The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis

IN THE SUMMER OF 1936 Jiang Wenye 江文也 (1910–1983),¹ a young Taiwanese composer cum poet based in Japan, made his first trip to Beijing and Shanghai. Earlier that year Jiang had won a prize in the Berlin Olympics’ Musical Competition for his symphony Taiwan no Bukyoku 臺灣の舞曲 (Formosan dance), an honor that solidified his status as a rising star in the musical circles of Japan. Instead of traveling to Europe to receive the prize in person, however, Jiang chose to visit China.

With Jiang Wenye on this trip was Alexander Tcherepnin (1899–1977), a Russian composer and an ardent admirer of Oriental music. Seeking to promote modern music with a distinctive regional style, Tcherepnin visited Japan in 1934 and quickly discovered Jiang’s talent.² By then Jiang had already won a reputation as an able opera singer and a promising composer in the vein of European modernism. Thanks to Tcherepnin’s influence, he redirected his passion to composing music unique to his culture. Although he came from colonial Taiwan and had spent a good part of his life in Japan, Jiang identified this culture with China.

The 1936 trip to China was a dream come true. As he wrote about his train approaching Beijing: “I could hear my heart pounding; my body was filled with boisterous soundings as if it might spill over any moment. . . . Like someone courting a sweetheart, I was in anguish over my desire, my soul burning like fire.”3 The young musician was overwhelmed by everything he saw and heard, so much so that he felt “flattened” by the awesomeness of the ancient city. Indeed, the charm of Beijing and by extension, China, was such that one year after the trip Jiang wrote:

Jiang Wenye’s encounter with China may seem of the most romantic kind, an overseas Chinese artist’s search for and eventual return to his spiritual homeland. Nevertheless, a closer look at Jiang’s journey reveals something else. As a native son of colonial Taiwan inspired by European avant-garde music, a connoisseur of Western modernism mediated by Japanese taste, and an advocate of Chinese-style music under a Russian mentor’s sponsorship, Jiang Wenye had already been busily shuffling his cultural and geopolitical motivations during his time in Japan. He represents one generation of Taiwanese artists who struggled to negotiate their identities and respond to multiple challenges, ranging from colonialism to imperialism and from nationalism to cosmopolitanism. But that was only a prelude to his adventure.

When Jiang Wenye arrived in Beijing in 1938, China was already engulfed in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Jiang’s career nevertheless thrived in occupied Beijing and climaxed in the early 1940s. With his symphony Kōbyō taisei gakushō 孔廟大晟樂章 (The music of the Confucian temple, 1939) and in poetic works in Chinese and Japanese, he sought to redefine modern Chinese music in light of the ancient melodies that he believed were crystallized in the Confucian practice of ritual and music. Jiang’s project appears to be an intriguing mixture of the past and the present, a bold invention in the mode of imaginary nostalgia.

As discussed in the introduction, Jaroslav Průšek described the cultural dynamics of modern China in terms of “the lyrical and the epic,” or individual poetic expression versus collective political articulation.5 Through Jiang Wenye’s career, the two sonic motifs of Průšek’s theory can again be brought to the fore, to show how the “sound” of modern China seems always to have degenerated into sullen silences or strident debates. This chapter discusses the acoustic choices Jiang Wenye made at the turning point of his career and the aesthetic and political consequences he faced. Using select music pieces, poetic works, and theoretical treatises as examples, I explore how Jiang’s modernist sensibility reflected an anomaly of colonial, national, and cosmopolitan bearings; how his engagement with Confucian musicology during wartime brought about an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism; and most important, how his lyrical vision was occasioned by and confined to historical contingency. Because of the contested forces his works and life brought into play, Jiang Wenye himself dramatizes the composition of Chinese modernity at its most treacherous.

In the domain of music, the advocacy of modernity coincided with the literary campaign for a new articulation at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1903, Feishi 匪石 (1884–1959) wrote “Zhongguo yinyue gailiang shuo” 中國音樂改良說 (A proposal for reforming Chinese music), in which he severely criticized the feudal elements and Confucian fixations of traditional musical culture. To refashion Chinese citizenship, he called for music reform following Western models.⁹ The first effort at modernizing Chinese music took place in 1904, when Li Shutong 李叔同 (1880–1942) and Shen Xingong 沈心功 (1870–1947) introduced “school melodies” or xuetang yuege 學堂樂歌 as a form of musical education.¹⁰ In the following decades, the education, composition, performance, and consumption of Chinese music underwent a drastic transformation. Western impacts played a crucial role; almost all major figures, such as Xiao Youmei 蕭友梅 (1884–1940), Wang Guangqi 王光祈 (1891–1936), Zhao Yuanren 趙元任 (1892–1982), He Lüting 賀綠汀 (1903–1999), Huang Zi 黃自 (1904–1938), Xian Xinghai 冼星海 (1905–1945), Ding 丁善德 Shande (1911–?), and Ma Sicong 馬思聰 (1912–1987), among others, were either inspired by imported Western schools and masters or trained overseas.¹¹ For instance, both Xiao Youmei and Wang Guangqi were educated in Germany; Ma Sicong studied violin and composition in Paris; and Huang Zi trained in the music programs of Oberlin College and Yale in the United States.

Despite the diversity of their specializations and interests, these musicians shared the approach of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European musicians; their employment of aspects such as major and minor keys, homophony, and harmony reflected an adherence to Western canons. Conceptually, they were mindful of the May Fourth call to rejuvenate national pride, and they took pains to create a music best representing the Chinese ethos. Not unlike their peers in other artistic disciplines, these musicians had to cope with the paradox that their desire for a quintessential national form presupposed an acquisition of international knowledge, and that their creations, however original to Chinese ears, reverberated with familiar Western tunes. Among their favorite models were the schools of realism and late romanticism, while nationalism enjoyed a special appeal thanks to its inherent agenda and use of distinct local color. As China’s crisis deepened in the thirties, most musicians became more and more concerned about the political message of their works and churned out melodies with a strong patriotic fervor and militant momentum.12

In this context, the appearance of Jiang Wenye was significant. Born in colonial Taiwan in 1910 to a Hakka merchant’s family, Jiang was sent to study at a Japanese school in Amoy, China, in 1917. He moved to Japan in 1923 and later enrolled in a vocational school, majoring in electrical engineering. But this young Taiwanese harbored more enthusiasm about music, and he spent most of his spare time taking voice training classes. Jiang made his first career breakthrough as a singer; between 1932 and 1936 he won four prizes in the vocal programs of the Japanese National Music Competitions. In 1933 he was offered a job as baritone in the opera company Fujiwara Yoshie Kageki Dan 藤原義江歌劇團, and he took supporting roles in productions such as Puccini’s La Bohème and Tosca. Meanwhile he was admitted to study composition with Yamada Kōsaku 山田耕筰 (1886–1965), leader of early modern Japanese music, conductor of the Japanese New Symphony Orchestra, and an advocate of German Romanticism from Wagner to Strauss.¹³

Japanese reception of European music started in the Meiji period,14 and by the early thirties there already existed a sizable community of enthusiasts embracing a wide spectrum of trends, from classicism to modernism. Instead of one model, young Japanese composers found multiple options to emulate. Although they had yet to find ways to invent anything new, by juxtaposing various musical paradigms in a synchronic constellation, they “spatialized” distinct temporalities in ways unavailable in the European context. Yamada’s music in the nineteen-teens, for instance, showed influences from “Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Dvořák” in one year, and from “Richard Strauss, Debussy, even Scriabin” in another.¹⁵ This was also a time when Japanese composers sought to create a national style. Jiang Wenye’s teacher was a leading figure in this endeavor with his blending of Western and Japanese style and his use of both vocal and instrumental compositions in folksong melodies.¹⁶ This nationalist pursuit created a double bind, however. While it represented the composers’ reflection on their indigenous identity, it derived its conceptual thrust and compositional skill first from Western models. In other words, “nationalism” implied not so much a tradition traceable to something quintessential to a civilization as an invention resulting from a dialogue between the local and the international.¹⁷ A desire for nativism thus presupposed an encounter with foreign customs.

Jiang Wenye’s early career dramatized such an encounter. Like many of his colleagues, Jiang was immersed in the European trends of Taisho culture. But as his foreign learning became increasingly sophisticated, he realized that not everything imported could be labeled modern. Instead of the masters of classicism and romanticism, he was fascinated with the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, Gian Francesco Melipiero (1892–1973), and especially Bartók. Not surprisingly, after a period of apprenticeship Jiang found Yamada’s style no longer up to date and was eager to pursue something more avant-garde. He came to know composers such as Mitsukuri Shūkichi 箕作秋吉 (1895–1971), Kiyose Yasuji 清瀨保二 (1900–1981), and Matsudaira Yoritsune 松平賴則 (1907–1981), and was eventually invited to join the New Composers’ Federation 新興作曲家連盟 (Shinko Sakkyokuka Renmei), an organization of composers who pitted themselves against the traditionalists from the Imperial Academy of Music on the one hand and jazz and pop song writers on the other.

That Bartók became Jiang Wenye’s major source of inspiration bespeaks Jiang’s engagement with both modernism and nationalism. The Hungarian composer’s creative interpretation of folk music and his bold departures from nineteenth-century romantic and realist formulae inspired the young Taiwanese to search for a music of his own. Although he avoided Bartók’s bold, dissonant sonority, the way Jiang employed the rhythmic concepts found in Bartók’s percussive music suggests that he was influenced by Bartók’s adaptations of folk dance and folk music.¹⁸ Cases in point include Formosan Dance and Taiwan Santidōhōka 臺灣山地同胞歌 (Aboriginal songs from Taiwan, 1936). However, Jiang’s works during this period, such as Bon odori shudaikōkyōkumikyoku 盆踊り主題交響組曲 (Symphonic suite based on the subject of bon odori, 1935), already show a skillful adoption of Oriental scale systems, particularly the Japanese Insen scale system, characterized by semitone intervals.

One of Jiang’s strategies during this period was to keep changing the direction of the melody, as if he were too impatient to follow a diatonic theme. As has been observed, the leaps in his melodic line may result from his extensive use of pentachords; thus even a stepwise moving line encounters a skip in diatonic scale. But these leaps may also exemplify Jiang’s employment of modernist technique, to interrupt the stepwise melodic movement.19 As a compromise, in his experiment Jiang constantly uses the reverse curve, which changes the unpredictable range to the predictable destinations of dominant and tonic.

Jiang’s career so far appears typical of East Asian modernists’ response to their Western antecedents. While acknowledging the power of imported European music, Jiang and like-minded composers were eager to bring a vernacular sound to bear on the universally acclaimed new melody. They tried to transform a belated modernity into an alternative, and alter/native, modernity. But Jiang’s case is complicated by his identity: he was a native of Taiwan, a colony of Japan since 1895. By the time he was born (1910), the island was well on its way to being assimilated to Japan’s political, cultural, and economic structure. Despite its discriminatory ethnic policies, the colonial power actually made great strides toward modernizing Taiwan, which under Chinese rule had been an underdeveloped area. “Becoming Japanese” was therefore an ambivalent fact for most Taiwanese, pointing to their dilemma between colonial modernity and ethnic identification.²⁰ Jiang Wenye was not spared, though he immigrated to Japan in his teenage years. The colonial specter must always have haunted him, for even years later, he gave race as the reason for his never winning any first prize in Japan, however outstanding his works.²¹

Our concern is how Jiang negotiated between his two most powerful interests, modernism and nationalism, in light of his colonial status. Insofar as colonialism manifests itself in not only political and economic monopoly but also cultural dominance at a locale other than the national domain, that Japanese composers acquired their modern skills wholesale from Europe bespeaks an acquired hegemony of the West, an unwittingly colonial submission. If so, it must have been doubly derivative for someone from colonial Taiwan, a place twice removed from the locus that set the standard of musical supremacy, to acquire the European masters’ expertise. Whereas nationalism may have served as a means for Japanese composers to redefine their modern identity, was a colonial Taiwanese like Jiang Wenye qualified to interpret the “authentic” Japanese nationality? But if nationalism is no more a spontaneous overflow of an innate consciousness than it is an imported ideology in the European vein, something cultivatable via pedagogical means, wasn’t Jiang Wenye equally entitled to compose on behalf of Japan? By corollary, granting his Taiwanese ethnic roots, can Jiang Wenye be regarded as a “natural” candidate to represent the island, which he left at the age of seven and to which he did not return until the early thirties? How did Japanese colonial power integrate Jiang’s desire into a discourse of Japanese local color rather than of Taiwanese regionalism?

These questions can be illustrated by Jiang Wenye’s orchestral piece from 1934, Minami no shima ni yoru kōkyōteki sketchi 南の嶋に據る交響的スケッチ (A symphonic sketch of South Island), which includes four movements: “Bokkafū zensōkyoku” 牧歌風前奏曲 (Prelude in madrigal style), “Shirasagi e no gensō” 白鷺への幻想 (Fantasy for a white egret), “Aru seihan no kataru no wo kikeba” 或る生蕃の語るのを聞けば (Listening to the story of a high mountain man), and “Jōnai no yoru” 城内の夜 (A night in the city). Among these pieces, “Fantasy for a White Egret” and “A Night in the City” won Jiang a prize in the Third Japanese Music Competition. Based on “A Night in the City,” Jiang Wenye completed Formosan Dance Op. 1, which won him the Berlin Olympics Music Prize.22 A Symphonic Sketch of South Island is written in a late romantic style, decorated with melodies drawn from Japanese folk music, a testimony to the influence of Jiang’s first teacher, Yamada Kōsaku. But whereas its mysterious, hypnotic color is reminiscent of Debussy’s impressionist sensibility, the way it changes meters and rhythms, adding and embellishing notes to create variations, is suggestive of Bartók’s style. In particular, “Listening to the Story of a High Mountain Man,” a piece that evokes the primitive vitality of Taiwan aborigines by means of irregular and rhythmic arrangement, bears imprints of Bartók’s percussive movement and Prokofiev’s machinelike toccata.

These five pieces were conceived during Jiang’s first tour to Taiwan in 1934, seventeen years after he left the island. On that tour Jiang performed with other Japan-based Taiwanese musicians and received warm welcomes.²³ Nevertheless, what impressed him most was the serene life and gorgeous landscapes on the island. As Jiang puts it,

The rice field looks so green! In the midst of quietness and transparent air a white egret displays its beautiful feathers. . . . I stood on the earth, which is like father’s forehead, in the black soil, which is like mother’s deep eyes . . . quietly I closed my eyes . . . the humanity, the beautiful nature, and the life of this place threw me into a state of meditation. I started to sense that the feelings in my body were being orchestrated into a series of poems, or a cluster of musical notes. The wisdom of Asia since the primitive times seemed to have awakened in my soul. Such a thought was developing to fill my body, driving me to the verge of being crazy.²⁴

Jiang wrote this poem right after his visit to Taiwan in the summer of 1934, and it appeared in the introduction to his album Formosa Dance. In sharp contrast to the earthy, pastoral image in the essay quoted above, Taiwan appears in this poem to be a ghostly site of decayed palaces and towers, theaters and cemeteries; “all these had perished.” Reminiscences about the splendid and ephemeral past of Taiwan drove Jiang to try to reconstruct in musical notes what no longer existed.

Through Jiang’s poetic and musical notes, Taiwan appears in two versions: a decadent wasteland and a lyrical dreamland. While the former calls for an elegiac incantation about the loss of history and splendor, the latter prompts an idyllic chanting about the return of primitive passions. Historically, Taiwan has never been known for its “splendid palaces and towers, theaters and cemeteries,” so Jiang Wenye must have conjured up an exotic landscape to suit his own nostalgic whims. If so, Jiang’s references to the white egrets, the aborigines, and the local color of the “South Island” may be less reminders of his nativist encounter than exotic signs of a fantasyland called home. The musician/poet feels homesick not just because of his separation from his homeland but also because of his loss of the aura of the homeland he believes he has cherished.

I have argued elsewhere that nostalgia may occur in tandem with exoticism because both rely on the principle of displacement. In mythological and psychological terms, displacement points to a narrative mechanism that makes possible the redefinition of something irretrievable or unspeakable, and to the eternally regressive state of such a narrative or psychological quest.26 Jiang Wenye’s case shows how such a mutual implication of exoticism and nostalgia could be historically grounded. By the early thirties, Taiwan had become a popular subject for Japanese writers and artists as the alluring and mystic “South,” as demonstrated by Satō Haruo’s 佐藤春夫 (1892–1964) romance, Ishikawa Kin’ichirō’s 石川欽一郎 (1871–1945) painting, and Inō Kanori’s 伊能嘉矩 (1867–1925) ethnographic account, to name a few.²⁷ The exotic appeal of Taiwan may be derived from the ikoku jōchō 異国情調 (exotic mood) prevalent since the turn of the century. Ikoku, or literally the foreign country, was first introduced along with a more pejorative term, nanban (南蠻), or the southern barbarian, in the first half of the seventeenth century when Japan severed all trade connections except with China and the Dutch East India Company. Jōchō, on the other hand, was a Meiji invention coined by poet Kinoshita Mokutarō 木下杢太郎 (1885–1945) in reference to the “mood” of exoticism his poetry tried to capture. As poet cum critic Noda Utarō 野田宇太郎 (1909–1984) reminds us, ikoku jōchō did not come into full usage until around 1907.²⁸ Its early twentieth-century incarnation is very much about a poetic representation of foreignness and novelty motivated by curiosity; that it came into existence in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) suggests political implications. Particularly in the way it describes Taiwan either as a virgin land or as an isle of decadence, possessing and ever ready to be possessed, ikoku jōchō resonates with the European imperialist connotation of exoticism.²⁹

When Jiang Wenye composed his poetic and musical pieces in 1934, he brought a new intensity to the art of nostalgia via exoticism. Although ethnically tied to Taiwan, Jiang was deeply immersed in Japanese and European culture from his upbringing; he could articulate his nostalgia only through musical notes and linguistic signs that were anything but homegrown. Meanwhile, in view of the discourse of exoticism in Taisho Japan, perhaps Jiang’s nostalgia was equally driven by a strategy of self-exoticization, that is, of dramatizing his Taiwanese origin so as to assert his difference from his Japanese fellow composers, and of catering to a Japanese audience eager to embrace an island just recently integrated into the national territory.

Vacillating between the roles of alienated insider and informed outsider, Jiang called forth in his music and poetry the effect of imaginary nostalgia. I have discussed the polemics of “imaginary nostalgia” as a modernist symptom with regard to the disorientation of time, space, and cultural legacy. It is imaginary in the sense that nostalgia comes not as the effect but as the absent cause of nativist longing; and it is as much an outburst of primitive passions as a convention overdetermined by historical factors.30 Situated in the colonial politics and cosmopolitan culture of early modern Japan, Jiang Wenye’s music and poetry provide a most poignant example.

We can now add the final stop on Jiang Wenye’s odyssey before landing in China: Alexander Tcherepnin, the Russian composer who toured East Asia during the thirties in quest of pure Oriental musical sounds. Born in 1899 in St. Petersburg to a family with a rich musical tradition, Tcherepnin started piano training in childhood. His father, Nicolai Tcherepnin, was a composer and conductor and an illustrious pedagogue who taught Prokofiev and urged him to experiment with new music skills. After the Russian Revolution broke out, Nicolai moved his family to Paris, where Alexander began to search for new ways of composition. Determined to redefine the national character of Russian music, he developed a theory of Eurasianism and took increasing interest in folk melodies from Middle Eastern and Asian areas. In the spring of 1934, Tcherepnin undertook what was to have been a world tour. He planned to visit China first, followed by Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Egypt, and Palestine. But at his first piano concert in Shanghai, Tcherepnin met pianist Boris Zakharoff, then teaching at Shanghai National Conservatory; through this friend, he entered the elite circles of China and learned the music and culture of the ancient country. He was so overwhelmed by his findings that he canceled the rest of his trip save for a stop in Japan, due to its geographical and cultural proximity to China.

Tcherepnin stayed in China for three years (1934–1937). During this period he taught at the National Conservatory and several other institutions, promoting and composing his Eurasian-style music. He fell in love with a talented Chinese pianist and eventually married her.31 He came to know Lu Xun, and the master agreed to write an operatic libretto after the Dream of the Red Chamber, a project aborted due to Lu Xun’s untimely death in 1936.³² Tcherepnin admired the Chinese musical heritage so much that he even obtained a Chinese name, Qi Erpin 齊爾品 (for Tcherepnin), from his “godfather” Qi Rushan 齊如山 (1875–1962), a famous theoretician and playwright of Chinese opera and the closest consultant to superstar Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 (1894–1961).

One aspect of teaching in China Tcherepnin found disturbing was that almost all composers had succumbed to the influence of Western classicism and romanticism. Instead of mimicking Handel or Beethoven, Tcherepnin believed that the Chinese should start right where modernism was striving: “For China, Debussy, Stravinsky, De Falla, could be regarded as classics—postwar modern production will provide the material necessary to accomplish the full musical education of a Chinese music student.”³³ Tcherepnin based his argument on the fact that China had nothing in common with the “culture that produced a Schumann, a Chopin, a Schubert” and therefore was not obliged to repeat the Western classic tradition so as to reach the modern age. “If you built a first electric station in Hankow, you would certainly build an up-to-date station and not one like the first that you built forty years ago in the U.S.A,” so “in music we have to start where we can use the common language—and it is the twentieth century.”³⁴ This modernist task, nevertheless, could not be carried out until a national style was established. Tcherepnin considered the pentatonic scale the tonal basis in the organization of Chinese native music, and he believed that compositions based on it would highlight the Chinese national character. He went so far as to claim that “modern music, because of its use of the pentatonic scale, is more closely allied to Oriental tonal feeling and is the most natural approach.”³⁵

At a time when the discourse of music was dominated by names such as Huang Zi and Xiao Youmei, Tcherepnin’s theory evoked skepticism among his Chinese peers. To them, the Russian composer’s campaign for modernism and nationalism appeared to be an odd mixture of causes. The dialogue (or the lack thereof) between Tcherepnin and his Chinese fellow musicians, however, leads one to rethink the conditions of Chinese modernism in a broader sense. Given the May Fourth cry for catching up with modern culture on all fronts, Tcherepnin wryly observed that his Chinese colleagues were transplanting Western models wholesale, without realizing the many problems that came with this approach, ranging from mimicry to anachronism. For him the most efficient way to modernize was to engage in the latest Western trend while remolding it in light of a national style. But Tcherepnin’s critics questioned whether he was not taking a privileged position even when debunking the European tradition, because he, after all, “was European himself,”36 and had the knowledge he now found unsuitable for the Chinese. Even his promotion of a distinctive Chinese pentatonic scale is not free of an Orientalist smell. As one critic pointed out, “Mr. Tcherepnin forgets that in working [on] the Pentatonic Scale Study he has Bach and others behind him, and possesses their techniques.”³⁷

This context may explain why Jiang Wenye became so crucial to Tcherepnin’s project. The two met in Tokyo in early 1935, when Tcherepnin was on his second tour to Japan, and became friends immediately. Jiang’s suave manners and experimental works served for Tcherepnin as a perfect example of his Eurasian theory, such that decades later he was still telling his wife that Jiang was the most brilliant among the Chinese musicians he had come to know.³⁸ But the Russian composer cast an even greater image in the young Taiwanese’s mind. Their shared penchant for modernism aside, Tcherepnin appeared to be an artist deprived of national affiliation for political reasons, and yet he managed to make the world his home; he was a cosmopolitan willing to embrace things new and foreign. More important, such a worldly attitude enabled him to better appreciate rather than do away with his own cultural heritage, as evinced by his promotion of Slavic and Eurasian styles of music. For Jiang Wenye, who likewise had been uprooted from his native land, Tcherepnin’s experience may have represented not only an artistic inspiration but also a cultural allegiance. Although the two never had a formal teacher-student relationship, Jiang treated Tcherepnin as his mentor—nay, spiritual father—for the rest of his career.³⁹ Therefore, it was only fitting for Tcherepnin to invite Jiang Wenye to visit China and serve as his host in both Beijing and Shanghai.

The friendship between Tcherepnin and Jiang Wenye suggests rethinking the conditions of constructing national imageries in modern times. Scholars in Taiwan and China have debated mostly whether Jiang Wenye was a Taiwanese or Chinese, as if national identity could answer all the questions of his musical explorations. They tend to overlook the fact that it was a Russian master who initiated this Taiwanese into China, encouraging him to reconstruct his “memories” of the old civilization in musical notes, and that both were composing with not just Taiwan, China, or Japan but a world stage in mind. Central to their agenda was how to find a vernacular articulation while maintaining a cosmopolitan vision.

The result was a fascinating conflation of desires and musical sounds, for example, Jiang’s piano concerto Jyūroku no bagateru 十六のバガテル Op. 8 十六首斷章小品 (16 Bagatelles, Op. 8), which he composed between 1935 and 1936, spanning the period before and after his first China trip. Among the sixteen pieces, No. 1 (“Aoba Wakaba” 青葉若葉 [Green leaves and young leaves]) is a toccata in a march style à la Prokofiev, while No. 3, written on the eve of his departure for China, was inspired by a Japanese lullaby. Nos. 12 and 16 and 11, 14, and 15 were written in Beijing and Shanghai respectively. These five pieces clearly reflect Jiang’s effort to inscribe the new sound effects he heard on Chinese streets; references to Chinese instruments such as the erhu 二胡 and pipa 琵琶 create a cadence of festivity and excitement. By contrast, No. 2 conveys a meditative mood by adopting atonality associated with Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and his followers, something deemed extremely avant-garde in 1930s Japan. The last piece (No. 16), as has been noted by critics, illustrates the influence of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.40

16 Bagatelles demonstrates Jiang Wenye’s versatility in handling various musical resources ranging from Japanese lullaby to Schönberg’s atonal experimentation, and from Chinese festive music to European impressionist pieces. But as a whole it presents not a coherent sequence but a fragmented constellation of timelines, occasions, themes, and sentiments. The pieces may appear to achieve a familiar formal closure, but their haphazard cross-references and untenable moods are such that they threaten at any moment to collapse the rhythmic order as well as its contextual grounding. This encapsulates the increasing uncertainty of Jiang’s sensibility while Tcherepnin’s influence loomed ever larger. Tcherepnin welcomed Jiang’s change, however, and he helped publish the work and frequently played select pieces.

But for Jiang 16 Bagatelles was only his first encounter with China, beyond which he felt there must be something more “Chinese” worthy of his pursuit. Resounding in this belief are Tcherepnin’s suggestions that Chinese composers should not occupy their time merely imitating European music; “they should try to interpret Chinese national music using modern notation and writing for instruments of an international character.”41 To follow Tcherepnin’s advice meant for Jiang recognizing his own Chinese identity in the first place. An exiled Russian composer and his Taiwanese disciple from Japan were ready to create a new music they believed best represented China.

In March 1938, Jiang Wenye took a teaching position at Beijing Normal College, which would result in his staying in China for good. Accounts of Jiang’s decision to leave Japan vary,⁴² but the Chinese vision he acquired from Tcherepnin no doubt was a major impetus. Between 1938 and the mid-1940s, Jiang proved how such a vision could take his career to a climax of both creativity and productivity. He produced at least six orchestral pieces, four piano sonatas, more than one hundred and fifty art songs for solo voice and piano, five musicals (two unfinished), theme music for two movies, and three poetry volumes. Almost all these works centered on the theme of lyricizing China. A few citations of their titles will suffice: Koto sobyō 故都素描 (Sketches of the old capital), The Music of the Confucian Temple, Kōhi den 香妃傳 (Princess Xiangfei), Shunkō kagetsu no yoru 春江花月夜 (Night by the river with flower and moon). It is particularly noteworthy that Jiang composed music for classical Chinese poems by Li Bai and Du Fu, and that he held at least three concerts to perform his works.

Nevertheless, this was wartime between China and Japan, and Beijing was under the rule of the puppet regime. While millions of Chinese were being killed, incarcerated, forced into exile, or ruled under surveillance, Jiang Wenye’s career thrived. As a Taiwanese from Japan, he was treated as an overseas Japanese citizen, and as such he carried on a relatively comfortable life throughout the war. He married a talented Chinese student, Wu Yunzhen 吳韻真, although he never divorced his Japanese wife, Nobu Koh 江信子.43 He was commissioned to compose the anthem of the New Citizen Society (Xinmin hui 新民會), an organization of Chinese collaborators, though he did not join the society. Meanwhile, Jiang’s determination to compose music with a distinct Chinese character became stronger than ever.

Thus in 1939, Jiang premiered The Music of the Confucian Temple, the centerpiece of Jiang Wenye’s works during the war. By all accounts, this orchestral piece represented a breakthrough not only for Jiang’s career but also for the history of modern Chinese music. Its relinquishment of Western orchestral conventions, inquiry into the conceptual nuances of classical Chinese music, and play with the cultural connotations of Confucian musicology appeared to be a far cry from the mainstream of Chinese music up to 1937. It also was Jiang’s final answer to Tcherepnin’s call for modern music in a national style. Jiang allegedly found his inspiration when attending the annual ritual at the Confucian Temple in Beijing. He claimed to have been so moved by the solemnity of the ritual, as well as by the rich concepts behind the songs and dances, that he wanted to compose a piece of music to present Confucian philosophy at its most exquisite. After all, what could be more authentic than Confucian ritual and music for expressing the essence of Chinese civilization?

The Music of the Confucian Temple comprises six movements, each referring to one of the six stages of the memorial rite in its traditional form. The first movement, “The Welcome of the Spirits” (Yingshen 迎神), andante quasi adagio, conveys the solemn and stately mood of the ritual. Amid the string and percussion instruments, a Buddhist chantlike melody starts in the 7th measure and recurs in variations throughout the subsequent music. In correspondence to the chanting melody, a second motif arises in the 31st measure, a hymnlike chord in praise of Confucius the Great Master. The 57th measure introduces, amid brass and woodwind instruments, the third motif, which articulates the procession of the ritual members. The three motifs interplay to create a rhythmic harmony in welcoming the spirits. The following three movements, titled “First Sacrifice” (Chuxian 初獻), “Second Sacrifice” (Yaxian 亞獻), and “Third Sacrifice” (Zhongxian 終獻), constitute the central part of the piece. “The First Sacrifice,” lento tranquillo, moves in a tranquil rhythm, underscoring the elegant “literary dance” (wenwu 文舞) at the ritual; “The Second Sacrifice,” largo misterioso, appears to be more active, in approximately the tempo of the “military dance” (wuwu 武舞); “The Third Sacrifice,” andante tranquillo con tristezza, which culminates with the “human dance” (renwu 人舞), is grand but pensive in tonality, as it brings the whole sacrifice to a close. The fifth movement, “The Removal of the Sacrificial Feast” (Chezhuan 徹饌), con modo composto, represents a relaxed appreciation of the ritual just accomplished. The music concludes with “The Departure of the Spirits” (Songshen 送神), andante quasi adagio sostenuto, which features a combination of piano and brass instruments in unison, followed by a return to the mood of solemnity from the beginning.44

Jiang’s works before 1938 were characterized by vital rhythmic organization, chromatic and skipping melodic lines, clear texture and bold harmony, and a strong tonal clarity, but The Music of the Confucian Temple is the opposite in character: reductionist in arrangement of sounds and highly restrained in mood, almost to the point of being monotonous. Such an effect was carefully conceived of, however. “The greatest music is that which sounds the easiest and simplest” (dayue biyi bijian 大樂必易必簡), as the ancient teaching goes.⁴⁵ To restore Confucian ritual music in its original form, as he believed it should be, Jiang took on an archaeological task, plowing through ancient documents; he even wrote a book, Jōdai Shina ongaku kō: Kōshi no ongaku ron 上代支那音樂考：孔子の音樂論 (A study of music in ancient China: Confucius’ treatise on music, 1942), to substantiate his discoveries.⁴⁶ Behind Jiang’s analysis lies Tcherepnin’s theory that “the native tune of Chinese music is characterized by the pentatonic chord . . . its tune consists in perpetual variation of the same melody and the melody always progresses”; “towards the end of the piece . . . the melody adapts itself to the new rhythm.”⁴⁷ As Jiang proudly claimed, “only pentatonic scales were used in this piece, but it will not make the audience feel simple or bored.”⁴⁸

What truly makes Jiang Wenye’s new project interesting is that it was created in a modernist spirit. It may not be all coincidence that where he arranges Confucian pentatonic chords in the simplest modes, they echo modernist compositions, especially those in line with Schönberg’s exercise of atonality.49 Jiang’s resemblance to the Austrian composer has been pointed out by critics.⁵⁰ Both deplored the “regression of listening” of their times, and both invested in their compositional strategy a visionary claim. Whereas Schönberg employed atonal arrangement and chromatic chords as a way to deconstruct the sonorous philistinism of European modernity,⁵¹ Jiang experimented with Confucian chords in hopes of retrieving the sacrosanct simplicity that was missing in current Chinese (and Japanese) music. Nevertheless, compared with Schönberg and his followers, Jiang Wenye made one more twist: he had to not only understand the European avant-garde spirit and skill but also put them in service of a goal—restoring Confucian music—that people would repudiate at first, as the least avant-garde. In other words, if Schönberg’s tonality struck his audience as something unprecedented, Jiang derived his iconoclastic power by reclaiming a lost tonality—a past whose rules were no longer or never had been available. When critics complained about Jiang Wenye “being too far away from the need of the time . . . lingering amid the ruins of traditional forms of Chinese music, therefore losing his critical capacity,”⁵² they may have overlooked the fact that before he discovered the “ruins of Chinese music,” Jiang was in the first place a student of Western modernism. He proceeded much too far ahead of his Chinese peers, and the path he took was too radical even by contemporary Western standards; as a result, his attempt to renew Chinese music was easily taken for mere fetishism of the past.

That Jiang Wenye was able to keep The Music of the Confucian Temple as both an antiquarian tour de force and an avant-garde experiment merits more attention, as it reflects the most obscure part of Chinese modernist discourse. Insofar as he intended to reconstruct the quintessential melody of Chinese music, The Confucian Temple shows Jiang’s ontological desire for contact with the ancients. He was keenly aware that the music of Confucian times was long lost (or had never existed), and that despite his painstaking research, he had to reinvent that tradition by putting together bits and pieces from various sources and periods, re-creating them using his modern skill. In so doing, Jiang may well be aligned with the reformist tradition of classical Chinese literature and scholarship, called by Stephen Owen “reactionary reforms,” in which the past is valued more than the present or future, and the antiquity proposed to be restored could not be a revival of the past, as it was at least partly an imaginary construct projected from the present.⁵³

I would argue nevertheless that Jiang’s effort was more consequential than a reactionary reform. Besides his limited primary school experience in Amoy, Jiang Wenye had hardly been exposed to Chinese antiquity; his knowledge of Chinese music and history was acquired mostly through Japanese connections. When he strove to regenerate Confucian music, therefore, he could not have engaged in a reactionary reform, as did those Chinese scholars well informed by their legacy. For Jiang, the Confucian tradition was more likely something he had never previously inhabited, protected as he was by his doubly colonial status. To call on Confucius through ritual and music, therefore, was an adventure of constructing a lost identity and rehabilitating a truncated lineage—a task that a diaspora is uniquely capable of undertaking. Instead of reactionary reform, The Music of the Confucian Temple meant for Jiang Wenye an imaginary re-formation, a bold invention of the past for the sake of the present.

The term fayue 法悅 (hōetsu), like the more commonly used faxi 法喜, is derived from the Buddhist text the Huayanjing 華嚴經 (mahā-vaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra), where it means the pleasure of epiphany one experiences at hearing the teachings of the Buddha.⁵⁵ Jiang Wenye believed that Confucian music was an art form that no longer relied on stimulated sensory excitement. With simple orchestration, it touched instead the deepest niche of one’s mind and evoked immense quietude and fullness.

Based on this theme of “divine bliss,” Jiang Wenye wrote A Study of Music in Ancient China: Confucius’ Treatise on Music (1942), an analysis of ancient Chinese music and its conceptual framework in light of Confucianism. Jiang opens his argument by calling attention to the close ties between music and the state in ancient China; he holds that politics was always already inherent in the conceptualization and production of music. But here politics is to be understood in terms of Confucian sage kingship rather than power maneuvering.⁵⁶ Jiang observes that music (yue) and ritual (li) constituted the two pillars of the ideal state in ancient times. Whereas ritual prescribed the rules of propriety, music helped orchestrate human and cosmic movements into a systematic whole. He cites from the Liji 禮記 (The book of rites) that “music is that which unites heaven and earth in harmony; ritual is that which places heaven and earth in order. Because of harmony, things can be cultured; because of order, things can be differentiated.”⁵⁷ Music, accordingly, takes precedence over ritual in forming the universal order.

Jiang Wenye takes pains to draw out a genealogy of Chinese music before Confucius in part two of A Study of Music. He first casts doubt on various mythological origins of Chinese music, such as Fuxi 伏羲 being its originator. Instead he surmises that Chinese music may have originated with the Greek tradition as represented by Pythagoras, “Confucius’ contemporary.”58 With the Book of Rites and other select sources as major references, Jiang then describes how music first came into existence in ancient times as a response to the rhythm of cosmic and human movements. It became a significant part of civilization when it was invoked in conjunction with ritual. With the invention of various instruments, music evolved into an elaborate form in accordance with rulers’ needs. The early Zhou dynasty, in Jiang’s view, represents the moment when music and ritual reached mature forms, and jointly they enacted a harmonious political order. Jiang deplores that such an ideal form of music was ignored in Confucius’ time, in deference merely to the institution of ritual. Worse, in the hands of corrupt rulers, music became a vehicle of decadent mores and base tastes. Thus when Confucius set out to reinstitute music and ritual, Jiang proclaims, he meant not only to restore a concordant form of life but also to anticipate a universal chain of being as harmonious as the melody conceived by ancient sage kings.

Throughout his study Jiang reminds readers that Confucius was in the first place a gifted musician as well as a critical musicologist. The master is said to have been born in a chaotic time when music had lost its prestige, yet he vowed to reform it as the first step in reconstructing the political order. Jiang cites numerous examples from the Analects and other sources, illustrating how Confucius did not just teach but lived in music, and how he linked his artistic, ethical, and political visions in recourse to music. The highest performance of music, accordingly, is the realization of ren 仁 or benevolence, the core of Confucian virtue.

Jiang Wenye’s archaeological analysis of Confucian music as that which helps bridge polity and morality may not sound original to Confucian scholars. But in it is an allegorical subtext that bears both personal and political significance. One can hardly miss Jiang’s projection of his own predicament and aspiration onto his account of Confucius as a musician. Particularly in the book’s third part, a biographical survey of Confucius’ engagement with music, Jiang inserts a series of excursions featuring his own thoughts and comments, thereby enacting a dialogue between the stories he constructs for Confucius and for his own self-narrative. For instance, referring to the famous account in the Analects that “the Master heard the shao in Ch’i [Qi] and for three months he did not notice the taste of the meat. He said, ‘I never dreamt that the joys of music could reach such heights,’”59 Jiang comments, “in our time of high speed, or super-high speed, that someone should forget about the attraction of the flesh because of his immersion in music perhaps appears to most people a sign of either inertia or total boredom.”⁶⁰ Later he claims that “speed has taken away the spirit of endurance required of a musician,” and

All musicians have cast their eyes on radio and record . . . the music they are producing is really not for self-accomplishment so much as for self-promotion. They are thinking first of how others may think of their works . . . Musicians and composers of this type prioritize fashion and strange effects . . . a phenomenon prevalent not only in Japan in recent decades but also in the rest of the world . . . everyone is either dazzled or dumbfounded by one trend or movement after another . . . . But whatever frenzy it might bring about, crude music is crude music. Only works that embody human awareness can truly call on human awareness.⁶¹

Jiang Wenye’s criticism brings to mind “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production” (1936) by his contemporary Walter Benjamin.⁶² Jiang could not have known Benjamin, but in an almost Benjaminian manner, he opposes the modern cultural industry to the fading “aura” of the traditional mode of art production. And insofar as he tries to retrieve the nirvanalike state of divine bliss, he reflects Benjamin’s yearning for a revelatory moment. “Good” music, as Jiang would have it, should transcend the quagmire of philistine consumption, crossing time and space so as to restore the plenitude of Confucian humanity—ren. But for all his discontent with modernity, Jiang derived his energy and inspiration from modernism. In other words, he shared Benjamin’s ambivalence toward the modern age, as both a melancholy reminder of a bygone era and an anticipatory index to the future, revelatory (or in Benjamin’s case, revolutionary) moment.

To be sure, there are huge differences between Jiang and Benjamin beyond this comparison. What engages me are questions such as: How do Benjamin (as German Jew) and Jiang Wenye (as Taiwanese Japanese) entertain their respective diasporic ambiguities, distancing themselves from their societies while searching for a belief other than what they grew up with? While Benjamin harbored beneath his revolutionary criticism a longing for a mystical messianic aura, how did Jiang come to terms with his “divine bliss” amid the battle cries of wartime?

Let us return to Jiang Wenye’s famous declaration that his music, like air, renders neither happiness nor sadness, existing nowhere and everywhere, and therefore it transmits a state of celestial elation. He regards the “divine bliss” thus generated as the key to Chinese music at its most subtle, but recent scholarship has found that this notion may not all come from Confucian musicological discourse. As Lin Yingqi points out, Jiang owes the concept of “divine bliss” to his teacher Yamada, who as early as 1922 was already using it to describe the sensation he felt in listening to music by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1919). Scriabin’s work is concerned with compelling and otherworldly visions; his symphonies, such as The Divine Poem and The Poem of Ecstasy, were composed to evoke a mystical feeling that transcends life and death, and “to foster a collective joy.”63 The Poem of Ecstasy was introduced to Japan as Hōetsu no shi 法悅の詩 (Poem of divine bliss). At that time, Yamada was commissioned to compose music for modern poetry by poets such as Kitahara Hakushū 北原白秋 (1885–1942). He found that the way Wagner integrates text into music could no longer satisfy him. Instead, he was “enlightened by Scriabin’s works” and “regained courage to strive toward the goal of ecstasy and divine bliss.”⁶⁴

Through Yamada Kōsaku, Jiang Wenye managed to transform a Russian composer’s mystical belief into something quintessential to Confucian music. As he claims, this music is like “a light air, flying gently into heaven, conveying the wishes and prayers of those on earth. Through this music, the worshipers acquire a certain inspiration, thereby creating an atmosphere that unites heaven and earth harmoniously.”⁶⁵ This leads back to the intriguing trafficking of sounds and thoughts between Jiang Wenye and his contemporaries. The aura of Jiang’s ideal music could not have arisen from his imaginary communication with Confucius, any more than from his dialogue with the Japanese and European masters, from Yamada Kōsaku to Alexander Scriabin and Tcherenpin. The “divine bliss” he professes, accordingly, is not merely the sonorous revelation of Confucian benevolence but a reverberation of the modernist call for undoing the world as it was.

China constitutes one of the most important themes of modern Japanese imperialist discourse. Although “depart from Asia and join Europe” had revealed Japanese nationalists’ determination to abandon the China-centered world—its politics and Confucian ideology—in favor of the European-style nation-state,⁶⁷ the lure of China, even just for her economic and cultural resources, never diminished but underwent a creative transformation. Indeed, military campaigns and colonial rules aside, there arose in the late Meiji and Taisho period a craze for “Chinese flavor” in intellectual pursuits and the arts.⁶⁸ Confucianism had been a major intellectual source in Japan for centuries; it took an intriguing turn at this time in response to the rise of modern Japanese imperialism. At its best, it provided a platform for Japanese scholars to enact a comparative study of Eastern and Western intellectual imports; at its worst, it lent the rising military power an ideological pretext by reinterpreting notions such as the “Kingly Way” (Oudo 王道)—an ideology suggestive of (Confucian) sage kingship—in support of imperialist expansionism. The rise of the “Cult of Confucius” (Koshikyo 孔子教), initiated by Unokichi Hattori 服部宇之吉 (1867–1939), was such a case.⁶⁹

Jiang Wenye was aware of the contesting voices of contemporary Confucian discourse. Through his music he nevertheless entertained a vision of Confucian sage kingship, an omnipresent, “apolitical” rule that would transcend all power dispositions at lower levels. Still, it remains debatable whether such a Confucian politics was free from the ongoing campaign of the “Kingly Way.” At least Jiang could not have disputed the fact that The Music of the Confucian Temple was composed during wartime and was first performed in Tokyo,70 and that his Study of Music was written and published with a Japanese audience in mind. Two more clues are significant. In the arts, the Confucian influence could be demonstrated by a series of essays by Takuma Hisashi 久志卓真 (1898–1974) on the relationship between Chinese music and masters such as Confucius and Xunzi. These essays were published in the magazine Ongaku shinchō 音樂新潮 (New tide music), to which Jiang Wenye was a frequent contributor; their writings sometimes appeared in the same issue.⁷¹ Jiang must have equally benefited from reading Sinologists such as Masukichi Hashimoto 橋本增吉 (1880–1956), whose book on ancient China was the sole reference Jiang quoted in The Study of Music. Hashimoto was known for his radical skepticism about the origin of Chinese civilization; most likely, Jiang drew from him the speculation that Chinese music originated in Greece.⁷²

However aloof he was to the war, it was hard for Jiang Wenye to steer clear of the political implications of his Confucian projects. When he talked about a music that harmonizes all differences, the tenor of the “Kingly Way” was ringing; when he celebrated Confucian benevolence, echoes of Japanese imperialist coprosperity were heard. In 1940, Jiang Wenye was turning thirty. The Music of the Confucian Temple premiered in Tokyo, conducted by Jiang himself and broadcast nationwide. Record production followed that summer, performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. This same year also saw the Japanese declaration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as well as the national celebration of the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of Japan. Jiang took part by composing Tōa no uta 東亞の歌 (The song of East Asia) for the dance production Nippon 日本 (Japan). Symphonia Universalis was composed as late as 1943, a piece inspired by the slogan “All Regions United as One Universe” of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Jiang’s opening remarks in A Study of Music that Chinese music developed in tandem with politics uncannily became a bitter footnote to his own musical activities during the war. Although he was involved on the periphery of the Co-Prosperity Sphere campaign, Jiang Wenye showed neither interest in nor commitment to Japanese military imperialism. He was yearning for a music that would transcend all human strife and worldly attachments, and for a short while he seemed to have found it, thanks to an unlikely circumstance. Still, his desired Confucian harmony had to succumb to the sound and fury of the time, and the state of “divine bliss” was no sooner attained than it had been contaminated by ideological gospels.

The musical politics of Jiang Wenye may have re-created the predicament besetting Confucius two thousand years ago. By the time Confucius came along, China had already been permeated with dynastic struggles and wars. If Confucius tried in vain to reinstitute music in anticipation of sage kingship, could Jiang Wenye accomplish this dream by calling on the ghost of Confucius, acting as final medium of the long-lost sacred chord? Whence the magic notes that would compel the sage king to return?

Jiang Wenye demonstrated a talent in poetry as early as he began his music career. Throughout his life, the dialogue between poetry and music continued to underlie his search for the ideal orchestration of sound. Jiang’s literary interest may have had something to do with his high school teacher Shimazaki Tōson 島崎藤村 (1872–1943), one of the most important modern Japanese poets in the romantic vein, who initiated him into the realm of lyrical poetry.73 In the early years of his career, Jiang also showed enthusiasm for the modernist trends of European art and thought, from Nietzsche’s philosophy to Baudelaire’s, Mallarmé’s, and Valéry’s poetry, as well as Matisse’s, Rouault’s, Chagall’s, and Gauguin’s paintings.⁷⁴ Jiang’s tour to Taiwan in 1934 inspired him to imagine a dreamland where sound, color, and other sensory stimuli corresponded in a mystical resonance—a synaesthesia. But this vision did not take on a more substantial shape until after he moved to Beijing in 1938. He became a productive poet in the early forties, alongside his thriving musical career.

Jiang composed three poetry volumes during wartime, Pekinmei 北京銘 (Inscriptions of Beijing, 1942), Daidō sekibutushō 大同石佛頌 (Hymn to the stone Buddha of Datong, 1942), and Fu tiantan 賦天壇 (Rhapsody of the Temple of Heaven, 1944). The first two volumes were written in Japanese and published upon completion in Japan; Rhapsody of the Temple of Heaven, Jiang’s first attempt at composing poetry in Chinese, was not published in Taiwan until 1992. The three works reflect Jiang’s immersion in his Chinese experience as well as his meditation on Confucian aesthetics, but close reading reveals a subtle dialogue among them. Inscriptions of Beijing provides a scattered, kaleidoscopic view of the cultural sites, street scenes, and sensory excitements of the city, with motifs ranging from sublime revelations to fleeting epiphanies. By contrast, Hymn to the Stone Buddha of Datong, a long narrative poem in praise of the stone Buddha sculptures in Datong, Shanxi Province, appears to be about an imaginary contact with the icon of mercy across the boundaries of time and space. The Chinese volume, Rhapsody on the Temple of Heaven, focuses on the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, the cultural construct that embodied for Jiang the architectonic beauty of music, a three-dimensional melodious mediation between the human and the divine. Throughout these poems are two sets of imagery: light, fragrance, air, and sound on the one hand; earth, stone, mineral objects, and their artistic representations on the other.

Inscriptions of Beijing is composed of four parts, each containing twenty-five short poems. Together with the prelude and epilogue, they constitute a cycle describing the architecture, seasonal changes, festivities, lifestyles, and rituals of the city. The volume opens with a prelude:

This feeling can be evoked only by the site of Beijing. The ancient city seems to have become a huge repository of sensory stimuli, compelling the poet to write at any sight or sound. From imperial palaces to back alleys, from casual street talk to changing sunshine, everything in Beijing touches Jiang, sending him through a spectrum of moods and inspirations as if he were undergoing the experience of xing 興 or poetic evocation. Thus, passing through the gate toward the Forbidden City, Jiang contemplates:

This leads to questions about the politics of Jiang’s light. Could it derive its power from the penetrating “Imperial Sun” of the Japanese empire? It is an omnipresent light that “inscribes” Jiang and enables him to inscribe in his turn Beijing as a shining city. Meanwhile, in either Buddhist or Platonic terms, light may well also refer to an illusory perception of the world, an amorphous form of knowledge.⁸⁴ Amid the glittering lights of Beijing, Jiang seems to grope for a vision of his own, and it is conditioned by both illusion and enlightenment, both blindness and insight.

As much as he was overwhelmed by Beijing culture, Jiang Wenye shows little indebtedness to Chinese poetry. While his use of short form may suggest the influence of haiku, it is French symbolism that underlies the Taiwanese poet’s works. The way Jiang builds each poem around a central symbol, idea, or figure, in a style of vers libre and word music, is similar to the works of Valéry and Mallarmé, both of whom he admired.85 Through the images of Beijing, he seeks to create a new sense of sonorous mobility and sentient intensity, thereby bringing out all the “correspondences” of verbal and figural images. He was so intoxicated by this city spectacle that he wrote,

In Hymn of the Stone Buddha of Datong, Jiang Wenye turns his attention to the stone sculptures in the caves in northern Shanxi. Jiang visited the caves in 1941 when he was commissioned by Tōhō (東寳) Studio to write music for a documentary film about the historical monuments of China, and he was deeply moved by the spectacular carvings. Again he creates fantastic motifs of light, air, and sound in praising the celestial serenity and all-embracing compassion embodied by the Buddha figure. But where Inscriptions of Beijing highlights a series of epiphanic encounters, Hymn of the Stone Buddha of Datong features a prolonged sequence of musings. In chantlike style, Jiang reflects on preserving the meaning of the weathered stone works through the passage of time and natural mutation. The Buddha sculpture, instead of locking the poet into intellectual and emotional gravity, sends him into imaginary flight through various eras and civilizations. Accordingly, the form of Gandhāra-style art and the thought of Socrates, the Christian belief of St. Francis of Assisi and the Superman philosophy of Nietzsche, the artworks of Da Vinci and Michelangelo and the music of Beethoven are all brought to bear on the radiant power of the Buddha and the universal vision of the poet.

Jiang Wenye’s search for a poetic articulation of divine bliss culminates in Rhapsody of the Temple of Heaven, his only full-length work in Chinese before the end of the war. Built in 1420, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing was the site where the emperors of the Ming and Qing paid homage to the direct source of their authority, Heaven. While Jiang Wenye was fascinated by the sacred ambiance and historical legacy of the temple, what struck him more was its spatial form, which is simple in design but rich in symbolism of seasonal cycles, zodiac movement, and magic numbers. The temple is surrounded by two protective walls; the outer wall has a taller, semicircular northern end, representing Heaven, and a shorter, rectangular southern end, representing Earth. If one stands at the center of the altar platform and makes a sound, it will echo because of the concavity of the surrounding walls.87 Moreover, the Hall of the Heavenly Lord is surrounded by an “echo wall,” which can transmit a person’s voice from one end to the other. In other words, the temple was built like an open-air sound box, with a surrounding acoustic capacity. In the old days when rituals were held, the musical instruments would resonate not only with one another but also with the architecture and the natural surroundings, creating a harmony presumably reaching Heaven.

With its immense capacity to communicate between Heaven and Earth, the Temple of Heaven serves as Jiang’s personal shrine through which he reaches the celestial state of music. He was so enchanted by the mathematical precision and the figural intricacy of the temple that he asked,

In the last part of Rhapsody of the Temple of Heaven, Jiang sounds increasingly meditative in describing zhong 中 (decorum) and he 和 (harmony). For Jiang, zhong means “a change without changes, a decorum that conceals endless possibilities of changes . . . only with simplicity of form can it withstand the eternal return of changeability.”90 Between decorum and harmony is a deep-seated sense of jing 敬 or reverence. Music—and its verbal extension, poetry—is regarded as the spontaneous flow of sounds that both embodies and encodes decorum and reverence.

THE WAY JIANG WENYE conceived of modern music and poetry leads to a broader issue: the relationship between the lyrical imaginary and Chinese modernity. Conventional wisdom has interpreted twentieth-century Chinese literature in terms of revolution and enlightenment, best represented by the Lu Xunesque calls to arms. By contrast, lyrical discourse has been downplayed as either irrelevant to the “historical consciousness” of the time or secondary to the canon dominated by realism. As I have argued in previous chapters, this is a misconception. Lyricism, as a generic attribute, an aesthetic vision, a lifestyle, and even a political platform, should be recognized as an integral dimension of Chinese literati and intellectuals’ efforts to cope with reality and configure an alternative vision of modernity.

In the introduction to this book I call attention to the late Czech Sinologist Průšek, who has described the dynamics of modern Chinese literature as pulled by two forces: the lyrical and the epic. Whereas the lyrical refers to the discovery of individual subjectivity and a desire for emancipation, the epic refers to the making of social solidarity and a will to revolution. The lyrical and the epic, accordingly, indicate not so much generic traits but rather discursive modes, affective capacities, and most important, sociopolitical imaginaries. The two modes have fueled the momentum of one generation of Chinese in their struggle for modernity. Therefore, modern Chinese history can be read as chronicling the dialectic progression from the discovery of individual subjectivity to the celebration of collective subjectivity, from the lyrical to the epic.⁹¹

Průšek believes that the lyrical serves not as impediment, as would have been assumed by fellow leftist ideologues, but as impetus to the realization of the epic. While the lyrical may suggest Western (and Japanese) romanticism and individualism, it derives its distinct bearings more from premodern Chinese “lyrico-epic” sensibilities. That is to say, despite their antitraditional postures, modern Chinese literati inherited from premodern literature, particularly poetry and poetic discourse, a style as well as mannerisms on which to model a modern (collective) subjectivity.92 At their most polemical, the lyrical and the epic need not be mutually exclusive terms; rather, they are mutually implicated: whereas a strident command of collectivity and revolution may originate with and culminate in lyrical ethos (as in the case of Mao Zedong’s poetry), a lyrical articulation against the unison of the time may become a political statement in its own right (as in the case of Shen Congwen’s essays in the 1950s).

Jiang Wenye’s music, poetry, and theoretical treatise on Confucian musicology can be understood as part of this lyrical discourse in 1930s and 1940s China. It is true that his works in Chinese were not made available until decades later and that he had little significant contact with contemporary Chinese writers, but this need not keep a literary historian from thinking of Jiang’s contribution to the discourse. As a matter of fact, precisely because of his ambiguous national identity and belated participation in the modern Chinese cultural scene, Jiang’s promotion of Chinese music and poetry—Confucian poetics and musicology in particular—provides a unique angle from which to “defamiliarize” the polemics of modern Chinese literature.During a time dominated by an epic tenor, he brought to the fore the slippery conditions of imagining a lyrical China.

Jiang Wenye understood the fundamental linkage between music and poetry. Confucius’ saying, “be stimulated by the Odes, take your stand through the help of the rites, and be perfected by music,”⁹³ may very well be the foundation of Jiang’s idea that poetry is an inchoate stage of musical engagement, a verbal approximation of sonorous harmony. Jiang may also have acquired other sources on music, the most prominent being the transcendental tradition represented by Laozi’s notion that “the greatest melody is that which renders the most modest sound” (dayin xisheng 大音希聲) and Zhuangzi’s upholding of “heavenly chords” (tianlai 天籟). Whereas the humanist tradition confirms the bond between music and the social and universal order, the transcendental tradition sees music as a pure acoustic reverberation of the human and inhuman worlds.⁹⁴ If the former stresses the ethics of music, the latter leans more toward the aesthetics of music.

How Jiang Wenye shuttled between these traditions, negotiating their different premises through his own practice, constitutes his contribution to modern Chinese music and poetry. A follower of the Confucian belief in edification through poetry (shijiao 詩教), he nevertheless repudiated the mimetic tie between social mores and musical representation and sought instead a pure form that manifests a rhythm coming from nowhere and ending nowhere. Thus he is a modern respondent to Ji Kang’s 嵇康 (223–264) famous treatise, “Shengwu aile lun” 聲無哀樂論 (Sound contains neither sadness nor happiness), which expresses that music is a pure form of nature, subject to neither affective influence nor sociopolitical conditions.95

Jiang’s eclectic inclination is emphatically represented by his notion of he 和 (harmony). In the Confucian discourse, harmony refers to an acoustic chain of being held together in terms of the emanation of ren. In the transcendental tradition, however, harmony refers to the mutual illumination, and absorption, of the animate and inanimate sources of sound; the ultimate effect has little to do with ethical order and is more a value-free state, “beyond happiness or unhappiness”—hence “divine bliss.” When he invoked harmony in terms of both ren and “divine bliss,” Jiang was at the same time testing the boundaries of artistic creation in terms of both self-cultivation and self-dissemination (into the cosmos).

Jiang Wenye was not alone in promoting music and lyricism in light of classical resources in China at this time. Literati like Zong Baihua 宗白華 and Shen Congwen 沈從文 also offered a musical approach to Chinese intellectual and literary modernity respectively. Zong Baihua acquired his aesthetic training in the Kantian/Hegelian vein during his stay in Germany between 1921 and 1925, and was equally influenced by a Chinese philosophical discourse rooted in the Yizhuan 易傳 (Commentary of the Book of Changes). Thus he was able to develop a comparative look at modern civilization by suggesting that Western civilization presupposes a schematic configuration based on abstract intellect, while its Chinese counterpart is based on a continuous interflow between cosmic movement and lived human experience. He considers the conceptual framework of Chinese civilization one of “number” (shu 數) versus “figure” (xiang 象). By “number” Zong means the formation of logos (li 理); by “figure” he means a tropic manifestation of the world, endowed with life forces, ever ready to generate a multitude of variations of the logos.⁹⁶ Zong believes Chinese culture is orientated to the “rhythmic force of vitality” or qiyun 氣韻, an aesthetic and emotive notion traceable to the Six Dynasties. As opposed to the Western metaphysical system, which is defined by mathematical abstraction, this Chinese world of “number” and “figure” finds its best manifestation in music. The rhythmic and lively flow of music is an assertion of the ceaseless dialogue between mind and nature, time and space: “‘To demonstrate the object and to formulate the figure’: [Artistic spirit] is eternally in the process of creative progress; it is a space that is imaged, emotionalized, structured, and musicalized.”⁹⁷ Zong concludes that “Confucian metaphysics is a philosophy of musical nature.”⁹⁸

Shen Congwen, as described in preceding chapters, is the most important figure bridging music and lyrical literature in modern China. Shen repeatedly indicated that his first love was poetry, but the emotional demand of poetic creation was such that he had to take up a less challenging form, narrative fiction, as an alternative.99 Through writing, he hoped to bring into play the fiction writer’s self-consciousness of the difference between what is told and the telling of it, and the poet’s effort to fill the gaps between signs and sounds. Such an endeavor aimed to unveil the “the divine nature” (shenxing) hidden in the world. Still, Shen concedes that to express this divine nature, “language is inferior to painting; painting is inferior to mathematics; mathematics is inferior to music.”¹⁰⁰ Music derives “from fantasy a beauty of amorphousness and ceaseless flow”;¹⁰¹ it is the musical form that “elevates life from the state of secular concerns to a state transcending gains and losses, rights and wrongs, love and hatred, in coexistence with an ‘image’ of configuration. Only a set of sounds reverberates in total quietude, representing the purity of life.”¹⁰²

There are fascinating echoes among Jiang Wenye, Zong Baihua, and Shen Congwen. For them an arguable “reality” does not represent itself; it is represented. By describing Chinese reality in terms of a lyrical mode, they not only question the privileged position of realism but also redraw the conventional boundary of lyricism. In welding incongruous rhetorical/acoustic forms and subject matters, they attempt to mold man’s immensely complex emotional capacity to cope with the built-in contradictions of any ideal moral/political order. A discourse of lyricism enables them to prioritize the creative force of language and sound and the freedom of human perception. Their emphasis on poetic and musical expression is confirmation of a writer’s/artist’ freedom to “figure” out the world. At its most acute, their view of text and world dissolves the distinction between prose and poetry, and poetry and music. They assert the fundamentally figurative—that is to say, musical—nature of all languages.

But as argued before, this lyricism entertains it own aporia, such that it could hardly survive the demands of the time. When patriotism and revolutionism prevailed, a musical contemplation of the “rhythm of life,” “divine nature,” or “divine bliss” was bound to appear irrelevant, to say the least. Thus Shen Congwen sighed, “Music in the past could clean minds and souls without any weight and capacity of its own, making them shiny and pure. But it is of no significance in our time.”103 Unlike his Chinese peers, Jiang was not directly affected by the national crises thanks to his colonial Japanese identity. But he could not have been unaware of the fact that ritual had collapsed and music had become corrupted (libeng yuehuai 禮崩樂壞), as the Confucian saying goes, in both China and Japan. When he talked about the necessity of cultivating benevolence and reverence through the edifying power of music, he could not do away with the specter of nihilism looming over his discourse. His upholding the sage’s “teaching of music” echoes not only how Confucianism was appropriated by Japanese invaders for propaganda purposes but also how, even within Chinese history, it has always been used by different regimes to affirm political legitimacy.

Thus, we turn to three moments in Rhapsody of the Temple of Heaven in which Jiang tries to bring the lyrical sounds of the past to bear on the present. Each moment, however, generates a tension between the lyrical and the epic. In section 9, chapter 1, Jiang praises the calm ambiance of the temple:

Nevertheless, in his celebration of the refreshing, evocative power of springtime, Jiang may have risked simplifying the dialogical relationship between benevolence and statecraft,¹⁰⁷ thereby making his quote serve the nihilist aesthetics of colonialism. The lyrical vision endorsed by Confucius both conditions and is conditioned by a polity that embodies benevolence—a point with which Jiang opens his treatise on Confucian music. In the midst of war, if the Temple of Heaven under Japanese occupation is not comparable to the Rain Altar in Zeng Xi’s comment, how could Jiang expect a springlike music that would illuminate benevolence, harmony, and reverence during wartime?

As if offsetting his own wishful thinking, Jiang Wenye makes another lyrical reference in the following lines:

More than twelve hundred years later, Jiang Wenye found himself wandering in the Temple of Heaven, an imperial structure preserved as a modern memorial, recalling the Tang poet’s thoughts about the immensity of heaven and earth. But he was certainly not thinking of defending China against foreign invasion, let alone reflecting on the terms of loyalty or loyalism. Where the Tang poet expressed pathos about the ruined terrace, the Taiwanese musician felt overwhelmed by the architectural sublimity of the temple. Instead of shedding desolate tears, the poet sounds puzzled by his time. Nevertheless, the poem continues with the following lines:

Jiang was imprisoned for ten months and was jobless and penniless after his release. In 1947, by coincidence Jiang’s talent became known to Father Gabriele Maria Allegra (1907–1976), the Franciscan priest later canonized for his Chinese translation of the sacred scriptures, and at the latter’s invitation he began to compose Chinese-style psalms for the church. Upon the publication of the first volume of Melodiae Psalmorum, Jiang wrote that he first came to know the psalms as early as his high school years. He placed them on the same level as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Valéry’s poetry, never thinking of a musical representation. But the Confucian melody he had been working on gave him new inspiration. He tried to set some of the old Chinese tunes with psalm texts and found they matched nicely:

Indeed, all along he had had in mind not religion as such but a kind of music so pure as to convey the “divine bliss” of sound. It is a modernist embrace of sound across temporal and spatial boundaries; it is also a renunciation of the worldly attachment starting with selfhood: “Great music is that which identifies with heaven and earth.” This accidental encounter with the psalms would mark the last triumph of Jiang’s career.

On the eve of the Chinese Communist takeover of the mainland, Jiang had the options of going to Hong Kong, Rome, or Taiwan, but he decided to stay, due to his deep love for Beijing. In 1950 he was assigned to teach composition at the newly founded Central Music Conservatory in Tianjin, and he was able to produce quite a number of piano and symphony pieces in the next seven years. In this new “epic” era, Jiang’s wish to create a “great music that harmonizes heaven and earth” had to be redefined: the people’s music was supposed to change heaven and earth so obviously and completely as to generate one great hymn.

Even then, Jiang was able to compose symphonic pieces such as Miluo chenliu 汨羅沉流 (Drowned in flows of the Miluo River). This piece was created in commemoration of the 2,230th anniversary of the death of Qu Yuan 屈原. It shows Jiang’s retreat to his early romantic traits; in addition to the standard orchestral arrangement, Jiang highlights woodwind and percussive instruments to bring out traces of Bartók and Prokofiev, as well as Chinese religious music.

Then came the disastrous years. In 1957, Jiang was labeled a rightist for his criticism of the Party and his deeds as collaborator during wartime. His Taiwanese identity again became suspect, as he liked to “talk about the Taiwan issue.”114 He lost his job, but worse, more than one thousand original compositions were confiscated and forever lost. Jiang continued to compose against all odds, however. During the Cultural Revolution, he went through one trial after another, like many other intellectuals and artists. When he returned to Beijing in 1973 after four years of labor reform, he was a frail old man tormented by numerous diseases.

In early 1978, twenty-one years after he was labeled a rightist, Jiang was rehabilitated. He again started to compose a new piece, Ali shan zhisheng 阿里山之聲 (The voice of Mount Ali), about Taiwan’s foremost scenic landmark. But he collapsed into paralysis one night in May, and was bedridden with apoplexy for the next five years. Jiang died on October 24, 1983; The Voice of Mount Ali was left unfinished.

Throughout his life Jiang Wenye was seeking a sound, a sound that might resonate with both the aboriginal melodies of Mount Ali and the ritual music of the Confucian Temple, both the fantastic cadences of natural Taiwan and the avant-garde rhythms playing in the metropolises of Japan and China. At his most ambitious, he re-created Confucian lyricism in such a way as to provide an outlet for his own radical inclinations. But Jiang’s project was conceived and rendered in epic time, in the sense not only that he composed amid political upheaval and social turmoil but also that he had to let his lyrical drive reverberate with the “tempo” of his day. At his best, he managed to work regardless of battle cries, bringing forth melodies seemingly free of the echoes of his time; at his worst, he was driven into total silence.

Therefore, where The Voice of Mount Ali suddenly stops, one has to rethink Průšek’s framework. Perhaps what most distinguishes Chinese literature and art is not its progression from the lyric to the epic, which seems to have stumbled by the end of the century, but the continued recurrence of lyrical articulations despite—or because of—the calls for epic unison. To examine the conditions and consequences of the lyrical in epic time is therefore to look into a most vulnerable, and most valuable, part of Chinese musical and literary modernity.