New York Qin Society

Festival of Ancient Music from China
the Qin and the Konghou
拊絲懷古 -- 音樂講座簡介

Program for the
New York Qin Society’s
Colloquium of Early Chinese Music
Sunday, February 11, 3–5 PM

Marilyn Wong Gleysteen and Bo Lawergren  王妙蓮,勞鎛
Aspects of Chinese music between 7000 BCE and the 10th century CE   概論公元前七千年至公元十世紀之中國音樂

We discuss several categories of musical instruments that archaeologists have recovered in China to provide a background to the classical qin-zither and the kunghou angular harp. Starting with the crane-bone flutes recovered at Jiahu (7000 – 5800 BCE), we delve into the ceramic drums (4300 – 1900 BCE) of the Neolithic period. With the subsequent bronze age of the Shang dynasty, inscriptions found on “oracle bones” of this historic period (ca.1200 BCE) reveal the existence of string instruments. In addition to the bronze ritual vessels and fine jades found at Anyang and other sites, drums, bells, stone chimes and ceramic ocarinas recovered from these tombs all testify to a rich musical culture in ancient China. In subsequent dynasties, new instruments such as the early qin, came into use, and survive in other major archaeological tomb sites such as those of the Marquis Zeng of Yi, Mawang Dui, Xishang qiao, Li Shou and Wang Chuzhi. With the cultural traffic of the Silk Road, foreign instruments such as the konghou-harp were introduced. The earliest excavated zithers come from sites in the Warring States period (403-221 BCE). Using extant and reconstructed examples, as well as depictions of music making on early ceramics, bronzes, burial chambers and in paintings, we document the rich and varied development of music through the Five dynasties period. (30 minutes)

Yang Yuanzheng  楊元錚
Japonifying the Qin: Ogyū Sorai’s Kingakutaiishō   江戶琴學的日本化：以荻生徂徠的《琴學大意抄》為例

The treatise Kingakutaiishō, compiled by the Japanese scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728) in the early eighteenth century, draws on the only two surviving sources of qin music and qin-music related materials pre-dating the thirteenth century: manuscripts Hikone, Hikone-jō, Hakubutsukan V633 and Tōkyō, Tōkyō Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, TB1393. By way of bibliographical and historical analysis, this paper seeks to examine the motives that informed its preparation and the reasons for its continuing influence across the eighteenth century. Written in Japanese and comprising merely seventeen sections, Kingakutaiishō has been looked upon as a short introductory essay prepared for non-literati musicians. However, Sorai’s writing, which manipulates the facts behind a mask of naïveté, is an emotional and ideological force to be reckoned with. His studies of music were not intended solely for academic purposes. Rather, they can be viewed as a manifestation of proto-nationalism, for Sorai treated qin music as preserved in the two manuscripts as a cultural “trophy” and thus claimed for Japan the role of privileged repository of Chinese orthodoxy. (20 minutes)

Stephen Dydo  戴德
Contemporary Performance of Tang Melodies  唐韻今聲

When faced with the prospect of preparing early music for modern-day performance, one may successfully employ a number of possible guidelines for one’s approach, depending on preservation of manuscript sources and performing tradition. These possibilities may include one or more of the following:

Faithful presentation: The musical material is rendered as faithfully as possible to the existing sources.
Traditional presentation: Such performing tradition as still exists, or as can be reconstructed, is used to determine appropriate aspects of the performance.
Reconstructed presentation: A lost performing tradition is reconstructed to create a methodology for realizing a performance.
Modern presentation: The melody is treated as a “found object” and is realized according to modern-day musical sensibilities.

The current project uses combinations of these four to produce concert realizations of pieces originally written down in the Tang dynasty, and existing in early Japanese ms. Two of the pieces were originally notated for wuxian, a five-string pipa played during the Tang, and whose music has come down to us in a single source. The others are from the Tōgaku repertoire. These pieces have been realized for performance on three instruments: a replica of the konghou (Japanese kugo), an angular harp played in the Tang which fell into disuse shortly afterward; a recreation of the wuxian; and the qin. In the course of creating pieces for contemporary concert performance, reference has been made to the original source material, the Tōgaku realizations of other pieces (which have been used as a guide to ornamentation), and speculation as to possible konghou and wuxian techniques. Knowing that some konghou and pipa players were known for a brilliant technique, I introduced a number of virtuoso devices.

The original Sino/Japanese sources were analyzed and transcribed into Western notation by five scholars working in the 1960s to 1990s at Cambridge University, England. The project was started by Dr. Laurence Picken and brought to fruition by his students Rembrandt Wolpert, Elizabeth Markham, Allan Marett, and Jonathan Condit. Their pioneering work produced a virtual gold mine of ancient tunes. (20 minutes)

John Thompson 唐世璋
Qin Music from the Time of Marco Polo 馬哥孛羅時期之古琴音樂

In The Travels of Marco Polo, Polo claims that he went to Hangzhou some time after the Mongols entered the city in 1276 CE. There is almost certainly qin music that survives from earlier than this period, but other than the melody You Lan, preserved in Japan, there are many problems in trying to establish the dates of the music. In his presentation John Thompson will discuss issues in dating qin music thought to survive from the 13th century and earlier. The talk will be illustrated by some of the recordings he has made of the music in question.

Since 1974 John Thompson has been playing qin, and since 1976 he has focused on reconstructing music published in the earliest qin handbooks. His website, www.silkqin.com, includes over 60 of his recordings of this music, while his article “Historically Informed Qin Performance” gives details comparing the reconstruction of early qin music with the reconstruction of early Western music. For further details, see See also his web-links: http://www.silkqin.com/01mywk/themes/marco.htm (30 minutes).

The speakers
All speakers are members of the New York Qin Society except for Yang Yuanzheng, who currently is spending a year at Princeton University on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. He received his B.E. in structural analysis from Peking University and M.Phil. in historical ethnomusicology from The University of Hong Kong. He is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include: manuscript studies, musical archaeology, history and theory of East Asian music.

音樂演奏節目表 Program for the Concert

新聞槁 Press Release

照片 Photos