Conference Agenda

The dependence of religious ritual and imperial governance upon harmonious music functioned as a unifying link throughout traditional Chinese thought (Brindley, 2013). However, sustained musicological attention is needed to excavate this nexus from surviving qin repertory. One promising place of entry is found in the work of late sinologist, Rao Zongyi, for whom the piece “Shenren Chang” (神人畅) typifies a genre that celebrates the connection between divine forces and human political concerns (2022). This paper first substantiates Rao’s claim through Song Dynasty scholar Zhu Changwen (1041-1098), whose definitive Qin History collates the associated origin myths: legendary founding emperors of China encountered divine apparitions while playing qin and subsequently received guidance on benevolent governance toward ecological and societal harmony.

Relating the relevant myth to the extant version of “Shenren Chang” (Xilutang Manuscript), the verbal descriptions of qin master, Ding Chengyun (b.1944), are next consulted. Credited as the piece’s modern revivalist, Ding cites various historical treatises to offer a sacred reading, which is then supplemented by my own resourcing of ancient timbral theories and modern choreographic qin-interpretation (“Sansheng lun” 三声论 ; Yung, 1984). The resulting program not only showcases the piece’s two prominent individual themes as divinity (“shen” 神) and humanity (“ren” 人) but also highlights their eventual climactic convergence through motivic, timbral, and registral interplay, thereby sonically portraying harmonious interaction between divinity and humanity narrated by the myth.

Moreover, the surprising verbatim echo of various “Shenren Chang” motifs in the only other extant “Chang” piece, “Nanfeng Chang” (南风畅), strongly suggests a compositional consciousness of genre, further corroborated by the two pieces’ proximate imperial myths. The striking correspondence encourages a concluding exploration into possibly concentric musical and narrative relationships that ripple into other thematically similar, contemporaneous pieces. What emerges is a continuous plot of divine encounter through shifting mise-en-scène that parallel a historical trajectory from direct divine encounter to secularized, Confucian mediation in Chinese religious thought. This critique explains modern reinterpretations that suppress or distort spiritual aspect of the piece. The proposed revival of “Chang” as generic category thereby reshapes our understanding of thematic expression and sacred evocation in ancient Chinese music.

In this paper, I examine the ontological aspects of musical practice and performance as performable work in Chinese Qin music. David Davies (2018) proposes that the classical ontological paradigm involves multiple artwork instances as performable works that “prescribe certain things to performers.” I specifically draw on his framework for two kinds of performable works: p-instances (replicable performances) and e-instances (unique interpretative performances). I argue that qin pieces present complex cases to these ontological questions as performable works since they are unique yet replicable in their performance practice. Qin students learn from pre-existing transcriptions of a piece as a strict paradigm and aim for an exact copy of the “traditional” performance of the work. The student who becomes a qin master could then develop a new interpretation or a new transcription (dapu) of the same piece. In the first case, a qin student is involved in the p-instance of a qin performable work since the performance is reproducible. In the latter case, a qin student creates an e-instance of a qin performable work that serves as a new epistemological paradigm for later p-instances.

I present two performance semiotic analyses of Meihuasanhong, exploring how performers Wu Jinglüe and Sou Si-tai embody different semiotic meanings of the plum blossom (meihua) topic (Dai 1999, Xu 2000). Recorded about fifty years apart, their performances of the same song present distinct meanings that are contextualized by their disparate biographical and socio-political history. Besides a structuralist analysis of qin music (Lam 1993), I employ both analytical and interpretative semiotic approaches for my performance analyses of these two recordings. I propose that the differentiation between p-instances and e-instances in qin music is further nuanced by the semiotic interpretations assigned by listeners, revealing a dynamic interplay between musical structure, interpretation, and social-historical context. Qin performance as performable works, as I showcase in this paper, are defined both by their analytical and interpretive semiotics (Dunbar-Hall 1991). This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the performative and semiotic complexity of qin music within the broader context of the history of Chinese qin performance, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Unlike a “fidelity to the score” approach by performers of Western classical music, traditional guqin composition is a collective and diachronic process closely intertwined with performance (Lin 2002, Liu 2002). This is partly because traditional guqin tablature, jianzipu, describes finger positions and techniques in detail, which imply pitch and timbre but omit precise rhythm dictation. To supplement rhythmic information, performers either rely on aural transmission from tutors or build new interpretations from the tablature (Wu 2009). Furthermore, musicians actively revise original scores with additions or abridgments and record these new versions. In this way, composing never stops, involving various musicians over centuries, which goes against the grain of singular compositional authorship, as seen in Western tradition since the 19th century (Jamason 2012). However, with Westernized conservatories established in China to train composers from the early 20th century China (Stock 1996), composing has become a separate occupation, disrupting the traditional performer-as-composer relationship. For instance, contemporary professional composers use Western staff notation instead of traditional tablature and do not necessarily play the instrument for which they write. Their composing is detached from performance.

This paper explores how composers and performers respond to these new dynamics and the consequent notational shifts in contemporary guqin music. In fieldwork, I work with a composer to compose and premiere a guqin solo work and report features of this collaboration. As professional composers are not necessarily able to play the instrument, performers are expected to demonstrate and give suggestions that result in score changes, but composers hold authority in decision-making. Furthermore, I report ethnographic data on composers’ and performers’ attitudes regarding “fidelity to the score” and different fingering interpretations caused by notational shifts. Performers show high freedom in different interpretations or even deviance from the score, and composers generally accept such phenomena as secondary creation. Performers’ initiative to influence the creation of composers’ scores and their high level of interpretative freedom inherits the traditional performer-as-composer pattern in the new occupational division within contemporary Chinese music.