'There is No Music- in Chinese Music History': Five Court Tunes from the Yuan Dynasty (AD 1271-1368)

JOSEPH S. C. LAM

'THEREno music in Chinese music history." This paradox is often exis pressed by music scholars in Hong Kong, a modem metropolis in which Chinese and Western musics and music scholarship mingle and thrive. Highlighting the contrasts between traditional Chinese and contemporary Western views of music and music historiography, the paradox refers to the scholars' observation that Chinese music histories include few descriptions of actual music, and that performances of early Chinese music are often inauthentic. Published accounts of China's musical past include little hard evidence about the structure and sounds of specific musical works. Thus, the scholars argue, the accounts are more theoretical than factual, and their musical descriptions disputable.' Public performances and recorded examples of early Chinese music reveal obvious use of Western tonal harmony and counterpoint, and thus cannot be authentic music from China of the past.' The scholars' arguments, however, cannot refute that in Hong Kong many Chinese music masters and audiences find the so-called early Chinese music authentic and its histories credible. The paradox raises many fundamental issues concerning relationships between the musical past and present, traditional Chinese and contemporary Western music historiography, and the dynamics involved in the reconstruction and perpetuation of a musical heritage. These issues lead to a barrage of questions, some of which can be presented as follows. What is a piece of early Chinese music? How do music scholars verify what it was and/or is? How is it incorporated into historical narratives of
I would like to thank Profs. John M. Ward of Harvard Univers~ty.Evelyn Rawsk~ and Bell Yung of the University of Pittsburgh, and Wdliam Prizer of the Un~vers~ty Cahforn~a,Santa Barbara of They read earlier drafts of this paper and offered many helpful suggestions ' Between 1988 and 1991 I taught in Hong Kong, and I often heard students and colleagues express t h ~ s paradox. (Beljing. 1981). In his Zhongguogudaz yznyue shzgao (Drafi Hrtfory ofAnnen& Chznese MWZC) the standard text of Chmese muslc h~story,Yang Yinhu devoted 800 (out of 1.070) pages and 50 musical examples to h ~ description of the h~story Chinese muslc from ~ t beginnmg to AD 1550 s of s Only four of these musical examples (nos. 9, 7. 8 and 14) are preserved in documents contemporaneous with the muslc being discussed. ' A representative commercial recording of such examples is SongJlong Barthz gequ shzqrthou tuoyu 1176-1196 nion (Seventeen Songs by Jaang Barchi Composed m 1176-96) (China Records, AL-50. 1986).

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Chinese music? Who formulates such narratives? For whom? Why? And how do such narratives relate to histories of Western art music and world music? Such questions have no easy answers, for they involve a multitude of issues in critical theories, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, historiography, musicology and sinology. Generations of Chinese and Western scholars have wrestled with the questions one way or another. Still their debates continue, discussing data and theories which transcend the boundaries between Chinese and Western musics, and which underscore the universal and theoretical nature of the questions.4 Through a case-study of five court tunes (hereafter referred to as tunes 1-5) from the Yuan dynasty (AD 1271-1368) of China, this paper discusses historiographical issues of methodology, objectivity, relevance and practicality. The tunes are preserved as notated music in a section of chapter 53a of the DaMing jili (Collected Ceremonies of the Ming), a multi -volume manual on Chinese court ceremonials compiled in 1369-70. (Hereafter, the section will be referred to as the source, and its host as the DMJL.) The tunes are hitherto unknown examples of Yuan dynasty court music; this paper is the first discussion of this repertory in any language. Being thus unknown to present-day Chinese or Western music scholars, musicians and audiences, the tunes have neither a reception history nor generally accepted meanings. They are ideal material for theoretical examination of historiographical issues.5 To present the tunes and to discuss the historiographical issues they raise, this paper proposes the following definitions and assumptions. Early Chinese music is defined as music which was created before 1550; which is transmitted to the present through words and notation only; and which is reconstructed and performed in the present.6 Early Chinese music is irrelevant to present-day musicians and audiences unless it is explained as historical music and performed as such. A history of early Chinese music is constructed with narratives which are formulated with verifiable evidence (words, notation, musical instruments and so forth) and non-verifiable hypotheses (historical constructs) which aim to explain
4 Three current publications on the questions, which also constitute a general foundation for this paper, are Liu Nianci et al , 'Yinyue shixue fangfalun yantao' ('Symposium on Methods of Music Historiography'), Zhongguo ymyuexue (1989/2), 66-89, Leo Treitler, 'The Politics of Reception Tailoring the Present as Fulfilment of a Desired Past', Journal of the Royal Mustc Association, 116 (1991), 281-98, Writing Culture The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford (Berkeley, 1986) ' For reasons why the DMJL remained unknown, see Joseph S. C Lam, 'Creativity Within Bounds State Sacrificial Songs from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)' (Ph D dissertation, Harvard University, 1988), 311-17 ' The year 1550 is a convenient dividing line in Chinese music history. No known genre of Chinese music can trace and verify that its performance tradition has been continuously and orally transmitted to the present from a time prior to 1550 In contrast, Kun operatic arias (Kunqu) and certain schools of qin (Chinese seven-string zither) music, which developed in the mid-sixteenth century and are still thriving, have contestable claims to such a kind of continuous oral transmission Historiographical issues concerning these twopther genres are related to but different from the issues discussed in this paper, which limits its purview to Chinese music created before_1550. I use the term 'early Chinese music' to draw an analogy-to the-early.music.of-the_West._The two^repertonesshare fundamental problems of performance practice, authenticity and relationships between facts and fiction For an introduction to theories of early music of the West, see Authenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford, 1988)

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music of the past.7 All narratives of early Chinese music are selective: the past cannot be comprehensively reconstructed and explained in the present, and can be viewed only through modern selective perspectives. This paper presumes that upon discovery of the notated source of the tunes, Hong Kong music scholars, masters and audiences would employ their typical methodologies and perspectives to formulate various narratives. Eight such narratives are hypothesized here, and arranged in the following sequence for convenience of discussion. These narratives would explain the tunes as:
(1) court music from the Yuan dynasty; (2) authentic court music from the Yuan dynasty, because the source and its transmission are reliable; (3) outlines of pitches which do not reveal full musical identities; (4) musical works with distinctive structural features; (5) specimens of banquet music and secular ceremonial music from the Yuan court; (6) musical works whose instrumentation and performance context are similar to other pieces of the above two genres; (7) evidence of musical exchange between different ethnic groups of Chinese people; (8) early Chinese music which can be reconstructed and performed in the present.

The above narratives are hypothetical but serve as case samples to identify verifiable facts and non-verifiable hypotheses in music histories, to analyse their formulation processes and to assess their practicality, acceptance and rejection in different musical and scholarly communities. Through these case samples, this paper argues for a Chinese music historiography that not only combines objectivity and cultural sensitivity, but also contributes to universal and theoretical understanding of music of the past. Tunes 1 -5 begin to exist as early Chinese music with the formulation of narrative 1: they are court music from the Yuan dynasty. The tunes have existed in notation for more than 600 years, but that existence has resided in meaningless receptacles of data from the past, and has neither historical nor musical significance for the present. In narrative 1, the tunes acquire a present meaning which is formulated with literal understanding of hard evidence, namely the words and notation contained in the source. Anyone who reads Chinese characters and has some familiarity with Chinese music history and notational signs would formulate this same understanding upon encountering the source. Headed 'Yuan yuequ' ('Tunes from the Yuan Dynasty'), the source includes 12 folios of words and notation. It preserves the tunes in 83 columns of gongche and lulu notation, specifying their pitches but not rhythm or any other details needed for reconstruction and performance
Robin George Collingwood, Idea of History (London, 1946), 231^19

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in the present (see Figure I). 8 In addition to the notated data the source includes the following verbal information: a list of ten song names, titles of the tunes, two technical terms and modal labels for tunes 4 and 5. There are no song texts. The list of ten song names, which appears at the beginning of the source, designates specific pieces of banquet music from the Yuan court. Three of the ten song names are common designations of constituent arias in musical dramas (zaju) or song cycles (santao) of the Yuan period.9 The titles of the tunes, which in each case precede the notation, are: Yeketangwu, Weixvuer, Weiwuer guopian, Siji wannianhuan (The Four Seasons in Ten Thousand Years of Happiness) and Wansuiyue (Music for Ten Thousand Years); Yeketanguru and Weiwuer appear to be Chinese imitations of non-Chinese words, and their meanings are, for the time being, unknown. The two technical terms refer to structural aspects of the music. The first term, guopian, which is appended to the title proper of tune 3, means 'an expanded version'. The second term, wet, which marks the last phrase of tune 4, can be translated as 'coda'. The modal labels mark specific phrases or sections in

t t

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notes describing matenals on the preceding folio tunes from the Yuan dynasty

Yeketangwu (tune 1)

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Figure 1. The first folio of the source, and its translated and simplified representation in English. (Note: Chinese documents are to be read from right to left and top to bottom.)

1 The lulu notation uses 12 terms to denote the 12 pitches inside an octave; the notation does not include symbols for rhythm. The gongche notation uses ten characters to denote pitch, the notation does include optional signs to indicate,rhythm..Rhythmic.signs are.absent.from the source For further information about the notational systems.see_Rulan_Chao_Pian, Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources and their Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass , 1967), 59-98. ' The names of all ten songs can be found in the Yuanshi (Standard History of the Yuan) (1370, Beijing Zhonghua shuju edn, 1976), 71 1773-7

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the notation of tunes 4 and 5, specifying modal categories with theoretical (proper) and practical (popular) terms. The narrative described above is a simple explanation, and its verifiable data and straightforward hypothesis are insufficient tojpecifyhow.the tunes are to be understood as performable music. A search for additional information would quickly lead to the conclusion that little is known about music in the Yuan court.10 Standard historical documents about the Yuan dynasty, such as the Yuanshi (Standard History of the Yuan) of 1370, testify to the existence of a variety of music: state sacrificial music, banquet music, secular ceremonial music, military music, recreational music and other genres. Thus, despite a lack of direct evidence, it is reasonable to presume that the tunes did exist in the Yuan court. With acceptance of this presumption, authenticity of the tunes becomes an urgent issue which cannot, however, be solved definitively. Past existence of the tunes is unrecoverable. One can nevertheless formulate narrative 2: the tunes are authentic because the source and its transmission are reliable. Equating musical authenticity with bibliographical reliability, the narrative is open to challenge, but it provides a justification for examining the tunes as early Chinese music and for constructing histories about them. Without the narrative, there is neither reason to pursue the tunes as early Chinese music nor a theoretical framework in which to examine the few pieces of surviving evidence. An investigation into the reliability of the source and its host, the DMJL, entails scrutiny of the bibliographical and historical data that are available. The DMJL is a Ming dynasty (1368-1644) manual on court ceremonials, which was compiled, upon imperial order, by Xu Yikui (1318-C.1400) and other scholar-officials during 1369-70. From descriptions found in standard documents of the Ming dynasty, such as the Wenyuange cangshu shumu (Catalogue of the Wenyuange Library) of 1440, the Ming Shizong Shuhuangdi shilu (Veritable Records of the Ming. Emperor Shizong) of 1577 and the Mingshi (Standard History of the Ming) of 1739, it is clear that the manual has existed in four editions: (1) an original edition of 50 chapters, which existed only in manuscripts and is now lost; (2) a 1530 edition, which has 53 chapters, was edited by Li Shi (1471-1539) and was printed inside the palace; (3) a Honan printed edition, a copy of which is now kept in the Gest Collection of Princeton University Library; and (4) the Siku quanshu (Imperial Library) edition of the 1770s, which is now available in facsimile printings. " 15 of the 53 chapters of the manual include extensive descriptions

10 There is only one known publication which specifically discusses music in the Yuan court of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Moerjihu's 'Yuandai gongting yinyue chutan' ('A Preliminary Study of Music in the Yuan Court1), Yinyue ytshu (1990), 16-23 1 ' For an introduction to documents about the Ming, see Wolfgang Franke, An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (Kuala Lumpur, 1968) For further details of Ming dynasty musical sources, see Lam, 'Creativity Within Bounds', 319-34 For general information on Chinese historical documents mentioned briefly, see Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China A Research Guide (Cambridge, Mass., 1975)

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of music (instruments, histories, theories, musicians, etc.). Seven of the 15 chapters (nos. 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 13 and 14) include lulu notation for Ming dynasty state sacrificial music. Only chapter 53a, which consists of 39 folios, preserves notated music from the Yuan court. The source for tunes 1 -5, i.e. the section that includes the notation, appears as folios 26-37v. The compilation and transmission history of the DMJL suggest that the manual is reliable. Compilation of the DMJL began in 1369, the year after the formal ending of the Yuan dynasty, an opportune time when information about musical practices in the Yuan court was still available. Many Ming scholar-officials and musicians, such as Zhu Sheng (1299-1371), Sung Lian (1310-81) and Leng Qian (c. 1310-1371), matured during the Yuan dynasty, and carried their musical-ritual expertise to the Ming court.12 That there was a certain continuity between the Yuan and the early Ming courts is now generally accepted among scholars of Chinese history.13 Compilation of the DMJL was part of a large-scale attempt to construct a new system of secular and religious ceremonials. Thus it is reasonable to hypothesize that the manual included reliable information. Such a hypothesis assumes that compilers of the manual made no editorial mistakes, chose typical examples and represented Yuan court music as it was. The assumption is optimistic, but there are no foolproof methods to identify inaccuracies, if they exist, in the DMJL. Subsequent editions of the DMJL have probably transmitted the contents of the manual faithfully. Court records indicate that the 1530 edition was prepared before manuscript copies of the original edition perished, and was produced as a replacement.'4 The 1530 edition differs from the original edition in certain features such as the number of chapters, but its faithfulness to the exemplar is obvious.15 As Figure 2 shows, the editor of the 1530 edition left blank spaces in the notation rather than substitute inauthentic text. These lacunae cannot have arisen through an omission in editing or printing, because the 1530 edition shows signs of meticulous production. It is inconceivable that the editor would have left such glaring spaces and have risked offending the emperor by presenting him with a defective manual. The only logical but non-verifiable argument is that the editor did not want to supply inauthentic materials; he did not dare tamper with a document that was respected as part of the legacy of the founder of the Ming dynasty.'6 The 1530 edition, of which only very few copies are now accessible for study, is
l! See their biographies in Dictionary of Ming Biography, ed L Carnngton Goodrich and Chaoymg Fang (New York, 1976) " A discussion of the continuity is Edward L Dreyer 'The Early Ming Period in Chinese History', Early Ming China A Political History, 1355-143} (Stanford, 1982), 1-12 " This is clear from a description in the Ming Shizong Shuhuangdi shilu (1577; Taipei Academia Sinica edn, 1962-8), 116 9a 11 Besides the differences in the number of chapters, the 1530 edition has textual discrepancies with contemporaneous documents over elements which were regarded as anachronistic None of these facts, however, casts doubt on the reliability of the DMJL- .See Lam, 'Creativity Within Bounds', 329-32 " See Emperor Shizong's preface in DMJL, 1-la-b Emperor-Shizong wrote that the DMJL preserves ritual guidelines from the founder of the empire that should be followed by all his descendants

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which is identical to that of tune 2 and the title proper of tune 3. Such matching of a distinctive title found in two contemporaneous documents cannot be accidental. At the least, it demonstrates that musical works with this title existed in the Yuan period. Whether tunes 2 and 3 are the same Weiwuer- heard by Tao Zongyi is -not an issue. Many Chinese musical works share a title; nevertheless, the appearance of a distinctive and identical title in two contemporaneous documents leaves no doubt that at least one musical work with this title must have existed. If the DMJL preserves music whose title is proved to have existed in the Yuan time, by that very fact the reliability of the document is enhanced. Second, the ten names of Yuan songs listed at the beginning of the source have counterparts in contemporaneous documents, such as the Yuanshi and Zhu Quan's Taihe zhengyinpu {Manual on Harmonious and Proper Music) of 1398. Third, the modal labels listed in the source also match those that are registered in Shilin guangji (A Comprehensive Record of the Forest of Affairs), a Yuan dynasty encyclopedia which included a considerable amount of musical materials of the time.20 Further corroboration of the reliability of the DMJL comes from historical data about the lulu and gongche notation used in the manual. The two notational systems were, by the fourteenth century, established means of representing music, and all scholar-officials and court musicians should have been able to use the notational signs accurately and reliably.21 The 12 lulu terms, which were first mentioned in the Liishi chunqiu (Spring and Autumn of Lu Buwei), prior to 235 BC, became standardized references to pitch by the Former Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 23), and appeared repeatedly in standard music treatises, such as the Yueji (Monograph on Music), prior to 7 BC. The exact date for the first appearance of the gongche notation as used in the source is not yet clear, but the system can be traced at least as far back as the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127)." By the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the gongche notation was widely known, and was even exported outside China. An example of such export is Lin Yu's Dashengyuepu (Collection of Dasheng Music) of 1349, through which Korean scholar-officials in King Sejong's court (1418-50) leamt 16 tunes of Confucian ritual music.23 If the lulu and gongche notation were, by mid-fourteenth century, established means of representing music, one has to presume that the compilers of the DMJL used the notation accurately. In other words, the notated music in the manual should be reliable. The above claim of reliability for the source, the arguments and the use of corroborative data, constitute the basis for formulating narrative 2: the tunes are authentic court music from the Yuan dynasty because the source and its transmission are reliable. The narrative is significant because it renders the tunes historically meaningful, even though it may
For an introduction to the encyclopedia and its musical contents, see Plan, Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources, 23-9. " There are many.references to the use of notation in the Yuan court See 'Zhiyue shimo' ('History of Instituting Music [in the Yuan Court]'), Yuanshi, 68 1691-9 " Plan, Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources, 59, 97-8 11 Robert Provine, Essays on Smo-Korean Musicology (Seoul, 1988), 116-33.
20

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only be a 'partial truth'. 24 If the tunes are inauthentic, they cannot be court music from the Yuan dynasty. Scholars and musicians can still examine the tunes as they are, but such an examination is not an exercise that engages China's musical past. If the tunes are authentic,_they constitute the earliest extant examples of Chinese music from the Yuan period. Qin (Chinese seven-string zither) music of the Yuan period may have been preserved in Zhu Quan's Shenqi mipu (The Mysterious and Precious Notation) of 1425, but such musical pieces are not yet identified. Yang Yinliu and other Chinese scholars have claimed that Yuan songs are preserved in the fiugong dacheng nanbeici gongpu (A Comprehensive Anthology of Texts and Musical Notation of Southern and Northern Arias in Nine Modes), but that document was compiled in 1746 and authenticity of the music awaits confirmation. Thus, for the time being, the tunes are the only readily available examples of Yuan dynasty music. As such, they give rise to many questions about themselves and about musical practices in the Yuan court. One must, for example, assess the musical information preserved in the notation. Such an assessment leads to narrative 3: as preserved in the source, the tunes are only outlines of pitches which do not reveal full musical identities. The lulu and gongche signs in the source constitute only an imprecise representation of music. The lulu notation, which identifies the 12 pitches inside an octave with 12 specific terms, is conceptually a precise system. In practice, however, it can only be a rough representation: its signs cannot reflect pitch variations which may have resulted from tuning differences. The Yuanshi reports that musical instruments in the Yuan court were appropriated from various peoples, and that there were different attempts at tuning musical instruments by different musicians." Lacking more specific information about the instruments with which the tunes were once performed, the lulu notation cannot be said to represent the exact pitches of the music. The same is true of the gongche notation which names relative pitches with ten Chinese characters. Since it originated from tablatures for wind instruments and is still widely used among traditional musicians, the gongche notation seems to be a faithful representation of pitches as they are performed. In reality, the rigid gongche signs cannot express the fluidity of pitch manifestations during performance. Exact pitch varies with, for example, the speed with which a flautist's finger covers a fingerhole on a flute, and the extent to which the hole is covered. Thus analysed (and conceived), the lulu and gongche notation can preserve the tunes only as rough pitch outlines. Furthermore, as the Hong Kong music scholars would observe, both the lulu and the gongche notation in the
For a discussion of the concept of 'partial truth' and its intellectual contexts, see James Clifford, 'Introduction. Partial Truths', Wntmg Culture, 1-26. " In addition to making new instruments, the Yuan government collected musical instruments from the Jin, Northern Song and Southern Song courts. For a brief survey of the different tuning standards used in these courts, see Yang Yinliu, Zhongguo ytnyue shigang (Outlme of Chinese Music History) (Shanghai, 1953), 288-300.
24

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source offer no information about rhythm, timbre, dynamics and other elements which are necessary for realizing and performing the tunes as audible music in the present. Still, the notation leads to narrative 4: even as rough pitch outlines, the tunes display distinctive structural features. Such a narrative is based on structural analysis of the tunes as notated music which is graphic and verifiable. This narrative is however not free of hypothetical elements. Structural analyses of notated music may include subjective and nonverifiable aspects. There is, for example, no way of knowing whether such analyses reflect the way people in the Yuan court experienced the tunes. Structural analyses of the tunes simply render the music meaningful to their analysts.26 The tunes share a similar general style (see Examples 1 -5). With regard to pitch, they employ scales which are essentially heptatonic. Tunes 2, 3 and 5 use the straightforward heptatonic scale C-D-E-F#-G-A-B or its transpositions. Tune 1 employs the scale C-D-E-F-F#-G-A, while tune 4 uses only six pitches within an octave (C-D-E-F#-G-G#). Tunes 2 and 3 have identical initials and finals, a feature which traditional Chinese music theory assigns to the demonstration of modal identity. Within the narrow tessitura of a sixth, tunes 1 -3 move mostly in seconds and thirds, displaying an undulating and flowing contour. The few repeated notes and large-interval leaps create only localized diversions. The melody of tune 4 is characterized by prominent semitone motion, while the melody of tune 5 is disjunct. The formal structure of tunes 1 -4 demonstrates no distinctive patterns, apart from a general regularity in phrase length. Tunes 2 and 3 share six identical musical phrases, the latter being an expanded version of the former. Tune 5 has a binary structure, whose eight phrases divide into two almost identical parts. With regard to structural relationships between individual pitches and phrases, tunes 1 -4 demonstrate a sense of musical coherence and flow that results from similarity between adjacent phrases, strategically located repetitions and a gradual introduction of new musical ideas. If the similar melodic patterns are conceived as basic musical ideas, they are the most prominent and memorizable features of the tunes. By comparison, tune 5 lacks such musical coherence and flow: its phrases employ strong cadences, prominent use of leaps larger than a third and contrast between adjacent phrases. The distinctive structural features of the tunes imply specific genres, identification of which might further clarify what the tunes are about, providing clues to when, why and how they were performed in the Yuan court. No known data explicitly identify the genres of the tunes or describe their musical features, but many clues implicitly lead to narrative no. 5: the tunes are specimens of banquet music and secular ceremonial music from the Yuan court.27
" See Leo Trenler's discussion of various types of analysis in his Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass , -1989), 67-78 - 27 There are various classifications of music in Chinese courts proper music or state sacrificial music (yayue), vulgar music (suyue), entertainment music (yanyue), non-Han music (huyue), out-

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Two verifiable facts strongly, though indirectly, suggest narrative 5. First, banquet music and secular ceremonial music are the subject-matter of the whole of chapter 53a of the DMJL. Second, external data confirm this interpretation of the nature of the tunes. The names of the ten songs listed at the beginning of the source also appear in a Yuanshi account of banquet and secular ceremonial music. The songs are registered as constituent pieces in four standard large-scale music programmes from the Yuan court - the New Year celebrations, imperial birthday celebrations, imperial auditions and devotional celebrations.28 Judging by the fact that the list of the ten songs and the tunes appear under the same heading ('Yuan yuequ'; 'Tunes from the Yuan Dynasty') and in the same document, one can presume that the songs and the tunes belong to the same genres. The tunes must have been intended as banquet music and secular ceremonial music, because they do not satisfy the criteria for state sacrificial music, military music or recreational music - i.e. for any of the prominent genres of court music.29 The tunes cannot have been state sacrificial music for the following reasons: (a) they do not carry formal and ritual titles; (b) they include no song texts, which are indispensable to express the ritual ideas of imperial sacrifices; (c) their musical structure does not match any extant texts of Yuan dynasty state sacrificial songs, all of which share a textual structure of 32 syllables/characters divided equally among eight phrases.30 The tunes cannot have been military music or recreational music: official ritual manuals, such as the DMJL, were not designed to describe such genres, and none of the manuals of court ceremonials produced between the fourteenth and late nineteenth centuries I have studied includes notation of either military music or recreational music. The distinctiveness of their titles argues that the tunes cannot have been recreational music practised inside or outside the Yuan court. Except for Tao Zongyi's reference, the titles of the tunes have no counterparts among the approximately 600 known names of Yuan songs, the most popular genre of secular and dramatic music during the Yuan dynasty. The evidence that the tunes may have belonged to two different genres of court music comes from the music: the structure of tune 5 is significantly different from that of the other four tunes. Tune 5 has a simple binary structure in which the second to fourth phrases are repeated (see Example 5). It is described and notated as a set of 12 modal
door processional music (yizhang), recreational music for leisurely enjoyment, and so forth To facilitate discussion, banquet music and secular ceremonial music, both of which belong to the general category of entertainment music, are defined as follows Banquet music was music performed as entertainment at court functions, such as banquet parties which followed New Year celebrations, coronations, and other formal and ntual activities. Secular ceremonial music was music performed to accompany secular ceremonies, such as a formal toast, in secular court functions. 11 'Yuedui'('Musical Orchestras'), Yuanshi, 71.1773-7 " The term recreational music refers to those genres emperors, noblemen and court citizens enjoyed privately and/or during their leisure. Such genres, which ranged from the seven-string zither music of the Confucian scholars to popular musical dramas, were also enjoyed by the general public Thus, those genres are seldom discussed as court music ' An example is the first song for a Yuan dynasty state sacrifice to Heaven and Earth, performed in 1302, which was entitled Qtanning zhi qu (Music of Heavenly Peace).

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Example 1. Tune 1: Yeketangwu

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Example 2. Tune 2: Weiwuer. 1

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Example 3. Tune 3: Weiwuer guopian. 1 2

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Example 4. Tune 4: Sijt wannianhuan.

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transpositions in the source. This modal feature is distinctive of ritual music in Chinese courts, reflecting the ritual-cosmological theory of the monthly rotation of musical modes: if a piece of ritual music is employed throughout the year, it must appear in distinctive modes in each of the 12 months.31 Thus, tune 5 may be ritual music. Furthermore, it may have been intended as secular ceremonial music because it cannot be sung as a state sacrificial song. If tune 5 is secular ceremonial music, then tunes 1 -4 must have belonged to a different genre of court music. They reveal such obvious differences in their structure that they cannot have belonged to the same genre as tune 5; theoretically, musical pieces of the same genre should share substantial similarity which is often found in their structure. Unlike tune 5, which is organized as two nearly identical parts, tunes 1 -4 are through-composed, and their structure demonstrates a distinctive musical coherence and flow (Examples 1-4). The above genre identification leads to questions concerning the instrumentation and performance context of the tunes, musical data which are needed to understand how the tunes sounded. Such data are not described in the source, and can be probed only on the assumption that musical works belonging to the same genre share basic features and that data about a musical work can be applied to other works of the same genre. Thus, one can formulate narrative 6: the tunes share similar instrumentation and performance contexts with other pieces of banquet music and secular ceremonial music from the Yuan court. In other words, the instrumentation and performance contexts of the tunes must be similar to those described in the four aforementioned standard programmes of Yuan dynasty court music.32 According to narrative 6, tunes 1 -4 were probably performed with one of the following types of instrumentation, which were employed for banquet music in the Yuan court: (1) the grand orchestra (dayue); (2) an ensemble of three flutes (longdi); three hour-glass drums (zhanggu), a small drum (Jingong xiaogu) and a set of wooden clappers (ban); (3) simultaneous performance by the grand orchestra and an ensemble of three flutes, three oboes (xianli) and two hour-glass drums; (4) simultaneous performance by the grand orchestra and an ensemble of three flutes, three oboes, three small hour-glass drums (zhagu), a handheld drum (hegu) and a set of wooden clappers.33 Tune 5, as secular ceremonial music, was probably performed by the terrace orchestra (dengge). Such understanding of the instrumentation is abstract, but it provides a theoretical basis from which to explore how the tunes sounded.
" Wang Mengou, 'Yueling', Ltjt jinzhu jmyi (Book of Ceremonial, Annotated and Translated) (Tianjin, 1988), 201-tO. " Yuanshi, 71 1773-7. " As described in the Yuanshi (71 1771-3), the grand orchestra included the following instruments, organ (xinglongsheng); pear-shaped four-string lute (pipa), 13-stnng fretted zither (zheng); four-string lute (huobusi), two-string fiddle (huqtn); metal-slab chime (fangxiang), flute (longdi); oboe (touguan), mouth organ (sheng); harp (konghou); gong chimes (yunluo); vertical flute (xtao); bamboo pole (xtzhu); suspended big drum (gu); hour-glass drum (zhanggu), small hourglass drum (zhagu); hand-held drum (hegu); seven-string zither (9m); three-hole flute (jiangdi); wooden clappers (paiban); bronze bowls (shuizhan) 14 As described in the Yuanshi (71.1700-5), the terrace orchestra includes the following instruments a set of bell chimes; a set of stone chimes; a one-string zither (qin), two three-string

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So far, this discussion has dwelt on technical details, and has offered no hints as to how the tunes and their narratives may contribute to the understanding of China's musical past. Are the tunes musical trivia which happen accidentally to have been preserved? Do they lead to narratives about the musical scene in the Yuan court? Are such narratives compatible with current histories of China's musical past? One answer to these issues is narrative 7: the tunes are evidence of musical exchange between different ethnic groups in China. This narrative is historiographically significant because it presents the tunes as rare and verifiable evidence to illuminate musical relationships between Han and non-Han peoples in the Yuan court. All current histories of China's musical past agree that non-Han music contributed much to the development of Han Chinese music, but they provide few clarifications.35 Such an inadequacy results from a scarcity of musical evidence and from the view that China's musical past and present constitute a continuous and essentially Han-Chinese tradition which absorbs foreign elements without losing its own distinctive characteristics, whatever those characteristics were and/or are. There is as yet no clear description of the musical exchange between Han and non-Han peoples during the Yuan dynasty, a period which followed centuries of ethnicpolitical struggles and which was politically dominated by Mongolians and other non-Han peoples.36 Even though non-Han influence is considered a factor leading to the more 'dynamic' style of the Yuan songs, there has been little clarification of what that non-Han music was, where it originated, and how it affected Han-Chinese music.37 In such a context, the musical features of the tunes appear as suggestive traces of China's musical past: they confirm, in two ways, the conventional view that non-Han musical elements were always sinicized and then absorbed into the Han culture. First, the Yuan court, which was controlled by Mongolian and non-Han peoples, adopted distinctive Han orchestras of stone chimes and bell chimes, and related practices of largescale ceremonial and banquet music. Second, the tunes were adjusted to Han-Chinese scales: the heptatonic scale C-D-E-Flt-G-A-B and its
zithers; two five-string zithers; two seven-string zithers, two nine-string zithers, four 25-strmg zithers, two sets of panpipes; two flutes (di), two flutes (yue), two flutes (chi), four large 19-pipe mouth organs (chaosheng), four small 19-pipe mouth organs (hesheng); a seven-pipe mouth organ (qtxtngbao); a nine-pipe mouth organ (jiuyaobao); a 13-pipe mouth organ (yunyubao); two ocarinas (xun); two drums (bofu), a wooden rectangle (zhu), a wooden tiger (yu) " See Yang Yinliu, Zhongguo gudai yinyue shtgao, 421-2 Throughout the monograph, Yang alludes to issues of non-Han music without detailed discussions Section 6 of Yang's book, pp 275-456, is entitled '[Music in the] Liao, Song, Xixia and Jin dynasties, 937-1279', but discussion is devoted to music of the Song empires of Han people, only pages 421 -2 discuss court music in the Liao (Khitan people, 907-1125) and Jin (Jurchen people, 1115-1234) dynasties See also note 36 below " While the Northern Song government of Han people ruled over the central part of China (960-1127), the Khitan, the Jurchen and the-Tanguts peoples of Xixia (1032-1227) occupied various areas in north and north-west China Genghis Khan (1162-1227) established the Mongolian empire in 1206. The empire was renamed as the Yuan in 1271, eight years before it conquered the Southern Song dynasty of the Han people and achieved full control of the whole Chinese land Contacts between the various non-Han and Han peoples were constant. 17 For example, Cheung Saibung believes that importation of non-Han peoples' plucked lutes led to the rise of rhythmically fast melodies and the use of padding words in song texts See his Zhongguo ytnyuesht lunshugao (Hxstoncal Studies of Chinese Music) (Hong Kong, 1975), 353-6

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variants employed in the tunes are closely associated with proper music (yayue) in Han-Chinese courts. Both are clear cases in which non-Han elements were either replaced or sinicized to conform to Han standards. At the same time, the tunes also lead to doubts on that prevalent view, which arise from the following observations. First, tunes 1-4 on the one hand and tune 5 on the other demonstrate contrasting strategies of organizing pitches in musical works. Second, Tao Zongyi, a fourteenthcentury Han Chinese, commented that Tartar music was different from its Han counterparts. Third, the non-Han origin of tunes 1 -3 is apparent from their non-Han titles. Fourth, the Han origin of tune 5 is evident from its set of 12 modal transpositions, a musical feature which reflects a ritual-cosmological theory of Han Chinese. Considered together, the above observations point to the deduction that the contrast between tunes 1^4 and tune 5 may reflect what Tao Zongyi perceived as different musics. The reflection is noteworthy because it implies that non-Han and Han people in the Yuan period used different strategies of organizing pitches, and that non-Han musical features may resist sinicization. In other words, musical exchange in the Yuan court of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries may not be an entirely one-sided process of sinicizing non-Han elements, and certain non-Han elements, such as particular strategies of organizing pitches, may not have been assimilated into the tradition of Chinese music. What happened between non-Han and Han music in the Yuan court? Are there other residues of non-Han music in Chinese music as it is experienced today? How can they be identified? These issues transcend the scope of the present article. And yet, the very fact that the questions arise from the tunes renders them a reminder that current histories of China's musical past are formulated from HanChinese perspectives. Are those histories objective and representative? Such significance of the tunes begs questions of how they sounded in the past, and how they can be performed in the present. These questions are critical, because the tunes were music (expressions of/through sounds), and because present-day performance is the only way through which the tunes can be understood and experienced as music. Unless answered, the questions generate scepticism concerning all theoretical narratives about the tunes as early Chinese music. Unless they describe musical sounds, narratives about the tunes will always appear abstract, drawing attention to the non-verifiable and hypothetical arguments which are inevitable in historical-musical investigations.38 Before abandoning any narrative of the tunes as too abstract or musically irrelevant, however, one must assess it on its own merits. What would be the standards for such an assessment? Who set those standards and by what authority? Are those standards absolutely and universally objective?39
" See Edward Hallett Carr, "The Historian and his Facts', What tsHistory?(London, 1987), 7-30; Michael Stanford, "The Evidence of History', The Nature of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1986), 56-75. " See Thomas L. Haskell, 'Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream', History and Theory, 29 (1990), 129-67

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For the Hong Kong music scholars who complain that there is no music in Chinese music history the standards are positivist methodologies and values which are prevalent in Hong Kong and other Westernized Chinese communities.40 In other words, the scholars are arguing that narratives about the tunes must be formulated with autographs, sketches and other similar pieces of hard evidence, and that credible narratives are verifiable and would eventually lead to a definitive edition and authentic historical performance of the tunes.41 The scholars also realize that such a positivist approach to studying the tunes is impossible and limiting. A scarcity of notated sources and other documents means that there is little opportunity to formulate any narrative of the tunes with only hard evidence and verifiable hypotheses.42 The disappearance of historical performance practices leaves no basis for reconstructing the tunes as musical sounds. Traditional Chinese musicians' licence in 'updating' preexisting musical works ensures that the tunes will never sound as they did once, even had they been transmitted continuously. In fact, if the scholars insist on hard data and verifiable arguments, they will have to conclude that the tunes will forever remain a historical mystery because there are simply too many unknowns. Such scepticism is not merely academic dialectic. As ethnic Chinese, the Hong Kong scholars would want to claim the tunes as part of their musical heritage and to understand them in this context. And yet they cannot accept narratives which violate positivist tenets. They want at once to appropriate the tunes and to reject them. For its theoretical presumptions, foreignness to China's musical past and crippling implications, the Hong Kong scholars' positivist understanding of the tunes cannot be the final verdict.43 Sooner or later, traditional Chinese music masters - namely, Chinese musicians and researchers who are knowledgeable about traditional Chinese music, who exercise the traditional practice of rearranging pre-existing music for present-day needs, and who do not hold inflexible belief in hard evidence and verifiability - will produce their own narratives and reconstructions of the tunes. Such an alternative approach to understanding the tunes is not only the insiders' view, but may also be a practical solution to the problems of Chinese music history. Traditional Chinese music masters always reconstruct and/or adjust pre-existing musical works to suit contemporary needs.44 Descriptions of
40 For a history of modern Chinese acceptance of scientism and positivism, see Daniel W Y. Kwok, Scientism m Chinese Thought, 1900-1950 (New Haven, 1965) 41 This sentence reports what Hong Kong music scholars emphasize as characteristics of AngloAmerican musicology as it relates to Western art music For a discussion of Anglo-American musicology, see Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass , 1985) See also Leo Treitler's review, 'The Power of Positivist Thinking', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 375-402, and 'History and Music', New Literary History, 21 (1990), 299-319. " There are numerous verbal descriptions of China's musical past, but there are relatively few notated sources See Zhongguo ymyue shupuzhi (Bibliography of Chinese Music Books and Scores) (Beijing, 1984) 43 For an analysis of the fundamental presumptions ln-music-histones of Western art music, see Leo Treitler, 'The Present as History', Music and the Historical Imagination, 95-156. 44 See Fang Kun et al., 'A Discussion on Chinese National Musical Traditions', Asian Music, 12 (1981), 1-15 For discussion of the dapu process in which qin music preserved in historical notation is

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four prominent cases will illustrate such confidence and practice. As early as the second century, Du Kui consulted classical documents and descriptions of historical musical practices to reconstruct ancient music (guyue) for Cao Cao (155-220), the king of the Wei.45 (Can music be reconstructed from verbal descriptions of historical music and practices? How?) In 1186, the famous poet and composer Jiang Kui discovered, in a pile of old documents belonging to a certain musician, the notation of the Nishang yuyiqu (Costume of Rainbow Feather), which was composed between 745 and 756.46 After analysing the modal and formal structure of the notated music, identifying its discrepancies with historical descriptions and commenting on its antiquated style, Jiang set a new poetic text to one of the sections of the music. (Why did Jiang superimpose a creative and contemporary feature on authentic historical music?) In 1968, the Taiwanese scholar Chuang Penli claimed to have reconstructed the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) version of Confucian ritual music from verbal descriptions and sketchy notation.47 Since 1986, the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) version of Confucian ritual music has been revived in Confucius's home town, Qufu, China, celebrating the philosopher's birthday and attracting international attention.48 Even today, traditional Chinese music masters still firmly believe that their 'updated' performances of musical works are representative of the past.49 The rationale behind this traditional Chinese approach can be tentatively explained as follows. Traditional Chinese music masters understand a pre-existing musical work more as the representation of a certain 'essence' and less as a musical object with a particular structure. The essence represents what is unique and meaningful in the work; however, what is unique and meaningful is always defined according to musical values of the present.50 Furthermore, traditional Chinese music masters believe that the essence of a musical work is independent of its structural features, which are merely the means of communicating the essence - content is independent of its form. These beliefs transform into actions and results as follows. Traditional Chinese music masters change their musical values from time to time. Whenever such changes occur, the essence of a pre-existent musical work is redefined and its structural features adjusted (changed) accordingly. Such adjustments are deemed necessary to reveal better the essence of the musical work to contemreconstructed in the present, see Bell Yung, 'Da Pu. The Recreative Process for the Music of the Seven-String Zither', Music and Context Essays for John M Ward (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 370-83, and 'Historical Interdependency A Case Study of the Chinese Seven-String Zither', Journal of the American Mustcological Society, 40 (1987), 82-91 " Jiaozhu Songshu yuezhi (An Annotated Edition of the Music Chapters m the History of the Song), ed Sujinren and Xiao Lianzi (Jinan, 1982), 11-12. " Yang Yinhu and Yin Falu, Songjtang Baishi chuangzuo gequ yanjtu (Studies of the Songs Composed by Jiang Batshi of the Song Dynasty) (Beijing, 1957), 47 47 See JiKong hyuezht gaijtn (On Improving the Ritual and Music of the Sacrifice to Confucius) (Taipei, 1970) 41 A detailed study of the reconstructed music is in progress " A written example of such an attitude is Ge Hong's 'Weiyi xiaode xingqiaocui' ('For Music, He is Exhausted A Biographical Sketch of [Shanghai] Qin Musician Gong Yi'), Renmm yinyue (1991/4), 25-7. ! The traditional music masters may however consult and accept historically established meanings of a musical work.

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porary audiences. The musical work thus changed is still considered representative of what it was. This traditional Chinese approach encourages the reconstruction of musical works which have ceased to be performed. As long as one can find the essence of those works, one can either gloss over certain gaps in available data about their structural details or substitute appropriate ones from current practices. Such optimism operates with the belief that the tradition of Chinese music is long and continuous, and that many current practices are either identical or similar to earlier ones.51 Thus the predominance of binary rhythm, heterophonic texture, stable dynamic levels and other so-called traditional features is considered typical of past and present genres of Chinese music. Indeed, these traditional features are materials with which early Chinese music can be reconstructed and its missing data filled in. This optimistic attitude towards the reconstruction of music of the past has been exercised in China for centuries: the eleventh-century philosopher Zhang Zai (1020-77) declared that music of the past could always be reconstructed in the present unless one was lost in the details." The traditional Chinese approach includes many internal contradictions. For example, if the essence of the tunes is defined according to present musical values, that essence is not something received from the past. If reconstruction of the tunes depends on substitutes, the reconstruction can never be what the tunes were. Still, the traditional Chinese approach is a way of understanding the Chinese musical past, rendering it meaningful for the present. With verifiable data and nonverifiable hypotheses, the traditional Chinese approach formulates narratives about the tunes which lead to reconstruction of their sounds, rendering the tunes relevant to the general Chinese music audience. The traditional Chinese approach is also an effective way of connecting China's musical past and present. The approach accepts changes introduced in the present without rejecting the past. It guarantees legitimacy of the new and smoothness in the transition from the 'old' to the 'reconstructed', confirming the notion that the tradition of Chinese music is long and continuous. The traditional Chinese approach is also pragmatic. No musical works can sound absolutely identical in different times. Besides pitch, rhythm, timbre and other fundamental ingredients, music is subject to change by the acoustic qualities of the performance locale, the relationship between performers and audience, and other contextual factors. Even if all the structural ingredients of the tunes are reconstructed in the present, the minds and ears experiencing the reconstruction belong to a present-day audience. The pragmatic nature of the traditional Chinese approach encourages reconstruction of the tunes. Traditional Chinese music masters can
11 A recent article illustrating such a belief is Guo Naian's 'Zhongguo chuantong yinyue di fengge' ('Musical Styles of Traditional Chinese. Music'), _ Wenhua Shtjie renrnm dt jiaoltu (Culture Dialogues among Peoples of the World) (Beijing,_n d.), 58^64 52 Yinyue Yanjiusuo, 'Zhang Zai lunyue' ('Zhang Zai Discusses Music'), Zhongguo gudat yuelun xuanji (A Selection of Ancient Chinese Music Theories) (Beijing, 1981), 188-9.

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reconstruct the tunes as soon as their musical essence has been grasped, and as soon as substitutes can be found for their missing features. The fact that the tunes are preserved only as rough pitch outlines in the source is not an insurmountable obstacle. Rhythm, dynamics and other details needed for the reconstruction will be found in descriptions of. orchestras and music programmes in the Yuan court, and in knowledge about traditional Chinese music. In other words, traditional Chinese music masters who want to reconstruct the tunes would always find clues as to their musical identities. The masters would formulate and believe in narrative 8: the tunes are early Chinese music which can be reconstructed and performed in the present. A search among extant descriptions of Yuan court music produces data which can be transformed into clues about the sounds of the tunes. If one presumes that the tunes share fundamental similarities with traditional Chinese music, the following clues (i.e. speculations) are obvious. First, the tunes would have sounded like a collection of tone colours that did not blend together. Instruments of court orchestras or ensembles, as described in the Yuanshi, would have produced contrasting timbres, namely, heterogeneous sounds. The crisp and short sounds of stone chimes in large court orchestras would, for instance, stand apart from the metallic tones of the bell chimes. Music played by an ensemble of flutes, oboes and hour-glass drums would sound like a combination of three distinctive timbres. Second, the tunes would have had few sudden and wide dynamic changes, as may be deduced from the fact that traditional Chinese music employs few. Third, the tunes, as played by court orchestras or ensembles, would have had a heterophonic texture. Traditional Chinese music, including that of the Mongolian minorities, is heterophonic. Fourth, tunes 1-4, interpreted as banquet music, would have had a performance style different from that of tune 5, which is supposedly intended to be secular ceremonial music. The two genres of music had distinctive functions. Fifth, tunes 1 -4 would have appeared in lively rhythm and tempo because banquet music always accompanied lively and rhythmic dances. In contrast, tune 5, which would have accompanied ceremonial movements, would have appeared in steady and slow rhythm and tempo. With these five speculations, reconstruction of the tunes as musical sounds is a straightforward task of finding the appropriate features of traditional Chinese music. One hypothetical example will illustrate such a reconstruction and explain why the Hong Kong music scholars would reject it. One may postulate that tune 5 was performed to accompany ceremonial walking inside a palace hall. The 12 modal transpositions of tune 5 conform to the ritual-cosmological theory of the monthly rotation of musical modes; the same practice of monthly transpositions was applied to the processional music that accompanied a prime minister's ceremonial approach to the emperor in the imperial auditions.53 One may thus infer that tune 5 was performed by a terrace orchestra, which was assigned to provide secular ceremonial music inside a palace hall. One may presume that the indi" Yuanshi, 67 1667

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vidual pitches in tune 5 were performed as sustained notes, as was conventional in Chinese court ceremonial music.54 One may assume that tune 5 was performed in a tempo that matched a prime minister's processional movements. Similar assumptions will establish that the texture of tune 5 was, like most traditional Chinese music, heterophonic, and that ornaments were added to the notated pitches. The introduction of such ornaments is a common practice known as 'adding flowers' (jiahua). Finally, knowledge about traditional ritual music reveals that various kinds of drum patterns marked the musical phrases of tune 5. With the above speculations, tune 5 becomes early Chinese music, performable and relevant to the general Chinese music audience. To positivist Hong Kong music scholars, the above reconstruction of tune 5 is a fantasy. At any rate, the reconstructed music is more a new composition than an artefact of early Chinese music. To traditional Chinese music masters and the general music audience in Hong Kong, however, the reconstruction qualifies as music from the past. It not only contains a verifiable pitch outline preserved in a fourteenth-century notated source, it also conveys to its present audience an essential message - one that is immanent in tune 5, a piece of music for secular ceremonials in the Yuan court. The reconstruction employs rhythm, timbres and other musical elements which are common in traditional Chinese music and which are associated with China's musical past. Embodying a present understanding of tune 5, the reconstruction and its narratives connect the present with the past, fulfilling one of the fundamental goals of studying music of the past. Furthermore, the reconstruction process of tune 5 is similar to other attempts to understand music of the past. Traditional Chinese music masters may not understand tune 5 or any of the tunes through the first seven narratives presented in earlier sections of this discussion, but they have to formulate their own narratives with verifiable facts and nonverifiable hypotheses. They have to convince themselves that the notated music in the source is authentic music of the Yuan court (cf. narratives 1 and 2). They have to analyse the notated music (cf. narratives 3 and 4) and supplement their analytical-notational data with verbal ones (cf. narratives 5 and 6). Upon realizing one or more meaning(s) of the tune (cf. narrative 7), the pursuit of musical details begins and assumptions will be made (cf. narrative 8). Once all the details necessary for performance of tune 5 are found (and/or newly created), a reconstruction is born. And it will serve to remind the general Chinese audience of a musical past in the Yuan court. As described above, there is a method in the ways traditional Chinese music masters would reconstruct tune 5 or any other piece of early Chinese music. Historically and historiographically, their reconstructions and histories cannot be dismissed on the grounds that their narratives are not based on positivist studies. In fact, traditional Chinese musicians are not the only professionals who engage in speculative reconstructions and
" An explicit record of the practice is provided by Yangjie's arguments for its application (AD 1080) See Songshi (The Standard History of the Song) (1345, Beijing Zhonghua shuju edn, 1977), 128 2981

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narratives of historical music. Laurence Picken has reconstructed 'music from the Tang court'.55 Many musicians and scholars in the Western world have worked on early music, combining 'facts and fiction' to produce one of the most energetic music movements of the century. Furthermore, as eloquently argued by Leo Treitler, the positivist pursuit of hard data" and of-formalist analysis is not as objective as it~may~ seem. "'Given the current state of music scholarship, one has to ask whether positivist methodologies and values hold the one and only 'objective' way of understanding the tunes and their story, and of China's musical past. The answer must be no, if one respects cultural differences. A 'Chinacentered' understanding of the tunes and of Chinese music history is necessary to reveal 'what is happening in that history in terms that are as free as possible of imported criteria of significance'.57 It is crucial to reconsider what constitutes a piece of early Chinese music in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts. What is the essence of a musical work? Is it a 'communicative process' as defined by Dahlhaus? If so, what kind of 'text' is the source and how should one assess a Chinese reconstruction as a document of 'a particular mode of reception'?58 Answers are probably not to be found with either postivist or traditional Chinese approaches. The positivist pursuit may identify some isolated facts, but it may not lead to an audible piece of early Chinese music, a verifiable narrative or a history of it. Unless a more flexible and culturally sensitive interpretation of hard evidence can be accepted, there is neither early Chinese music nor its history. Chinese reconstructions may have preserved the essence of historical works of Chinese music, but such works are more than just their essence, and reconstructions beg the question how the originals sounded. Unless a more detailed (and perhaps more positivist) methodology is found, there is no way critically to understand Chinese music as it was. Perhaps some kind of 'objective' fusion of the positivist and the traditional Chinese may generate new approaches and results.59 Then there may be music in Chinese music history, and
" Laurence Picken and his colleagues have produced a series of 'reconstructed' and 'performable' scores of 'music from the Tang court' which will not be discussed in this paper for the following reasons. Picken and his colleagues' distinctive attempts to understand and reconstruct early music of East Asian cultures are intellectually, socially and musically different from the subject-matter and issues of this discussion Picken and his colleagues use a methodology that is based on a Western tradition of philology and textual criticism, and that does not involve current practices of the musical cultures they study The notated sources they have consulted were produced in Japan by Japanese musicians The Chinese attributes of that notated music are disputable The narratives and reconstructed compositions of Picken and his colleagues exist in specialized and scholarly publications, and are not commonly known among general Chinese music audiences in Hong Kong or any other Chinese communities See Music from the Tang Court, ed Laurence Picken et al., 5 vols (London, 1981, Cambridge, 1985-91). See also Richard Widdess, 'Historical Ethnomusicology', Ethnomusicology An Introduction, ed Helen Myers (New York, 1992), 219-37, and Joseph S C Lam, review of Music from the Tang Court, li-in, Ethnomusicology, 33 (1989), 345-8 " See Leo Treitler, 'The Power of Positivist Thinking', and Margaret Bent et al , 'Facts and Values in Contemporary Musical Scholarship', CMS Proceedings The National and Regional Meetings, 1985 (Boulder, 1986), 1-52 " Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, 1984), 196 " Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J B Robinson (London, 1983), 39. " The word 'objective' refers to the objectivity defined in Haskell, 'Objectivity is not Neutrality' He states that 'the most commonly observed fulfilment of the ideal of objectivity in the historical pro-

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Chinese music historiography may become objective, culturally sensitive, practical and relevant. Suffice it to say, such a historiography would contribute to universal theories and methodologies in the understanding, reconstruction and perpetuation of any music from any past. University of California, Santa Barbara
fession is simply the powerful argument - the text that reveals by its every twist and turn its respectful appreciation of the alternatives it rejects' (p 135)

APPENDIX
CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE DYNASTIES Xia dynasty Shang dynasty Zhou dynasty Q_in dynasty Former Han dynasty Later Han dynasty Three Kingdoms era Western Jin dynasty Era of North-South division Sui dynasty Tang dynasty Five dynasties era Northern Song dynasty Liao dynasty Xixia dynasty Jin dynasty Southern Song dynasty Yuan dynasty Ming dynasty Qjng dynasty 2000?-1500? BC 1500?-1066> BC 1066?-221 BC 221 -206 BC 206 BC-AD 23 AD 25 -220 220-80 266-316 316-589 581-618 618-907 907-60 960-1127 907-1125 1032-1227 1115-1234 1127-1279 1271-1368 1368-1644 1644-1911