five ladies strolling at leisure with qin, panpipes, a mouth organ and a moon lute, amid outdoor scenery. The Book of Odes contains references to gallant courtship and family happiness: ‘loving harmony with wives and children is like the union of qin and se’. The se was a larger and more unwieldy type of zither with about twenty-five strings supported by movable bridges; after the Han it went into decline and was replaced by a lighter successor, the fourteen-stringed zheng, but until that time the se was widespread, and probably – with its wider compass and louder sound – a more popular type of zither than the qin.
The qin had risen to new prominence during the Han era, when it became bigger and standardised, and saw its ideology and aesthetics firmly established. Han sources hint at a fixed repertoire and the existence of different styles of playing. The Qincao, a well-known qin treatise attributed to mathematician, astronomer and composer Cai Yong (132–92 CE), lists the titles of forty-seven qin songs, plus in many cases the names of their presumed composers, including Confucius and various dukes and kings as well as ‘an anonymous woman of Wei state’. As in later times, music in Chinese antiquity was customarily transmitted in oral form; if qin notations existed during the Han era, they have not survived.
That era was a period of territorial expansion, political unification and economic and cultural prosperity. China’s money economy expanded, warring kingdoms were united under a single government, and the foundations were laid for the Silk Road trade network. Court and literati traditions (from written language to philosophy, from literature to music) spread, and were infused in turn with ideas from regional and tribal cultures. This was a formative era for the qin, as reflected in writing and art. Noble families in Sichuan – one of Han China’s richest and most fertile regions – owned large plots of land, presided over hundreds of servants and had the leisure time to host lavish entertainments. Clay figurines and reliefs of players and dancers found in the Han tombs of Sichuan attest to the richness of elite cultural life during this epoch. There was room for sports, hunting, chamber music with bells, drums, flutes, mouth organs and stringed instruments, and also for rowdy dance spectacles and extravaganzas, as the tomb statues of disfigured drumming and singing dwarfs show; among the figurines are smiling musicians playing the qin.
The mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was nothing new. Excavated in 1978, the fifth-century BCE tomb of Marquis Zeng of Yi in Suizhou, Hubei Province, had already harboured an intriguing contrast in the form of two of the oldest musical ensembles surviving from any culture: one was a sizeable orchestra intended for state ceremonies with large sets of bronze bells, chime stones, twenty-five se zithers and eight wind instruments; the other was an intimate group of eight instruments, presumably for the nobleman’s private entertainment. The marquis was buried in a side-room of his tomb, together with eight young female attendants and the chamber instruments, which included a prototype qin with ten strings. His private music may well have been more appealing to the Marquis than the solemn hymns played on bells during state banquets or sacrificial rites.
Intimate string and wind ensembles continued to flourish in China in later centuries, right down to the ‘silk and bamboo’ orchestras of teahouses in China today. Many types of ceremonial music too have persisted in one form or other since antiquity. Bells and chime stones eventually went out of fashion (except in fanciful ‘reconstructions’), but native ancient instruments like mouth organs, end-blown and transverse flutes, vessel flutes (ocarinas), panpipes and zheng zithers still feature in several regional cultures. Wind and percussion ensembles continue to play a role in ritual processions, funerals and other formal or festive occasions.
In all these genres there has always been a sharp divide between the world of amateurs and that of professionals. The traditional amateur ideal in Chinese music, which prevailed until the 1950s, is the very opposite of its counterpart in Western music. Westerners tend to think of amateurs as ‘lesser’ players, and of professionals as high-level performers. But in Chinese traditional music, amateurs were always high-level musicians, people rich enough to have the time to indulge in art; professionals had lower status because they made money with music, and frequently came from the poorest social strata. Status was further determined by the origin of genres and instruments.
Throughout the centuries China witnessed a substantial import of foreign drums, shawms, plucked lutes and fiddles, as well as musical ideas, especially from Central Asia. ‘Barbarian’ instruments tended to be looked down upon, at least until they were Sinified – a process which could take centuries. The pipa (of which the prototypes were originally imported from abroad after the Han era) had a hard time surviving during the Ming, which was a xenophobic period. The qin never had such a problem, unless Bo Lawergren is right that the qin was also a Central Asian import,3 but he gets little support for his views in China.
Today we tend to think of the qin so much as a solo instrument that we may overlook a long history in which it featured in ensemble contexts, starting from its ancient partnership with se (or with yueqin moon-lute) right down to the first half of the twentieth century, when players like Guan Pinghu and Pu Xuezhai sometimes played it in combination with bamboo flutes, pipas, mouth organs and other instruments. Some of the oldest citations explicitly connect the instrument with pleasure – indeed, the very character for music is an ancient ideograph which can be pronounced either yue (music) or le (joy), emphasising the link between them. Interpretations of the meaning of qin music started to change in the Han era, when many scholars began to view the instrument as a tool for intellectual introspection, and as a vehicle for sadness – a shift in perception which influenced all subsequent qin ideology.
In the early part of the second century CE, Emperor Wu founded a large music bureau, the Yuefu, which he ordered to document the nation’s music, including regional folk songs and ‘barbarian’ tunes. It had to supervise imperial music-making and provide new songs; it organised court spectacles and arranged cavalry music for the army, bringing in tribal drummers and wind players performing on horseback. Such music reflected a growing cosmopolitan spirit.
In this same period, the qin was increasingly played as a solo instrument, and it had to find a new niche. Han intellectuals were fascinated by ‘sadness’ (bei) and by grave sentiments in music, which they associated with exalted emotional states. Under the influence of Confucian and Daoist ideas, qin proponents like Cai Yong and a century later Ji Kang began to promote the instrument, with its delicate sound, as a sacrosanct realm, a kind of cosmic ‘hearing-aid’4 which epitomised the assumed mystical relationship between music and nature. The mystery of qin performance was neatly captured in poetic lines accompanying the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) score Liezi yu feng, ‘Liezi riding on the wind’:
I do not know whether the wind is riding on me
Or whether it’s me riding on the wind
But this metaphysical musical quest was very much limited to a small number of intellectuals, and the qin gradually became regarded as a ‘lonely’ or even ‘forgotten’ instrument, as the Tang poet Liu Changqing lamented on hearing a qin being played:
Your seven strings resemble the voice
Of a cold wind in the fir-trees,
Singing an old and once beloved song
Which no one loves any longer
Thus were nostalgia and the idea of neglect integrated into qin lore. This may be easier to understand if we realise that the true historical backdrop of the qin tradition was not some festive court gathering of wealthy literati, but an ancient country of rural poverty, corruption, wars, power struggles and social inequality: qin pieces were full of references to this troubled past, and often emerged in direct response to social tragedies. In this respect, the qin belongs to the same intellectual realm as many Chinese poems and paintings created in exile by dissidents banished to remote areas and barred from official posts. Such people poured their sadness into art.
Ji Kang’s claim that ‘music has neither sorrow nor joy’ has been interpreted as an early reaction against the overriding vogue for sadness; but he did not deny that qin music could evoke emotion. His main polemic was directed against crude escapism and the theatrical exhibition of feelings.5 For him and for most later qin aficionados, the qin was a symbol of sophistication and intellectual restraint: in the mind of ‘superior’ man, music would transcend trivial everyday concerns, and sadness and joy would merge in one united experience. This view finds echoes in writings on music from many other cultures.
It was thanks to thinkers like Ji Kang, and notably to their mystification of nature, that the qin came to be regarded as an ‘instrument of nature’. The nature symbolism of the qin is echoed in paintings, poetry and titles of musical pieces, as well as in qin organology: parts of the instrument have been named ‘immortal’s shoulders’, ‘dragon’s toothgums’, ‘phoenix’ eye’, ‘goose feet’ and ‘dragon’s pond’. This even applies to the patterns of cracks appearing in its lacquer coating: ‘serpent belly cracks’, ‘cow’s hair’, ‘turtle back’, ‘cracked ice’.
Sometimes qin music directly imitates natural sounds such as the flowing of water, the singing of birds, or the dropping of a woman’s tears. Hand and finger postures frequently correlate with the shapes of animals or trees, as in the Taigu yiyin of 1413, where one finds drawings and descriptions of ‘the leopard catching its prey’, ‘a crane calling in the shade’ and ‘the lonely duck looking for the flock’. Such drawings – much copied and re-used – have served as practical aids for hand positions, and also as metaphorical extensions of ideas from qin philosophy. The basic task for any traditional player is to capture and faithfully reproduce the spiritual essence or ‘mood’ (yijing) of a piece, an enterprise which invariably leads through mountains and involves encounters with animals, narrative characters and events as reflected in titles, prefaces, poems and illustrations.6 Not all players experience qin music as mystical evocations of nature, however. The twentieth-century master Zhang Ziqian never spoke to his students about high mountains, great rivers or spiritual aims: he simply instructed them to reproduce the finger techniques he demonstrated and to practice in front of a mirror – and things were probably no different in antiquity. There was always room for more than one approach to the instrument.
Playing the qin ‘in nature’ as a spiritual exercise probably did occur, though few performers can have wanted to expose their instrument to severe cold or dangerous mountain climbs. Documents from the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) list – among ideal situations for playing the qin – ‘sitting on a stone’, ‘having climbed a mountain’, ‘resting in a valley’ or ‘resting in a forest’, but also advise against playing the qin ‘when there is wind and thunder, or in rainy weather’. These rules were presumably made by Daoist monks living in temples and secluded spots who felt an overriding need to live by strict regulations. Some modern qin players like Zheng Chengwei and Lin Youren have confessed an interest in occasionally playing the qin outdoors, on solitary mountain walks. Zheng Chengwei, on one CD cover, honours ancient tradition by sitting in front of a bamboo bush, but also by holding his instrument on his lap in the classical pose, rather than playing it on a table, as became the habit after the Tang and Song.
Qin hand postures, as reflected in the Ming dynasty handbook Qinshu daquan (1590). Every posture is compared to an image from nature – a crane, crab, monkey and so on.
We do not know what qin music sounded like before the Tang period. In the third century, Ji Kang urged players to carefully observe the rhythms of pieces, to move their fingers with dexterity and to play slides quickly; he also claimed to distinguish forty-two different types of vibrato, including a fast ‘flying vibrato’ known as fei yin. This may hint at a preference for fast tempi, but without notations we really cannot say much about it. It was only during the Tang that the first surviving notations emerged, and that regional styles of playing proliferated, foreshadowing famous schools such as those of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
Tang imperial patronage brought an unprecedented synthesis of the arts and blending of cultures, with the great imperial court at Chang’an maintaining thousands of foreign and native musicians and dancers who participated in lavish spectacles. Qin music was now less fashionable at the court, but was still respected in the homes of literati. Detailed musical notations for court ensemble music, as well as for solo qin pieces, began to appear. Some survive in manuscript copies of later dynasties, but one qin piece, Youlan (‘Solitary Orchid’) is extant in the original seventh century manuscript currently kept in Japan (which at that time maintained extensive cultural contacts with China).
The Tang was also an era of great poets, whose lyrics, sung to music, could become instantly popular. But the downfall of the Tang saw a decline of interest in the instrument, with much notated music lost in the ensuing political upheaval, and with a revival documented only from the twelfth century onwards. During the Ming, the first extant full anthologies of notated qin music appeared, starting with the Shenqi mipu (Handbook of Spiritual and Marvellous Mysteries), sixty-four pieces printed in 1425 under the auspices of a Ming prince.
Traditional qin notations are mostly in shorthand tablature form (see the illustration on p. 112 above), and indicate fingerings and playing techniques for executing individual pitches or groups of pitches; the beginnings and endings of melodic phrases and of separate sections in the music are marked, but there are few indications of rhythm or metre, and few pieces are attributed to specific composers. Players in the seventeenth century began to record their fingerings in more sophisticated ways, but rhythm – with the exception of a few formulae – was still not indicated.
The first surviving piece to be notated, Youlan, is different from all later notations in the sense that it is a descriptive text, explaining sentence by sentence (without abbreviating symbols) the fingering of both hands. One of the oldest surviving pieces of any written melodic music in the Far East, this five- to ten-minute work has been variously attributed to a sixth-century qin player (Qiu Ming) and to Confucius. The score is damaged in places and contains many ambiguities; its interpretation has been subject to debate, and when Youlan was revived in the mid-twentieth century, it came as a shock that the piece did not sound nearly as pentatonic as many had expected. Pentatonicism plays a substantial role throughout Chinese music history, but most surviving traditional Chinese tunes are heptatonic, and the melodies of early Chinese music may still be more varied, as the example of Youlan shows. The American qin player John Thompson has shown analytically that the predominant (relative) scale of Youlan is C–D–E–F#–G–A–B–C, with F as an occasional alternate to F#, and C as the tonal centre. There are also incidental occurrences of C#(three times) and Bb (once), resulting in a ten-tone scale, and the piece has an ascending slur of five microtones at the end of each of its four sections.
Music enjoyed high prestige during the Tang dynasty.
Ladies at an informal court concert with players on the sheng, se, pipa and xiao
Most later qin melodies are built on a pentatonic or heptatonic structure, though chromatic features continue to play a role.7 Ultimately, much of the expressiveness of qin relies on special types of vibrato, slides and a lingering on tones, which turns the landscape between finite pitches into an essential part of the music.
Qin pieces usually come with specific tunings, with by far the most common one (starting from the lowest string) being C–D–F–G–A–C–D. This is known as zheng diao, ‘correct scale’. Many variants are known, in which one or more strings are lowered or raised by a semitone or a whole tone. The famous Xiao Xiang shui yun (Mist and Clouds over Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a ten-minute piece which Liang Ming-yueh once compared in dramatic fervour to Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie)8 is played with the fifth string raised by a semitone (see Example 4.1). Other familiar tunings include mangong diao (‘lowered first tone scale’), in which the first, third and sixth strings are lowered by a whole tone, and qingshang diao (‘bright upward scale’) in which the first, fifth and seventh strings are raised a semitone.9 There is no fixed pitch for tuning a qin, one’s choice depending on the length of the instrument, the quality of the strings, regional traditions and personal preference. Chinese conservatories usually recommend tuning the fifth string to an A at 110 Hz.10
Yu Shaozhe (1903–88) was a celebrated qin master in the Sichuan style. Here he performs during a qin meeting, probably in his native town Chengdu in the early 1980s.
This ecstatically laughing musician, from an Eastern Han period tomb in Sichuan, belies the stereotype image of zither players as being solemn, stern and contemplative. It was excavated in 1951 in Ziyangxian and is kept in the Chongqing Museum.
Qin handbooks contain poems, stories and programmatic explanations which are as dynamic and changeable as the music: the same story may find its way into different qin pieces, or the same piece may be explained in very different ways.11 Programmatic ideas, particularly those of Ming dynasty handbooks, are often marvellously suggestive. Longer pieces frequently consist of individually-titled sections, and the divisions can be a practical help in determining the music’s architecture. Song-like or rondo-like structures with the repeated occurrence of themes, motives or gestures occur, but much qin music is rhapsodic, and the emphasis on timbral and ornamental detail can become dominant to the point where music is experienced on a note-by-note or gesture-by-gesture basis.12 Silences also play a major role; the enormous variety of ways in which the strings of the qin can be approached includes the option of not touching them at all – just making silent hand movements in the air over the soundboard.
EX. 4.1 The slow and spacious beginning of Xiao Xiang shui yun (Water and Clouds of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers) in a version played by Wu Jinglue. The first section up to the double bar line is played entirely in harmonics. Sounds indicated with ‘x’ refer to a pitchless slow vibrato, produced by rubbing a string with fingers of the left hand.
Rhythmic freedom is another major asset of qin playing: no repeated performance of a qin piece will ever sound exactly the same.13 The process of translating the unmeasured and free qin notations into performance versions with more definite rhythmical contours is known as dapu. Some scholars interpret the freedom of rhythm as a musical reflection of players’ aspirations towards spirituality, but perhaps too much has been made of this: players still work within an established framework of rhythmic formulae and convention, and do not reinvent tradition every time they touch the instrument.14 In deciphering old notations, they face a challenge comparable to that of Western instrumentalists faced with trying to perform French harpsichord preludes from the times of Louis Couperin – pieces written in whole note sequences, which leave the players free, without metrical constraint, to invent their own pace and rhythmic divisions.15 Usually after a few playings recognisable melodic sequences begin to emerge, and the same happens in qin pieces revived via the dapu process. The parlando-rubato nature of many qin melodies may suggest vocal origins, with some styles – such as the Qinling style of Nanjing – reportedly being influenced by the ornamentations and vocal techniques of specific singing styles.16
Many pieces in the handbooks are qin songs, with lyrics; lauded by poets as a ‘singing’ instrument, the qin has probably always been one of the most ‘vocal’ of Chinese instruments, and players often teach their pupils by simultaneously singing and playing to them. The instrument’s flexible rhythmical properties and spiritual connotations might seem to turn its music into a Chinese equivalent of the stile fantastico of the Western Renaissance and Baroque, with its connotations of rhetorical speech and theatrical content, of the human (or superhuman) voice ‘speaking’ in mysterious ways, but the sound of the qin is unique, and its repertoire is too varied to merit such comparisons wholesale. Epic and dramatic pieces like Xiao Xiang shui yun form a surprising contrast to the plain lyricism and song-like simplicity of tunes like Jiu kuang (Drunken madness; see the illustration on p. 112 above), or Meihua san nong (Plum blossom melody) – shorter pieces dismissed by some qin players as ‘superficial’, but praised as gems by others.
Following the Ming, regional ensemble and opera styles flourished, and Western culture began to make an impact in China, perhaps at the expense of qin music which again went into decline. But it experienced another (modest) come-back during the early Republican period, and was allowed to develop further under Maoism, in spite of its elitist past. Players had to hide their instruments and remain silent during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, and some were persecuted, but the tradition continued with renewed enthusiasm from the early 1980s onwards.
In recent decades, an ideological battle has emerged between players in Hong Kong who promote the qin strictly as a gateway to self-cultivation, and mainland players who prefer to regard it as a ‘mere’ musical instrument. Behind this looms a debate about who can claim to represent genuine tradition. In reality, however, there have always been many traditions; no single model from the past can claim to be prescriptive, nor can any players from the past be excluded, not even the ‘old gentlemen with very long fingernails’ whom Laurence Picken and Robert van Gulik met at Xu Yuanbai’s home in Sichuan during the early 1940s, ‘who couldn’t use their nails to pluck the strings, so they played with continuous glissando, moving their nails on the qin surface all the time; it sounded like giant cockroaches seeking hiding’.17
A sandstone carving in the Musee Cernuschi, Paris, showing how the pipa was held at the time of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 CE)
The transition from silk to metal strings in the 1950s resulted in greater volume and longer resonance, but also in a loss of clarity and timbral richness; some also say that the traditional aura of qin suffered from its transfer to the concert hall,18 but at all events playing styles changed dramatically. Recordings from the 1940s and 1950s show that qin players then tended to follow a much more steady pulse than they do today; the free-floating melodies we may hear in recent performances – with abrupt shifts in tempo and frequent ritardandos and accelerations – are a development of the last fifty years, in part under the influence of Western music. Moreover, many traditional pieces were abbreviated to fit contemporary tastes. The newly dramatic approach to qin music has created a different musical landscape, and has won new audiences.19
Whatever approach one prefers, its current success does not derive, as has been suggested, from amplification or from ‘mass ideology’.20 It is the legacy of an eclectic group of artists who, in many different ways, gave new impetus to the tradition: men like the mild and soft-spoken gentleman-scholar Pu Xuezhai (1893–1966), kin to China’s last emperor Pu Yi, who made the instrument politically acceptable to communist leaders Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. And like Guan Pinghu (1897–1967), who became China’s most influential interpreter of old qin scores, or like Zha Fuxi (1895–1976), co-founder of the influential Jinyu Qin Society (1936), who became the country’s leading qin researcher and (with Wang Di and Xu Jian) carried out major fieldwork in the spring of 1954, travelling across China and recording and documenting the music of eighty-six local players. Zha Fuxi also published important collections of scores which became the basis for the monumental multi-volume anthology Qinqu jicheng (from 1981 onwards). Wu Jinglüe (1907–87) and Wei Zhongle (1908–88) promoted a modern concert and conservatory career for the instrument, and introduced folk elements in their playing, partly borrowed from the pipa (which they both played). Wu Jinglüe became the most ardent proponent of steel strings, helping to make them fashionable in China. There were important women, too, not least Tsar Teh-yun (Cai Deyun) (1905–2007) who almost singlehandedly raised a whole new generation of qin players in Hong Kong. Other artists, like Wu Zhonghai (1908–95), Sun Yuqin (1915–90) and Hu Guangjing (d. 1973), launched the instrument in Taiwan. John Thompson revived complete collections of ancient qin scores in historically-informed performances. Many others could have deserved inclusion in this list.
The qin lives on, in oversized concert halls, on the internet and in commercial recordings, as well as in intimate surroundings. And, as in the past, the crucial element may be its sound: the qin’s great strength may lie in its fragility, in the evanescent quality of its music, and not – as in the romanticised, imaginary past – in its magical powers and cosmic connotations. It enchants as much by what it keeps silent about, as by what it says.
Further reading
Van Gulik’s landmark book The Lore of the Lute (1940, reissued 1969) is still the best in-depth monography on qin, and is eminently readable, though a formidable modern competitor is Cecilia Lindqvist’s Qin (2006), which includes a wealth of illustrations, fine personal reminiscences of how she came to study the qin in China in the 1950s, and informative chapters on almost every aspect of the instrument including its manufacture. Sadly, Lindqvist’s book is so far only available in Swedish and in Chinese. The best one-volume general introduction to Chinese music is Liang Mingyue’s Music of the Billion (1985). A classic on Chinese music philosophy which puts qin lore in historical perspective is DeWoskin’s A Song for One or Two. Connections with Asian art are explored in Stephen Addiss’s The Resonance of the Qin in East Asian Art (1999). Ji Kang’s classic essay on the qin is still worth reading, translated and commented by Van Gulik (Hsi K’ang and his Poetical Essay on the Lute, 1941/1969), or in French by Goormaghtigh (L’Art du Qin, 1990). A Chinese teaching manual, translated and with instructive commentary, is Lieberman’s Zither Tutor (1983). A substantial website on qin is John Thompson’s www.silkqin.com
Readers with access to Chinese should explore Zha Fuxi’s landmark essays on qin (Zha Fuxi Qinxue wencui, 1995). A concise general survey of qin history is Xu Jian’s Qinshi chubian (1982); a fine introduction to twentieth-century qin history is Lin Chen’s Chumo qinshi (2011).
Recommended listening
Favourite Qin Pieces of Guan Pinghu, Roi Productions RB-951005-2C, 1995. Double album by the ‘father’ of twentieth-century qin playing. Recordings from the 1950s, played on silk strings, yet with amazing resonance and clarity of sound.
An Anthology of Chinese Traditional and Folk Music: A Collection of Music Played on the Guqin (8 vols), China Record company, Shanghai, CCD-94/342-349, 1994. Rough sound editing, but a landmark historical anthology, featuring Zha Fuxi’s pioneer recordings. Includes many great masters of the past: Guan Pinghu, Pu Xuezhai, Yao Bingyan, Gu Meigeng, Shen Caonong etc.
Hugo Records in Hong Kong has produced over 30 qin solo CDs since 1989, many dedicated to important senior and regional masters, including some, such as Wang Hua-De, Yu Shaoze and Liu Shaochun, who have been little recorded elsewhere.
Wu Wenguang, Music of the Qin, JVC World Sounds VICG-5213, 1992. Features one of the finest performances ever of the oldest known qin piece, Youlan.
Dai Xiaolian, China: The Art of the Qin Zither, Auvidis B 6765, 1992. A vigorous player of a younger generation, recorded in Paris.
Tsar Teh-yun, The Art of Qin Music, ROI Productions RB-001006-2C, 2000. Fine classical performances by Hong Kong’s first lady of the qin.
John Thompson, Music Beyond Sound: Qin solos from the Zheyin shizi qinpu (1491), Toadal Sound TDS 10001, 1997. Beginning of an unprecedented project to revive and record little-known early qin music.
