State Sacrifices and Music

The State Sacrifices and Music are arguably the most important rituals in imperial China, but also among the least known. The ritual began about 2,500 years ago in the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC), and continued through the successive dynasties, with some interruptions, until the early twentieth century, when the last dynasty ended. Among the dozen or so rituals that were performed regularly within a calendrical cycle, each State Sacrifice honoured a celestial or mortal deity, the most important and elaborate of which was the Sacrifice to Heaven (Lam Reference Lam1998:19–28; Yao Reference Yao2000:196–198). Heaven bestowed the legitimacy to the emperor’s rulership; the emperor, who declared himself the son of Heaven, served as the chief celebrant for this ritual, supplemented by over a hundred assistant celebrants, singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and other minor functionaries (Rawski Reference Yung, Rawski and Watson1996). In the early twelfth century, these rituals were introduced to Korea during the Koryo dynasty (935–1392), and were subsequently conducted fairly continuously until the end of the nineteenth century (Provine Reference Provine1996). In the twentieth century, the only State Sacrifice that survived was the one honouring Confucius, which is still being conducted in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Korea (see, for example, Pian Reference Pian and Wade1997).

For all emperors who first ascended the throne, and in particular for the first emperor of a new dynasty, the Sacrifice to Heaven must be performed, and performed properly. A new emperor must continue the tradition by adhering to the details of the ritual from the past in order to legitimise his rule as a successor to earlier emperors. Documents from previous dynasties provided details of the ritual to follow, although ambiguities existed in the text because of changing time and circumstance from dynasty to dynasty. There was also the issue of which of the earlier dynasty’s rituals should be the model. Long-serving court officials who had direct knowledge of earlier rituals provided yet other opinions. On the other hand, each new emperor also wanted to assert his own identity by instilling new elements into the ritual. Thus, to realise every step of the ritual was no simple matter, but involved complex negotiations among the emperor himself, the high-level scholar-officials, and the knowledgeable experts in the court. The negotiations could be contentious, but, in the end, had to be resolved. These discussions and negotiations, which sometimes were like tugs of war between traditionality and creativity, were recorded in detail in court documents, which provide evidence for the study of such processes (Lam Reference Lam1998).

Music was at the core of the ritual. The performance involved a large number of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists, who played a great variety of musical instruments. These instruments were among the oldest known in China, having been preserved in these rituals through the dynasties. The best-known were the bronze bells and the stone chimes; but also many wind and string instruments to play melodies, and drums and percussion instruments for rhythmic marking, and textural variety and richness.Footnote ⁷ The singers, dancers, and instruments perform specific songs with well-defined tunes written in the lülü notation. The majority of these short tunes have units of four-note phrases, which form binary structures (Pian Reference Pian and Wade1997).

In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which was studied and reported by Joseph Lam (Reference Lam1998), there were 323 such songs, each one sung at a particular segment of a particular ritual. An example is the song sung at the segment Welcoming the Deities of the Sacrifice to Heaven. The performance practice, including the instrumentation, orchestral texture and colour, and tempo remained largely unchanged through the centuries; the critical component that did change was the specific melody of the songs. The documents of the Ming dynasty show three versions of the song “Welcoming the Deities” from the documents of 1370, 1464, and 1530 (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Three versions of the song for Welcoming the Deities from 1370, 1464, and 1530 (Lam Reference Lam1998:147).

Note that the tune remained largely unchanged from century to century. There was switching of a few octave equivalents in order to make the melodic contour smoother, and a few altered notes towards the end of the song. These minor changes instilled originality to satisfy the requirement for the new emperorship. Were such minimal changes in fact noticeable in a performance? According to Joseph Lam, they were. He notes that they were obvious signs of musical creativity to anyone familiar with the style and who knew the boundaries within which creativity could operate, even though to us, these changes may seem barely noticeable (Lam Reference Lam1998:155–162).

Another example is the song sung at the Second Offering of Wine in the Sacrifice to Heaven. The three versions from the three documents can be seen at Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Three versions of the song for the Second Offering of Wine from 1370, 1464, 1530 (Lam Reference Lam1998:149).

This example appears to have a more drastic change from the 1370 version to the 1464 version when the E^b of the 1370 version was substituted by E in the latter two versions. Joseph Lam points out that the use of E^b resulted in a hemitonic scale, which evoked historical music from the Ming period, while substituting it with E transformed the tune into anhemitonic, which was used in many types of music performed contemporaneously in mid-Ming (Lam Reference Lam1998:146).

The example of the songs in the Sacrifice to Heaven shows that the creativity was carried out deliberately, and was the result of negotiation by group participation. It also shows that, to our musical sense, the new elements instilled were minimal and negligible. But to the Ming dynasty experts and ritual participants, the changes were significant and served the purpose of creativity.

Qin or Guqin

My second example is the music of the instrument qin, or guqin (Chinese seven-string zither), on which many writings are available (see, for example, van Gulik Reference Van Gulik1940; Lieberman Reference Lieberman1983; Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1997). Its legacy rests in the large body of philosophical treatises, incidental essays, poems, memoires, instruction handbooks, and a repertory of compositions preserved in its own distinctive musical notation. There were also paintings and calligraphy, and millennia-old samples of the qin instrument still in playable condition. These materials from the last two millennia formed indisputable and compelling evidence of a tradition that is not easy to resist to any qin player.

Just like the State Sacrifices and Music, which catered to an exclusive audience in the imperial Court, the music of qin also catered to a near-exclusive group that consisted mainly of the literati and scholar-officials. They were society’s political and economic elites, and they played the instrument mainly for themselves without having to please an anonymous audience. For that reason they faced little external criticism and pressure to change, and could conform to its tradition with a sense that they were the continuation of a historical legacy dating back a number of millennia.

Most qin players followed that tradition, but a small number asserted their creativity to render the music more dynamic. Their most obvious activity is the practice of so-called dapu, which is related to the qin’s distinctive notation called jianzipu (Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1985). Suffice it to note here that the jianzipu notation does not directly record or prescribe pitch, as in Western staff notation; instead it provides detailed finger positions and movements. More importantly, it does not provide explicit durational, rhythmic or phrasing instructions. In order to play a composition from notation, one needs to interpret the literary content of the piece, according to which one introduces rhythm into the music. In short, the person who carries out the dapu process is somewhat similar to a composer of Western art music.

Some scholars criticise the jianzipu notation as flawed because of the lack of rhythmic notation. Yet from another point of view, the jianzipu allows qin players of later generations to exercise their freedom to instill rhythm (Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1994). It all depends upon one’s notion of the function of musical notation: does the notation aim to preserve music as accurately as possible for posterity? Or, in the case of jianzipu, it allows and encourages the qin players to exercise their creativity to recreate the past to suit the needs of their own times. Therein lie the essence of creativity that is built into the performance practice and the musical notation.

The qin musician’s creative input is not limited to the dapu process; it may also change the jianzipu itself by changing the finger positions and finger movements, and by adding or deleting segments to a composition (Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1987). The most interesting case is the composition called “Guanglingsan” (Niezheng Assassinates the King of Han), which evolved and expanded through several centuries (see Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1997, Reference Yung and Shapiro2008). Its oldest extant jianzipu notation is from 1425, which shows that the composition has six movements, each of which contains many sections: Figure 4 outlines its complete structure.

Figure 4.

Structure of Guanglingsan (Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1997:16).

Many historical documents through the earlier centuries show that the composition existed before 1425, some with important details based upon which researchers have deduced that its notation could have existed as early as 700 CE, and, through detective-like analysis by qin scholars (Zhongyang 1958), proposed that the composition’s original shape consisted of movements three and four, adding to a total of twenty-three sections. Later musicians added new movements and sections to it so that the composition expanded to a total of the full six movements and forty-five sections as recorded in 1425 (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Evolution of Guanglingsan, ca. 700 to 1425 (Zhongyang 1958:3; Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro2008:1040).

It is interesting to note that, in recent decades, there has been a tendency to shrink the number of sections to shorten the piece. A quick check on YouTube, where many qin players post their performance of this composition, shows that the duration of the piece ranges from almost 25’ (24’53” by Wu Wenguang) to a little over 4’ (4’14” by Chen Leiji). These qin players took the liberty to delete parts of the movements or section, or completely eliminate some of them.

Guanglingsan was not the only composition that received revisions from generations of qin players. Other compositions received similar treatments and many of these new versions were subsequently published. One of the most popular qin compositions is “Pingsha Luoyan” (Wild Geese Landing on the Sandy Beach); there exist today fifty-six versions in qin notational collections, the earliest in 1634, the latest 1931. Many of these were simply copies of earlier versions, but others were quite different, having been revised by qin musicians (Luo Reference Luo2003). These examples show that the qin tradition, despite its generally conservative nature and historical legacy, nevertheless tolerate, if not encourage, musicians to exercise their creativity to express their personal aesthetic preferences (see Yung Reference Yung and Shapiro1987).

Cantonese Opera

The last example is Cantonese Opera, which is called “traditional” in contrast to newly composed operas by, say, Guo Wenjing (b.1956), Tan Dun (b.1957), Zhou Long (b.1953), and a host of other Western-trained Chinese composers who recently came into fame. Not relying on such a composer, the two-hundred-year old Cantonese Opera uses instead a pool of pre-existent tunes, each with a label. The label identifies the original tune such as Bongji, and its tempo-metrical variant such as zungbaan, or medium tempo. For example, the label Bongji Zungbaan is “the tune Bongji with its variant in medium tempo” which prescribes a metrical pattern of alternations of strong beat and weak beat. Rulan Chao Pian, who pioneered the study of traditional opera with her work on Peking Opera, called these variants of pre-existent tunes “aria types” (Pian Reference Pian and Wade1993).

These aria types not only have structural identities in terms of melodic and rhythmic characteristics so that knowledgeable audience would recognise what they are, but they also have dramatic associations so that knowing the music enhances the effect of the dramatic content. Scriptwriters compose a poetic passage; they then attach a label of an aria type to this passage. In composing the poetic passage, they must adhere to the prosodic rules specific to the aria types, which the singer then sings accordingly without needing any musical notation.

Because these aria types are not written down in musical notation but are internalised by performers, scriptwriters, and audience, a singer of an aria type may, and often does, vary the details of the melody within certain constraints that would preserve the aria type’s structural identity. These constraints—handed down by tradition—include:

• • the general form of the aria type, which is normally in couplet form, with a basic rhythmic pattern of mapping the individual syllable into a prescribed metrical structure;

• • mixed cadential notes and cadential patterns at the end of each of the two lines of the couplet; and

• • matching of melodic contour more or less to the linguistic tones of the text.

Within these constraints, the singer has the freedom to manipulate the melodic contour and the rhythmic pattern (Yung Reference Yung1989). To illustrate creativity in Cantonese Opera, I shall limit my discussion to the rhythmic pattern and use an aria type called Fast Bongji Zungbaan for illustration (Yung, Reference Yungin press). Fast Bongji Zungbaan means that the aria type is the medium tempo version of the Bongji tune, sung at a fast clip. This aria type has seven syllables in each poetic line sung to six bars. The basic rhythmic pattern of how the syllables are placed within the metrical structure in the full couplet of twelve bars is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Rhythmic pattern and syllables of Fast Bongji Zungbaan.

Note that the rhythmic pattern has many crotchet (quarter-note) syncopations, in bars 1, 2, 4, 5 of the first half of the couplet, and the corresponding bars 7, 8, 10, 11 in the second. Because of these syncopations, the aria type could in fact be heard as 3/4 metre, so that the syncopations fall on strong beats instead, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7.

Rhythmic emphasis in Fast Bongji Zungbaan.

In actual performance, the singer may vary this basic rhythmic pattern to create new musical interest so long as the original pattern is not drastically altered. Among the recorded performances I transcribed, many of them introduce an additional quaver (eighth-note) syncopation to the original crochet (quarter-note) syncopations in bars 2, 5, 8, 11. Figure 8 shows the additional syncopation added to bar 2 of Figure 7.

Figure 8.

Example of an additional syncopated rhythm to Fast Bongji Zungbaan.

Some performers retained the original pattern, others sang one, two, or three additional syncopations in bars 2, 5, 8, 11. One of them, however, sang additional syncopations in all four bars, resulting in the rendition as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9.

An expanded syncopated rendition of Fast Bongji Zungbaan.

It is my contention that this singer is particularly bold and inventive: he is the incomparable Lam Ka-Sing (Lin Jiasheng in Mandarin, 1933–2015, active on stage from the 1950s to the 1990s). By introducing these additional syncopations consistently throughout, he projected the illusion that the metre has been transformed into an alternation of 6/8 and 3/4 as shown in Figure 10.Footnote ⁸

Figure 10.

Alternating rhythmic feel in Lam Ka-Sing’s rendition of Fast Bongji Zungbaan.

This single example illustrates that Cantonese Opera singers could still exercise their creativity to project new expressions, despite the rather rigid formulaic rhythmic patterns of aria types structured by traditional aesthetics.