Whitewashing Chinese music

The idea that Chinese performers on Chinese instruments playing Chinese music might be guilty of whitewashing seems preposterous, yet I'm going to suggest that whitewashing occurs here, and to no small extent.

Within China, over the past close to two centuries, with Westernisation of the Chinese society, European culture has become the idea of a representation of high culture, modern organisation, a system focused on scientific rigour and understanding. This perceptual shift is a widespread movement throughout various levels of the Chinese society and not restricted to music alone. Western science, western systems of thought, and even western musical systems were being hailed as advanced, as the direction the Chinese had to go in order to be a part of the modern world. This was understandable, with China losing out swathes of land and power since the Opium Wars to the Europeans. What was in the past an ancient and powerful civilisation was so reduced, it was inevitable the Chinese believed that a different way of government, education, philosophies, an entire different way of doing things had to be implemented for their civilisation to be on par with the rest of the world.

Music was no different. The early 20th century saw promotion of singing in schools, bringing music education to the younger generation of Chinese. What is known as school-songs (学堂乐歌) were in fact Westernised melodies with new lyrics. Music education reform was carried out by many idealistic individuals who had the opportunity to go abroad to further their studies. Having learnt the musical tradition of European art music and seeing its systematic organisation of theoretical knowledge, most of them wholeheartedly embraced these philosophies, believing that this was the reform that the Chinese culture needed. From the early 20th century onwards, music in China took on a whole new set of ideas, philosophies, aesthetics, and structure. This was not to say that traditional Chinese music was totally wiped out or that the philosophies and aesthetical ideas of the past few thousand years no longer influenced the people, but it was a fact that this new music from Europe impacted the ideas and musical culture of China significantly from the early 20th century.

While there is the constant revival, conservation and work done for the folk and classical traditions of China, it is an indisputable fact that a significant extent of the idea that people have of Chinese music is the music of the "Chinese orchestra". The development of the Chinese orchestra will not be detailed here but readers can be directed here for slightly more detailed description of its development.

With the basic premise of the Chinese orchestra modelled upon the symphony orchestra of European art music tradition, the aesthetics of how the sound should be like is gradually being influenced as well. The full Chinese orchestra set up as we know of now is not built from a single group of instruments from a particular folk instrumental ensemble, but from different kinds of ensembles all around China. One difficulty arising from this is the fact that these instruments were not built to blend together because they did not originate within the same ensemble in the first place.

Within folk instrumental ensembles, there are various instruments that have very unique sounds and it is precisely because of these unique sounds that contribute to the particular ensemble's defining characteristic. When they come together in the Chinese orchestra however, all these various characteristic sounding instruments unfortunately might not work very well together. In attempting to emulate the symphony orchestra, instruments are being grouped into four instrumental families, much like the instruments in the symphony orchestra. With the creation of these instrumental families, it is inevitable that people also tend to parallel them in comparison.

Take the bowed string section for example. Although both groups of instruments produce sound through the bowing of strings, the similarity pretty much ends there. While performers especially competitive young professional musicians fresh from years of gruelling training from the conservatory will like to emphasise that whatever the violin can do, so can the erhu, and that is quite true - almost all the violin techniques can be performed on the erhu, and there are numerous technically virtuosic pieces in the violin repertoire that have been played just as well by performers on the erhu - they are still fundamentally different instruments. The structure of the instruments are very different with the erhu sounding with a membrane versus the wooden soundboard of the violin. There is no fingerboard on the erhu as well and the angle the bow makes on the strings is different from that of a violin. With all these fundamental differences, it is a sad fact of life that many erhu performers still take the ability to perform virtuosic pieces from the violin repertoire as one of the important goals in erhu performance. While finding ways to challenge and break technical limits is important and always welcome, it is unfortunate that sometimes it overshadows other forms of achievement in the performance of a Chinese musical instrument.

Chinese instruments have been seen as being built less scientifically than western musical instruments. Although this idea is slowly changing, it is nevertheless a very deeply ingrained one. The idea of musical instruments from another culture being less "well-built" is hard to shake off when the standard is being set with the ability to perform pieces equivalent to the European art music repertoire in musical systems based on the European art music culture. Definitely it is a boost to the ego when one can say that one is able to perform a certain piece of music just as well on the erhu as any other good violinist can on the violin, it is unfortunate however that this in fact perpetuates the believe that for the musical culture of the Chinese to be good, one has to aspire towards the achievement of European art music standards. This in fact is a circularity that turns in on itself. Instrument makers and researchers are at the same time constantly developing various ways of improving on Chinese musical instruments and many of the improvements sought after are precisely how to make them "comparable" to western musical instruments. Making instruments whose sounds "blend" better together in the orchestra, trying to increase the instruments' resonance and sound (an erhu can never match a violin in terms of volume) and even experimenting with different materials for the instruments are some examples of these developments. The results are instruments that sound good in the orchestra, instruments which are easier to play, and so on, and these are definitely welcome for performers. But at the same time, isn't "sounding good in an orchestra" a very Eurocentric point of view? What does a "good sound" imply?

All these build up an extremely intricate web that is very difficult to unravel. With the development of the Chinese orchestra being so influenced by European art music, the direction musical aesthetics of the Chinese orchestra takes has already been set, from the early days. While not set in stone, it is still a direction which, unless the entire performance practice of the Chinese orchestra were to change radically, is still going to be moving in the same general course. Yet at the same time, even with its borrowing of all the European traditions, there are elements that are different. While I argue that the whitewashing of Chinese music is a matter of historical fact, I am also at the same time, believing that music, art, and culture are always evolving, and always borrowing from other traditions and cultures. With communications and huge ease of accessibility, this is going to be even more so in the current time. And that should not be something to be feared but recognised. Influences should be acknowledged and new developments embraced.

Origins of the names of the degrees of the scale, "gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu"

The degrees of the scale "gong [宮], shang [商], jue [角], zhi [徵], yu [羽]" are terms which have been in use in Chinese music since the ancient times. The "Commentary of Zuo [左傳]" mentioned the fact that regardless of what type of songs it was, regardless of the area it originated, regardless of the type of scale used, the five tones (of the anhemitonic, tonal pentatonic scale) was the basis of the notes. In the chapter "Discourses of Zhou [周語]" within the book "Discourses of the State [國語]", it was mentioned that "gong" was the starting point in the creation of the modes.

The next question was how these names came about. The musicologist Feng Wen Ci [馮文慈] believed that "gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu" arose from astrology. "Gong" represented the centre of things, and that was the Big Dipper. "Shang, jue, zhi" were three stars within the Azure Dragon of the East, one of the four symbols of the Chinese constellations. "Shang" was Sigma Scorpii, "jue" was Spica, and "zhi" was Alpha Librae. Finally, "yu" was Alpha Crateris, a star within the Vermilion Bird, another symbol of the Chinese constellations. Feng believed that astrology played a huge part in the lives of the ancient Chinese and hence the reflection in the music of the people.

There is also Xi Jie Guan who believes that these names came about when the notes are being sung. In the text "Guanzi [管子], the notes "zhi, yu, gong, shang, jue" were likened to the sounds of the animals on the farm, from the lowest to the highest. "Zhi" was described as the grunts of the boar, "yu" as the neighing of the horse, "gong" as the calling of the cow, "shang" as the baa-ing of the sheep, and "jue" as the cries of the pheasant. Because the names of the animals sounded similar to the words "gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu" in the pronunciation of ancient Chinese, these words could have been derived from that.

As could be seen, these names of the degrees of the scale were already in place by the Spring as Autumn era, but musicologist Feng Wen Ci proposed that they could have arisen even as far back as Western Zhou, or the Shang dynasty.

Music was a mysterious phenomenon to the ancient Chinese and hence the common 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 that we take for granted now was associated with something as far reaching as the skies, or as important to life as the livestock on the farm.


References:
Liu, ZS. (1989). Zhong Guo Gu Dai Yin Yue Shi Jian Shu [中國古代音樂史簡述]. Beijing: Ren Min Yin Yue Chu Ban She.

Chinese Music briefly

Chinese music encompasses several different genres, the more prominent ones being: folk music; traditional music; and art music. These various forms of music represent not only the traditions of a single ethnic group, but of various ethnic populations that make up China. At the same time, they also include not only music that has been handed down through the generations, but also contemporary, living music.

Art music is a very big area to define, including not only pieces of music composed by past and present composers in China, but also compositions by composers who may be ethnic Chinese but do not reside in China, and who may or may not write for traditional Chinese instruments and/or based upon Chinese themes.

contemporary Chinese art music

Traditional music in China includes music that dates back more than 5000 years in China's history. In modern classification, scholars tend to categorise music that predates the Qing dynasty as traditional Chinese music. Traditional Chinese music can include court music [宫廷音乐], scholarly music [文人音乐], religious music [宗教音乐], and folk music [民间音乐]. Court music includes ritual music [雅乐] and music for entertainment [燕乐]. Ritual music is meant for religious activities in the courts and to signify the ultimate power and position of the emperor and is hence sombre and never light and lively. Court music for entertainment on the other hand usually derives from folk music or music brought in from other areas by foreign musicians. It is usually modified somewhat to suit the courts but usually retains the unique characteristics of the music it was derived from. Scholarly music includes guqin music or poetry set to music. The characteristics of scholarly music, especially that of guqin music has been exemplified in the writings and philosophies of several important thinkers in Chinese history and aesthetic values of ancient Chinese music has been based on these ideas.


traditional scholarly music

Religious music in China is mostly comprised of music for Buddhism and Taoism. These religious music however could vary quite widely in the different areas of China, as each derives influences from different cultural, historical, and geographical factors.

Folk music refers to music that is being performed and enjoyed by the common people and they include folk songs [民歌], music of folk dances [民间舞蹈音乐], folk instrumental music [民间器乐], operas [戏曲], and music for narrative-singing [说唱]. The folk music of China has a long history and at the same time, it is still very alive and constantly evolving even at the present moment. In the feudalistic society of the past, the literati thought of folk music as a base form of music and bad for the cultural development of the people. Yet, folk music continues to development and remain a very important part of people's lives. The folk music of China has became such a big part of the Chinese musical culture and presently, could be one of the most important forms of traditional music that influences the development of contemporary art music in China. The forms and types of folk music are so widely varied and the contents so rich that the influence to modern development is almost infinite. Even though the view towards folk music during the feudalistic past was far from complimentary, there are various eras in which the department in charge of music within the courts took an effort at collecting and classifying the folk music of their common people. These provide us with an idea of the types of folk music that were present during those periods of time and are a very important source of information. At the same time, the educated literati, besides collecting and classifying folk music, might do certain modifications or change the folk music in certain ways, slowly also infusing the folk music of the common people with characteristics of the music of the courts of scholarly music. Hence besides the common folks' practice of folk music and gradual change over time, these forms of interactions and influences by the literati and court officials are also part of the slow process in which folk music evolve through the ages. The folk music of China has been created and evolved through people's ideas and lives over the ages and in them, we can find very rich sources of artistic creativity, as well as the emotions, dreams, ideas, and passions of the people throughout the long history of China.

Types of folk music
The folk music of China could be divided into 5 categories: folk songs, music of folk dances, music for narrative-singing, operatic music, and folk instrumental music.

Folk songs could be classified in various ways. They could be grouped according to the contents of the lyrics; or they could be grouped based on their utilitarian purposes; they could also be classified by the period of time of their origin; or they could be divided into the various regions from which they come from.

Chinese folk song

Music of folk dances do not have as long a period of scholarly research as the folk songs of China and hence their understanding and classification are still in the stages of infancy. The music of the folk dances is often closely related to the folk songs of the area and hence one can usually see similar characteristics within the music.

folk dance

In narrative-singing, the classification is usually made up of pinghua [评话], guqu [鼓曲], kuaiban [快板], and xiangsheng [相声]. Amongst them, only guqu involves music and this group of genre could be further classified according to the instruments that are used, the area of origin, or the musical characteristics such as guci [鼓词], tanci [弹词], daoqing [道情], paiziqu [牌子曲], and qinshu [琴书]. Another way of classification is based on the musical structure and this includes danquti [单曲体], qupailiantaoti [曲牌联套体], banqiangti [板腔体], and zhuchati [主插体].

narrative singing

Operatic music has 2 different modes of classification - the first is based on the singing style and the second based on the musical structure. Based on the singing styles there are 6 different categories: kunqiang [昆腔], gaoqiang [高腔], bangziqiang [梆子腔], pihuangqiang [皮簧腔], folk singing and dance style [民间歌舞类型], and narrative-singing style [民间说唱类型]. Based upon the musical structure, there is qupaiti [曲牌体] and banqiangti [板腔体].

opera

Folk instrumental music consists of solo instrumental music and ensemble music. Solo instrumental music can be divided into wind instruments, bowed string instruments, and plucked string instruments. Ensemble music can be categorised into string ensemble [弦索乐], silk and bamboo ensemble [丝竹乐], wind and percussion ensemble [吹打乐], and percussion ensemble [清锣鼓].

traditional folk instrumental ensemble

Characteristics of folk music
Oral traditions, improvisation and group composition:
Folk music cannot trace their origin to a single composer, they are created through the long process of singing and passing on, and they are the result of the ideas of generations of people throughout history. Folk music is historically passed down through oral traditions and through this process, gets slowly changed. There is plenty of improvisation within folk music as well and because of the absence of strict adherence to notations, there is a continuous fluid change in every piece of folk music.

Regional:
Folk music has very unique regional characteristics. Various regions in China have developed very different cultures and ways of life through the years due to various geographical, historical, sociopolitical factors, and all these influenced the development of the music in that region. Different dialects result in regional differences in the ways a melody might be ornamented or sung. Differences in ways of life also creates different emotional loading of the music, as well as differences in the lyrics of folk songs. Different geographical and physical attributes also lead to differences in the ways a melody or rhythmic features develop, as well as differences in musical instrumentation.

Utilitarian:
Folk music serves various purposes and these could be: educational; to aid in labour; for entertainment; for festivities and rituals; etc.