Historically Informed Qin Performance T of C Home MyWork Hand-books Qin asObject Qin inArt Poetry/ Song Hear,Watch PlayQin Analysis History Ideo-logy Miscel-lanea MoreInfo Personal email me search me Teaching H.I.P. / Performing / dapu / and the creative process / tuning / rhythm / mode / glossary 中文 首頁 Some Issues in Historically Informed Qin Performance1 John Thompson 3 復古風格演奏的一些問題 2 唐世璋寫作；金秋雨譯 4 Preface In the West when an audience goes to hear a performance of early music they generally expect a faithful representation of that style according to the principles of historically informed performance (HIP). If a performance purports to represent a particular early music style but does not follow these principles, critics and many in the audience will attack it. In China the principles of HIP have not yet become widely accepted, and this is reflected in almost all Chinese performances of their "early music".5 And yet the Chinese silk-string zither (qin, also called guqin, "old qin), is a music instrument ideally suited for HIP. From 1974 to 1976 the present author studied the guqin in Taiwan. My teacher, Sun Yü-ch'in, taught in a purely traditional manner: he would play a melody and expect me to copy him exactly. Since 1976 my focus has been reconstructing and playing qin music from 15th and 16th century tablature. According to my understanding, if you respect a tradition you first learn it thoroughly; only then are you free to use it in your own personal ways. Here the tablature functions as my teacher.6 As a result, when I learn a new piece from tablature my aim is still to follow the tradition of copying my teacher as exactly as possible. Only after I have learned (and recorded!) a melody in this way do I feel that I can be free with it. Music systems that emphasize improvisation, such as the classical Indian tradition, also have as their core copying one's teacher. After a period of study the teacher allows the student more freedom of interpretation and the student can then learn to improvise. Of course, if tablature is your teacher there is no one to tell you when you can start to be more free in your interpretation, and of course no one to guide you in improvisation. Today, when we have little familiarity with the qin idiom as expressed in Ming dynasty handbooks, a player who wishes to be free in their playing of qin melodies can only use later qin idiom as a starting point. On the other hand, accurate reconstruction of qin melodies as published in Ming dynasty handbooks might help us recreate the style of melodies as played in that period. This in turn would allow players to play music of that period and yet be free in their interpretations, or even improvise.7 The Chinese term for playing music directly from qin tablature is "dapu"; regarding dapu one can speak of two types: strict and free.8 Qin tablature itself is a shorthand description of how a qin melody could or should be played, detailing tuning, finger positions, stroke techniques and ornamentation. In other words, it tells us quite precisely the note pitches, but gives little direct information about the note values (note durations and rhythms). Nevertheless, I believe that qin tablature conveys enough information that it can be used not just to reconstruct the original note pitches, but also to give us a reasonable idea of what the original note values might have been. The test for such a reconstruction is not whether one can prove that this is exactly the way the melody was played when written down. Instead, the test is: if someone were to put into qin tablature this new interpretation, could what they write down be the same as the original tablature. Some of these early melodies have survived into the modern repertoire, albeit much changed; others disappeared centuries ago. Determining the original playing method of music described in Ming dynasty tablature will require work arguably comparable to the efforts that have been made over the past 100 years to reconstruct Western Medieval and Renaissance music. The latter was also written down, but much information was left out; for centuries it was rarely played, and when played it was in a style contemporary with that of the performers. The 20th century reconstruction of it from the original sources (sometimes also consulting oral tradition) has resulted in performance styles whose accuracy is widely accepted but still very much debated. In 1817 the British poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that his aim was "the willing suspension of disbelief". This term, most commonly used for literature or theater, can also be applied to performances of early music. With early Western music sufficient research has been done to allow an analytical person, though aware of the tentative nature of the research into that music, to suspend disbelief and imagine that the melodies are indeed the voices of our distant ancestors. This is then the illusion I seek when doing this reconstruction: the illus...