In Taipei in the 1990s, there is a worker in ethnomusicology who cherishes the ambition of searching out canonical audio recordings of the flights of imagination and magnificent sounds of 5000 years over a vast expanse of territory. He has made every effort to explicate the aesthetic qualities of Chinese music. He can be called the "one who knows the music," "a modern connoisseur of Chinese classical music." He is Lin Ku-fang.
"As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between Chinese and Western music; there is only the difference between what sounds good and what sounds bad. Chinese classical music is what I consider bad music; if you want it to become more vibrant, and want people to begin to respect it again, the only way is through some sort of revolution. Maybe making Chinese music more symphonic is one possible way to go." This is the judgment of the host of a television program about culture.
Has the tradition already "passed away"? Is this music, which only a revolution will suffice to "rescue," about ready to step into the coffin? Using this sort of language to describe what most people think about traditional music might be a bit cruel, but the fact is that it is really no exaggeration. Official-style "Chinese music" groups generally sell only about 20 to 30% of the seats at their performances. Compared to those studying Western instruments, there seem to be very few students learning "Chinese music." This makes many people worried that traditional music may be in such a weakened state in our society that at some point it will completely disappear.
Lin Ku-fang, a worker in ethnomusicol-ogy, worries too, but his way is not to take the path of revolutionizing Chinese music or making it more "symphonic"; rather, he goes directly into the tradition, looking into it for "good music" that has lasted undiminished for a hundred generations.
"Riverside Night Flute" on Egret Lake
No matter whether one sees Lin Ku-fang privately or publicly, he's always wearing a cotton, Chinese-style shirt. Talking about Chinese music, he's always citing the classical sources, and he's full of traditional poetry: it makes one wonder if he isn't some sort of creature who has walked out of a Tang or Song poem. However, phrases of Taiwanese frequently pop out of his mouth, such as "The most miserable are barbers and percussion-and-shawm performers" (indicating that traditional music is often seen as "low class"); his sense of humor when he ridicules current affairs is also admirable. One has the feeling he is the native Taiwanese with the most market appeal of our times. Some will say, "Not only native Taiwanese, but also Chinese." This is a fair appraisal of some of his characteristics, but doesn't quite say everything there is to say about him.
Lin Ku-fang was exposed to traditional music because of something that happened to him when he was young.
In the summer of his 16th year, Lin and three classmates went camping at Egret Lake in Taipei's Hsintien. When they were moving the camping equipment, it was already getting dark. In order to get to the campsite at the other side of the lake, Lin had to get on a boat and go across. The boatman was a big northern fellow with curving moustaches, wearing a bamboo hat. The atmosphere at that time "just seemed to go off into the spacetime of a fantasy tale; it was so natural, nobody would ever have thought it was Taiwan in the sixth decade of the 20th century."
"The boat went up the river. A classmate of mine who studied 'mantis fist' kungfu with me suddenly picked up a flute, raised up high at the bow, and played "Riverside Night Flute" into the wind. The straight flute sound traced itself along the valley walls; for an instant, a dozen or so little boats all stopped their rowing. It seemed as if space and time too were frozen, and that only the sound of the flute was flowing. When one song was done, all we saw was a soldier with his girl, hastening to row over to our bow, and breathlessly exclaiming, 'You play the flute so well!'"
The emotions from listening to the flute in the boat made Lin decide to get to know "Chinese music." A classmate noticed that his fingers were agile, so suggested that he study that complicated and most technically demanding instrument, the pipa. Because of his classmate's suggestion, he first purchased an early recording, pirated from the mainland, of pipa music. There was one song, "The High Moon Shines on China" (after an old song called "The High Moon"), which gave him yet another jolt. "When the introductory part began, I already felt that this song had long since been following me throughout several lifetimes. Watching the moon from the river tower, I had a deeply sentimental feeling, the meaning of history became more clear_"
Karma from another lifetime?
Lin Ku-fang practices Zen; he likes to use the phrase "karma from another lifetime" to explain this sort of encounter with traditional music. "It's really thanks to karma from another lifetime; in 'The High Moon,' one is just able to quickly enter the most refined regions of music and obtain its emotional tone," he says.
However, the road Lin Ku-fang took towards the research of the aesthetics of traditional music was also due to a time when he felt alone and on his own.
This is what the young Lin Ku-fang actually experienced. At a high school party, when he participated in a stage performance of the Chinese Music Club's "Happy Song," from the opening introduction until they left the stage, the performers faced a continual hissing. This was the way the young people had of demonstrating their new ways of fashion; it was almost too much for the flute-playing friend just to keep on performing to the end. He asked Lin Ku-fang what he should do. "In my youth I had a sense of myself as struggling against injustice, so I said, 'Finish it with dignity,'" says Lin.
"Why is it that the art that moves me so deeply is so belittled by others?" Lin says that in order to find a reasonable explanation, he started to read all the documents about Chinese music he could find, but at that time, Chinese music documentation "was just crudely printed musical notation and old essays talking about the ritual music of the ethnic minorities." There was no way to satisfy his demands, but fortunately, other Chinese cultural experiences provided him with a basis for preliminary comparison.
"In Chinese music, aren't the notes and silences just like the black ink tonalities and the spaces of painting?" Lin says that from expressive techniques to the interpretation of one's feelings about life, "the approach is from your own experience, and how it directly corresponds to Chinese culture!"
Who can unravel classical sensibility?
Lin Ku-fang was born in a fishing village called Nanliao in Hsinchu County. After he graduated from the Department of Anthropology of National Taiwan University, he didn't really embark on the path of academic research, but was totally involved in the field of traditional music.
Beginning in 1988, with the opening of relations across the Taiwan Straits, Lin Ku-fang, who had been hidden in the city for more than ten years, "started on a more sociable path, in order to find out how much of what I had learned was true and how much false," he says. Besides crossing back and forth across the straits, and meeting people in the world of traditional music, he also lectured throughout Taiwan in private study centers or public lecture halls. He shared with everybody what he had come to understand about the aesthetics of Chinese music.
When he discusses music, he doesn't use a lot of jargon. He uses "the humanities aspect as the warp, and musical typology as the woof" to talk about genres of music, songs, and the way performers interpret Chinese music, and combines these in his curriculum. "To listen to him lecture is not like attending a class on music; rather, it's like being in the warm, embracing presence of a cultivated man of Chinese classics," says one student who has taken his class.
For example, discussing the grievances one encounters in human society, talking about the qin song "Solitary Orchid," he doesn't pedantically explain the history of the ancient song's evolution, but rather starts from the way the talents of cultivated people fail to be appreciated by the rest of the world, and from this affective basis builds his explication. Or for example, when he explains the qin song "18-Beat Hu Jia," and its story of the "Return of Wen Ji to the Han," which stems from the Eastern Han, he says, "This is the difficult choice Wen Ji had to make, after having been displaced to a foreign country and having children there, between the feelings a mother would have about rejecting her children, or returning to her homeland towards which she felt a deep attachment." It is "a passionately angry, tragic feeling; following the beat, a painful, heartbreaking sensation takes shape and comes into existence through the tips of your fingers."
In the past decade of public lecturing, Lin Ku-fang has allowed many people who had never known "Chinese music" to become fans. Hsu Linglin of Kaohsiung's "Wuyuan Study Society" is one of them.
Hsu Linglin originally was a passionate devotee of Western classical music. During her middle school years, she says, she "never missed a single album" of the classical music which "Asian Records" issued. She and some other full-time mothers who were her friends organized a study club, and invited Lin Ku-fang to talk on traditional music. Their greatest reward was that Lin "opened up another window" for the members of her group, all of whom had grown up with Western style education, she says.
After Lin Ku-fang's "extended education" had lasted for several years, to the beginning of the 1990s, he had already become famous as an interpreter of traditional music; whenever anyone spoke of Chinese music it was hard not to mention this "Master Lin." However, "Master Lin," who was known to everybody as being quick in response and a good speaker, underwent yet another transformation in 1992.
Exemplars from the past
Five years ago, after easily finishing a series of lectures on "Chinese Music" at the National Concert Hall, he couldn't help a growing feeling of sadness. He asked himself, "How long am I just going to go on giving lectures like this? Even if I speak again and again, at most in the future the result will just be a distant and blurry memory for the members of the audience."
At the time, his feeling was that no matter how systematic his lectures might be, "what goes into the ears of the most attentive ones will still be fragmentary." No matter how good his speeches might be, what was most important was still that "the audience have actual, effective life experiences for themselves." This is just like "people drinking water know its temperature." If "it simply depended on me exhausting myself running all over explaining the qualities of Chinese music, then after everybody has finished listening, traditional music still is just something that passes in front of their eyes like a cloud of smoke, in which case Chinese music still has no future."
In this way, he realized that the difficult situation of Chinese music, which made it unable to influence present society, was just due to the fact that ordinary people did not understand it, and just did not have a "canon" of recordings that they could depend on every day. These days, when musicians and musical genres are gradually diminishing to nothing, there is no canon of recordings; simply depending on some concerned individuals' explications is equivalent to simply leaving behind written historical records. If people of the future one day wanted to reconstruct it, there would be no standards for learning it.
From the point of view of present-day people, not having a reliable "canon" to listen to, no matter how meticulously notes are written to indicate the qualities of the music, consciousness will always be one step removed from the actuality. Lin Ku-fang suddenly realized that the purpose of all these years of tireless lecturing to introduce traditional music, "was latently to reconstruct this canon," he says, and this was just "the transmission of culture"-"exemplars from the past!"
What is the canon of traditional music? When this is mentioned, Lin Ku-fang sighs deeply once again. He points out that when the subject of Chinese culture is mentioned, you'll probably think of Confucius and Mencius in philosophy; Mahayana Buddhist learning; The Book of Odes and Chu Ci, the poets Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Dongpo, and Xin Qiji in literature; Huang Gongwang, Zhao Mengfu, Ba Da and Shi Tao in painting; the Records of the Grand Historian and Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Governing in historiography; and the calligraphers Wang Xizhi and Huang Shangu. But what about music? What do you think of when you think of Chinese music?
Where are Chinese classics?
Is it the Duke of Zhou "regulating the rites and creating music"? Is it First Concubine Yang of the Tang and her "Cloud Cloak Feather Clothing Song"? Is it Bo Ya who "broke his strings and offered his qin" to Zhong Ziqi who understood him so intimately? Other than these fragmented musical stories, ordinarily people really are very limited in what they know about the transmission of and changes in Chinese music. If they knew about the sources and development of traditional music, a better appreciation of its artistic effects would naturally come into their minds.
Lin Ku-fang remarks that the present-day qin tunes "High Mountain," "Flowing Water," "Playing Daffodils" and so forth are all songs created by people after the fact, based on the story of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi. "Flowing Water" underwent further elaboration by qin players of even later times, so that it became a piece which made great use of special techniques in order to imitate the sound of water, in such songs as "72 Rapids," which has been played by the mainland qin performer Guan Pinghu, and has been said to produce the feeling of (like water) "not knowing the difference between day and night."
Another example comes from 2000 years ago. In the Wei dynasty Ji Kang, one of the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove," objected to the authoritarian power of the Sima family, and so the members of the court unjustly implicated him in treason, and he was wrongly put to death. As the execution approached, Ji Kang was cool and composed; after performing the tune "Guanglingsan," he sighed heavily and said, "The 'Guang-lingsan' won't live past today," then casually went to meet his death.
Did the "Guanglingsan" die with him? It wouldn't seem so. In the records of the late Eastern Han, the "Guanglingsan" was listed as folk music current in the Han and Wei regions, but in the records of the Song, it says "the 'Guanglingsan' is no longer extant."
Lin Ku-fang points out that the music of ancient China always persisted extraneous to statements whether it was extant or not; it was preserved in a state so that at times it was hidden, at times evident. The "Guang-lingsan" which we hear nowadays cannot be said to be the song which Ji Kang played on that occasion, but the scores of "Guang-lingsan" which have been passed down through the ages are intimately connected with the historical story of Ji Kang. Through the remembrance of Ji Kang, and the disgust towards authoritarian control as well as intellectuals' sympathy, the transmission of "Guanglingsan" has a part of Chinese psychology bound up with it.
The last moment of history
"In the future, when it has become decrepit to the point that it can only continue withering, with the ambience of the times it will be ever harder to have a great master of traditional music appear on the scene. Nevertheless, 'the exemplars are in the past,' so as long as there is transmission of the canon, the life of the present can communicate emotionally with that of history," he says. Lin Ku-fang has for this reason called the canon which he is working on, "a collection of recordings completed at the last minute of history."
The collection is to be published in Taipei in mid-May. It consists of 10 compact discs with 67 classic pieces of music, and two texts interpreting the aesthetic qualities of traditional music, entitled A Realistic, Affectionate Look: The Humanistic World of Chinese Music, and Exemplars in the Past: The Collection of the Canon and Introduction to the Musical Pieces. Superficially, it doesn't seem to be very different from The Complete Pipa, An Overview of the Chinese Musical Canon, or other published works systematizing traditional music which are now available on the market.
What's different is that "this is a work based on life experience, not just a work which was carried out with musical concepts," remarks Wu Ting-lien, who has read a draft of A Realistic, Affectionate Look, and is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Applied Arts in Chiao Tung University. For example, the types of musical instruments, if described according to concepts, are just "sound-producing tools." However, if you return to the Chinese cultural system, and approach it from a human perspective, of course, "the pipa is not just a musical instrument; it bespeaks the attitude of a knight-errant, and has an organic correspondence to life," says Wu Ting-lien.
The essence through precipitation
Lin Ku-fang summarizes Chinese traditional music as being an art in which "the Dao is not far from the human." It comprehensively treats natural phenomena. It laments what takes place between people in human society. But ultimately, it returns to a "realistic, affectionate look." It does not just expand the world of art and elevate it to the exalted state of "the Dao and art are one"-a realm where art is for the sake of life-but it also has "a view of history, a poetic sigh," as well as "a sentimental cosmology" including all sentient creatures and sensitive situations. Lin Ku-fang thinks that this is the greatest asset that traditional Chinese music bequeaths upon humanity.
Although it is said that a dislocation in the transmission of traditional music occurred in the late Qing and early Republican eras, still, most people cannot know-nor can deny either-how many of the vast number of musical records are still extant. There are so many representative traditional musical pieces; one of Lin Ku-fang's problems is how to establish a canon. In the end, Lin has selected and weighed the most absolutely central, canonical materials from history, taking into consideration every kind of musical genre and aspect of living concern, as in the typical emotions in human social life, praise of nature, the careful observation of transformations in space and time, various interesting features of everyday living, the fundamental pulse of life, and so forth, and in this way has gradually expanded the collection to 67 musical pieces.
Among these 67 pieces there are ancient songs more than one or two thousand years old, such as the qin pieces "Solitary Orchid," "Guanglingsan," "Song Beyond the Pass," and so on; there are also songs for the er-hu which have appeared within the past 40 years, such as "The Er-quan Springs Reflects the Moon" and "River Water," which, although not ancient tunes, have long since been viewed as a part of "tradition."
A canon must undergo a historical process of elimination and selection. Lin Ku-fang has specified that the most recently a song can have appeared is 30 years ago; that is, of contemporary music, he collects and records only those that are more than 30 years old in order to avoid being too subjective due to overly close proximity in time. Such works have undergone selection by at least one generation of people.
People ordinarily think that traditional songs are stagnant and no on-going creation is taking place. In response to this "misunderstanding," besides traditional tunes, the canon also includes some music which has been re-arranged and transplanted, variations on the same songs, such as the zheng version of "High Mountains, Flowing Water," a classical version of "Spring River, Flowers, and Moon at Night," in southern musical instrumentation, etc. And in order not to let listeners think that the practice of doing variations on existing pieces has not been continued in the past 30 years, the collection also includes some more recent examples, such as the "18 Beat Hu Jia," performed on pipes, and "Autumnal Thoughts by the Lady's Make-up Table" for winds, which "stands on the aesthetic foundation provided by the baritone flute, a result of modern improvements in instrumentation."
People promote the music
Another criterion for collection and recording the canon is that "works are made famous by their performers." That is to say, which pieces were selected depends heavily on who performed them and how. Because under differing interpretive performances, Chinese music can reveal totally different values, "in Chinese music, the performer is an important part of the equation," says Lin Ku-fang. For this reason, the choice of performers has been very troublesome for him.
There are several principles involved. For example, with a particular piece of classical music an artist may have attained a musical level which nobody else has reached, and played with a unique style. Such a work could not have been conceived of by anyone else. If these people are already dead, then a copy of their recordings must be obtained at all costs. If they are still alive, and can still perform, then every effort must be made to obtain a new recording.
In the canonical system as a whole, one-third of the music is from old versions. These have been acquired from 1950s and 1960s mainland China. Liu Shulan, an opera scholar from Beijing who also produces recordings, describes them this way: "These recordings carry on a historical tradition which goes back to what was received from the end of the Ming dynasty and the beginning of the Qing." Lin Ku-fang also believes that these recordings have historical significance: "They are tradition, they are also individuals. They aren't complicated, yet they are profound." However, finding such old recordings was not easy.
Lin points out that even if these old recordings had all been issued overseas in the 1960s, when one looked, the masters could never be located. Even if every one of them had written on them that they were produced by China Records, they could never be found at China Records in Beijing. Later, someone told him, in the past, the record press had been at Shanghai Records; maybe the masters were there. But when Lin Ku-fang followed the lead to search among the old records at the Shanghai Record factory, he discovered they were covered with dust. When you picked one up and tried to dust it off, it sounded a little clearer, but there were more cracks and flaws.
For example, take the work of the qin artist Guan Pinghu, "Guanglingsan," which was already a rare cultural document. When the record was first located, it had problems such as fading volume, growling noises in the low frequencies, crackling static, etc. Professor Liu Shulan, who had heard Guan Pinghu perform, said that the whole recording "did not completely reflect the dignity and character of the artist, and was an obstacle to the inner meaning of the work." Several efforts at copying and editing cleared up the static, etc., so that "the artistic quality of the program was enhanced by an order of magnitude," he says.
In order to produce recorded works which came from places such as Guang-dong, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, and Fujian on the mainland, as well as Taiwan, Lin Ku-fang set up a recording unit in the office of the musical group he leads, the "Forgotten Music Ensemble," and placed Li Tungheng, a member of the group specializing in gong percussion, in charge of the work of finalizing the production.
High-fidelity realization
To release a recording worth listening to, one must be careful that the sound quality, tone, and so forth have the "live" sound of the scene of the original performance. However, in recording processes such as the present use of CDs, due to differences in the degree that sound engineers understand music, copying original recordings onto the master tapes for mass production always creates problems. "It always turns out that when master tapes are recorded, the feeling of the sound is extremely regulated; it is cold like canned music," says Lin Ku-fang.
When recording pieces of Chinese music, this sort of flaw is especially serious. "Chinese musical expression has relatively more sounds in the middle range; a recording engineer more accustomed to Western high ranges, when producing Chinese traditional music, often misses the middle portions," says Li Tung-heng. For this reason, for Lin Ku-fang's canon, it was finally decided not to use a recording studio setup, but rather to let a member of "Forgotten Music"-Li Tung-heng, who "not only understands Chinese music, but also understands recording equipment"- take care of master tape production. What was hoped for was that quality could be assured, while avoiding a "regulated" production procedure.
Does the use of a home-made recording unit imply that in the information age, this is a way of not depending on commercial recording companies? Lin Ku-fang points out that as the canon is nearing completion, this would be the time for him to start promoting it in the media such as radio, television, and the arts sections of newspapers, using advertising and packaging to make a sales pitch; however, one evening he suddenly realized that this had never been his way of doing things. For many years, he insisted on "no manipulation of the media, no packaging or marketing himself, using practical life experiences to interpret concepts." How could he change this attitude now that this canon was about to be completed, and thus fall short of his principles?
"I don't believe what everybody always says about how responding to society can change you, about 'quantitative' changes and 'qualitative' changes, or any of that," remarks Lin. Even if marketing it in the media would be a "convenient trick" so that he could get more people to know about the ideals of the canon, "if you make a lot of news for the arts sections of newspapers and so on, nobody will believe that you are doing it to interpret concepts, but rather that it's just to promote your product," says Lin Ku-fang. "I'm unwilling to have this become just some merchandise I lay out as something new before the media of the consumer society. This collected canon which has taken so much careful work and has such historical significance would just become a series of ripples propagated by the advertising, and disappear without a trace."
"One characteristic of the information society is that everybody believes in the power of 'quantity,' and forgets the pursuit of living encounters with people, encounters with things of substance," says Lin Ku-fang. He does not believe that with the overwhelming commercial trends of the recording industry, there is no other way forward. "I'm in no hurry to achieve sudden recognition and affirmation; what is urgent for me is that some people who are willing to work conscientiously for literature, history, philosophy, and the arts, will be able to find something to respond to in the canon of music. After all, in categories of traditional culture, music has been left out for too long!"
Lin Ku-fang says he is not advertising, but is issuing news reports. He's not making the news, but wants to use the most traditional means-"word of mouth"-to sell his canon. To anybody worrying that perhaps sales may be flat, Lin Ku-fang has a confident reply, "The works of Laozi and Zhuangzi aren't hot sellers, but they're always on the bookstore shelves!"
Who saw the moon on the river bank?
"The winter dusk closes down ten thousand sounds
Some cold frost sparsely falls
Six years a visitor at the Buddha's gate
A solitary lamp in the snowy night."
When Lin was young and wild he studied with a master and practiced Zen on a mountaintop. He frequently meditated all night, sitting alone until the next morning. The "Poem of Mountain Dwelling," which he effortlessly recites, commemorates his years of mountain residence.
Lin says that at the time, he most enjoyed watching the rain on the mountaintop. He particularly liked early spring, when moist, fine rain got his bare feet feeling chilly; this made him clearly know his individual existence. All along, life is just this simple, yet so real and substantial.
Those long days of living in the mountains are resources Lin can draw upon when he meets challenges in his present life. Whenever he thinks about his "world of thought" in his youth, about his youthful ideals, his mind is clear.
When confronting the present conditions of existence of traditional music, Lin Ku-fang uses the canon to pay back "all the feelings which have been given to him by 30 years of shifting around in life." Now that the canon is about to appear, Lin has no feeling of tragedy, just a bit of concern. This is just the engaged sentiment expressed in "Who first saw the moon on the river bank? When did the river moon first shine on people?"
Perhaps there is a statement in Exemplars in the Past that can best represent the feelings of this development:
"It is really wonderful that such a rich, perfect thing can appear before all our eyes through the meticulous process of organizing, recording and production. And this clarity is not just a clarity of theory, but also an emotional clarity, between just this person and just this piece of music, here and now. Even in the present age, when tradition is in decline, a concerned person won't be lonely at all, but will rejoice at his or her own personal good fortune."
p.88
Who says the performance has to be on stage? Several performers from the mainland play in front of Lukang's Tianhou Temple, and reduce the distance between performers and audience.
p.91
The qin has a sound quality which is both "relaxed and resonant." It is the musical instrument which represents cultivated people. Being "resonant" gives the music depth; being "relaxed" makes it seem remotely distant. The picture shows the mainland musician Wu Wenguang and the flautist Zhan Yongming performing at the National Concert Hall.
The canonical collection, A Realistic, Affectionate Look, is due to be released in mid-May. It represents the whole-hearted devotion and efforts of a Taiwanese worker who continues this musical tradition.
Tradition and modernity, nature and culture, can intermingle and be widely propagated. Through the gift of modern technology, the master tapes collected from fieldwork and the recordings from studios in many places are being mixed down in a recording room in a busy section of Taipei.
Playing a stringed instrument gives up a singing, singing feeling. It al so expands the traditional forms of hu-qin music. Traditional Chinese music is rich and comprehensive; even facing the modern disappearance of tradition, people who are aware will not feel lonely.
The transmission of culture begins with such practices as tuning, hearing the sounds, and performing demonstrations.
"An empty, luxurious dream／ For 67 years／ The white bird sinks down／ Autumnal waters reach the sky." Lin Kufang, a practitioner of Zen, quotes the poem of the Song Dynasty monk Tiantong Zhengjue, which says that life and death are one, the ultimate beauty. Though art cannot really reach this realm, it has, however, stimulated his pursuit of a lifetime of traditional music, making "the Dao one with art.".
@List.jpg?w=522&h=410&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
