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The
musical instruments displayed in the exhibition Music
in the Age of Confucius have provided our earliest
concrete evidence for understanding the music of ancient
China. The research on these instruments published
in the accompanying catalogue has also contributed
greatly to the scholarly exchange between China and
America. As a Chinese scholar, I am pleased to be
part of this exchange in today's symposium.
The discovery of the bell chimes from the tomb of
Marquis Yi of Zeng in 1977 has generated intense interest
over the last twenty years in ancient China's musical
instruments, and has contributed greatly to our understanding
of China's ancient musical history. Even so, these
studies were mostly preoccupied with questions of
pitch (or frequency) measurements and pitch standards
in ancient times. Due to a lack of available data,
questions such as "How were the instruments used in
performance during the age of Confucius?" and "What
was the music like?" remained unanswered. According
to historian Ban Gu of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-AD.
220), this information was as good as lost by the
first century A D. Although actual instruments like
those from Marquis Yi's ensembles have survived from
ancient times, no written music is extant, and there
was little hope for reliable recreations of ancient
musical performances. In the spring of 1994, the Shanghai
Museum acquired a group of about 1,200 inscribed bamboo
slips (strips) that may have been removed from the
tomb of a late fourth- or early third-century B.C.
nobleman at Ying, the capital of the ancient state
of Chu in modem Hubei province (central China). Our
studies of these bamboo slips reveal that they include
various texts on music of the late Warring States
Period (480-221 B.C.): Confucius's Discourses on Music
(Kongzi ShiLun),MusicforPoems (Shi Yue), and various
unrecorded poems. In ancient China, poetry was an
integral part of music, poems serving as lyrics to
songs.
The text I want to talk about today, Music for Poems,
did not survive intact. Written neatly on seven bamboo
slips are the titles of over forty poems and the pitches
to which they should be performed. One title can be
found in current editions of the ancient Classic of
Poetry (Shi Jing); the remaining forty-some titles
are similar but not identical to those in the anthology
. Perhaps these titles represent poems that were,
for whatever reasons, excluded from the Classic of
Poetry. This is the first evidence of its kind to
appear in over 2,000 years. More importantly, these
titles were preceded by musical designations. One
or several poems can be grouped under the same designation,
each composed of two parts: (I) the name of the tone
(as in do-re-mi) in the musical scale and (2) their
secondary affixes. The names of four of the five tones
in the scale of Chinese classical music appear on
these titles (gong-shang-zhi-yu or do-re-sol-la).
Of the nine secondary terms listed, only two (mu and
he) appear on the inscriptions on Marquis Vi's bells;
the rest are unknown to us until now. We do not know
if these nine secondary terms correspond to specific
names of pitches or pitch standards in Chu music,
but it seems likely that they referred to popular
melodies in the ancient Chu capital. Nothing like
these pitch designations was known until now. The
inscriptions on these bamboo slips tell us that each
poem was performed to a specific tune, and that the
tune could not be changed arbitrarily in performance.
This suggests that a highly sophisticated and regulated
musical system was already in place by the late Warring
States Period.
These
bamboo slips reveal that there were at least four
named tones to the Chu scale and forty song titles,
thirty-three of which are complete with pitch designations.
Because the seven bamboo slips do not form a complete
and continuous sequence, some musical information
has been lost. Viewed overall, these slips appear
to form some kind of table of contents for the Music
for Poems, organized according to pitch designations.
It
is also clear that these composite musical designations
were written in at least two ways, with the tone name
(do-re-mi) presented as either a prefix or suffix
to the secondary term, A similar phenomenon occurs
among the inscriptions on the Marquis Vi's bells,
where a lower pitch is expressed by using the tone
name as a prefix, and a higher pitch is expressed
by using it as a suffix. What this means in the performance
of individual pieces remains unclear: It is unusual
to have such surviving records of musical performance
because according to traditional texts like the Record
of Music (Yue Ji), musicians were merely accomplished
"technicians." They were not educated musicologists
like the nobles they served. That is why there were
few written records of the mechanics of musical performance,
and why the contents of these bamboo slips have come
as such a surprise.
The
ancient Chu capital of Ying in modem Hubei Province
was a major center of musical culture along the middle
Yangzi River Valley .The term Yingqu (Ying melody)
was synonymous with its special brand of music. An
early third-century B.C. record of performance at
the capital describes the audience's different reactions
to different melodies: when a singer performs Xiali
and Baren (folk songs), several thousand in the audience
sang along; when a singer performs Yang'e andJielu,
several hundred sang along; when a singer performs
Yangchun and Baixue, no more than a few score sang
along. Although these titles do not appear among the
contents of the Music for Poems, those that do often
suggest popular love songs, for example "Thinking
of You," "Your Longings for Me," "Everything about
My Husband is Lovable," "Why Didn't You Listen to
Me," etc. In these titles, we can get a hint of some
of the local tunes sung in the ancient Chu capital.
As
these titles are not included among the 300 pieces
of courtly ritual music of the Classic of Songs, they
may represent the popular but short-lived "hit" songs
of the time. Judging from the presence of parts of
another text written on the back of one bamboo slip,
it seems that these slips might have been considered
insignificant enough to be reused for other purposes
before they were buried. We are lucky indeed to be
able to capture a glimpse of Chu's ancient musical
culture through the miraculous preservation of these
bamboo slips.
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