Modern Chinese instruments are a lot like modern China: a disparate patchwork of various Parts forcibly cobbled into a Whole that, to hear some tell it, Always Was and Ever Shall Be.
That is a bit of an exaggeration: no government officials contend that “the yangqin dulcimer has always been part of China” the way they might claim Tibet or Taiwan or the Spratly Islands. All the same, the next time you hear a performance of “traditional” music, consider that the “Chinese” sounds in your ear, like the borders of the modern People’s Republic, are scarcely a century old. Often they are much newer; yet they are propagated and presented as traditional. This occurs through the musical equivalent of a military occupation: government oversight of music schools, venues, broadcasting, the recording industry, and other prominent incubators and outlets of cultural activity.
To be sure, China’s oft-touted “5,000 years of civilization” holds rich musical culture. It is just that when you are the Middle Kingdom, ruled by the Son of Heaven who radiates Civilization outward towards tributary states and distant barbarian lands, there is little pressure to consider yourself a nation-state boxed in by borders or “national” characteristics. Certainly nothing so crude as bratwurst, or baguettes or baseball – or a flamenco guitar.
Moreover, like the Middle Kingdom itself, today’s roster of “Chinese” instruments has been buffeted by foreign invasions. Though the seven-stringed qin zither (琴 or 古琴 guqin, “old instrument”) is native to the Han heartlands around the Yellow River, the yangqin (洋琴 “foreign instrument”) dulcimer and huqin (胡琴 “barbarian instrument”) fiddle came via the Silk Road, as did the lute-like pipa (琵琶) whose name, according to one theory, approximates the instrument’s unfamiliar twang.
Many rich musical traditions flourished within the emperor’s domain, but like the cacophony of dialects that divided the mostly illiterate Chinese before the 20th century, they were seldom mutually intelligible. Villages and even family clans developed their own musical styles and instruments. Traditions were passed down to the next generation, but seldom outwards to other families or villages – let alone to the entire country.
Rulers did, of course, populate their courts with musicians. “Elegant music” (雅乐) was considered a Confucian virtue, and music was classed among the Confucian Six Arts (六艺). Any respectable monarch upholding the Sage’s teachings would maintain an ensemble for rituals. Tang Dynasty court musicians drew in a mix of influences from Central Asia, and the Qing court fostered the development of Beijing Opera, which amalgamated many regional opera styles within the empire. But the cliché holds: the mountains were high, and the emperor’s musicians far away. Most music wasn’t written down, and even a simple two-string erhu fiddle would be built, tuned, and played differently in every village.
As the Imperial system collapsed, Chinese intellectuals and politicians groped towards new definitions of nationhood. China became a “Republic” (中华民国) and the word guo (国) came to signify a modern nation-state. The new understanding of guo brought new suffixes signifying association with the nation of China. Intellectuals sought symbols and canons to convey guocui (国粹 “national essence”).
Sun Yat-sen, an itinerant revolutionary, became father of the nation (国父). A variant of Beijing’s dialect, once known as “Mandarin[administrator]-speak” (官话, hence the English “Mandarin”), became instead the nation’s language (guoyu 国语). A textual tradition that had spread far and deep into Korea, Vietnam, and Japan — but not Tibet or Xinjiang — was redefined as guowen (国文, the nation’s literature. Like Mandarin, Beijing Opera was anointed guoju (国剧), the national opera. Humiliations inflicted by outsiders — the opium wars, the razing of the Old Summer Palace — were summed up as guochi (国耻), National Humiliation.
Guoyue (国乐), national music, was a trickier matter. No such thing existed, nor did any one musical tradition within China seem fit to become a nationwide standard. In language, at least, a unified script bound together disparate regions, and literature was regarded as a worthy pursuit unto itself. But the literatus who played qin and sipped tea in his study felt no musical brotherhood with a blind erhu player on the street corner who played “vulgar” music, and a jam session would have been unthinkable.
The court musicians in Beijing would have had nothing to say to a lone herder playing a flute in Mongolia.
Ensembles were small, instruments were fashioned haphazardly by local craftsmen, and the idea of a “composer” — a Beethoven or Mozart on par with famous poets, or architects, or monarchs — was unheard-of. No institutions supported music for music’s sake – no concert halls with specialized acoustics and audiences who sat in rapt silence, no dedicated music schools, no notion of a musicianship as a cause that united singers or instrumentalists of different provinces and different social stations. The Chinese word for musician, (yinyuejia 音乐家) is a modern construction. Chinese music lacked, in the words of scholar Gong Hongyu , “a connected history, a systematic pedagogy and respectability.”
In the European tradition, a vast infrastructure of institutions, specialists, and connoisseurs supported the enterprise of Music, from the mightiest Verdi opera to the humblest Schubert leid. “Music,” almost by definition, was written down in highly detailed notation. This allowed far-flung musicians to literally compare notes and composers to create epic masterworks that would be long-remembered like a great novel or painting. National styles emerged — the dreamy French, romantic Italians, brooding Germans, wide-open-prairie-hoedown Americans, Tango-tinged Argentineans, Roma-hued Hungarians, and the like. Scientific practices allowed a unified standard for the note of A — 440 vibrations per second — to emerge alongside instruments that could be precisely built and tuned.
During the New Culture Movement, intellectuals and bureaucrats decided to give China a “national music” worthy of the name. The Republican government’s Ministry of Culture founded the Shanghai National Conservatory (国立上海音乐学院) in 1927, and scholars began to collect and systematize a Chinese “tradition” from the country’s vast but disparate musical riches.
China’s bewildering variety of musical instruments, with their many forms and variants and tunings and playing styles, were also to be reformed along “scientific” principles. The Western symphony orchestra, in particular, was held up as the musical equivalent of a modern army: outfitted with precision-engineered equipment, tightly coordinated, and capable of projecting a vast range of sounds in powerful, focused ways to achieve a huge variety of musical outcomes. Chinese music, like much else in Chinese culture, was considered “backwards” by comparison: overgrown, decadent, unfocused and unfit to compete against European music or stir souls within China itself. Clearer, sharper, brighter, louder sounds were needed to play music that represented not just a particular province or village or regional opera, but China as a whole.
For centuries, string and wind instruments had been known collectively as “silk and bamboo.” After decades of experimentation by musicians, scholars, and engineers through the Nationalist and Communist periods, stringed instruments all use metal or nylon today. A Western-style system of frets was introduced to the pipa, which is now played with taped-on plectra (fake fingernails). Bowing and fingering techniques on the modern erhu are modeled after the violin.
The sheng (笙) was once mouth-organ made of bamboo whose mellow, woody sound infused Tang court rituals. By the Qing Dynasty, it had evolved into a larger, louder instrument but retained its all-wood structure and organic tone. After Republican- and Communist-era reforms, it is now a loud and brassy affair, outfitted with additional metal pipes for more resonance and clarinet-like valves for cleaner, crisper transitions between notes.
Sound samples: A version of Jasmine flowers (茉莉花) on an all-wood Qing-era reproduction sheng (笙), followed by same melody on a modernized sheng with metal amplification tubes, metal-reinforced reeds and other innovations.
Recording courtesy of Mr. Wu Laishun 吴来顺, played on instruments made by the Wu Family Wind Instruments Company (宏音斋乐器销售中心（中国吴氏管乐社）
The “Chinese orchestra” probably represents the zenith of this century-long Westernization trend in Chinese music. Laid out like a Western orchestra with a conductor, “reformed” Chinese instruments mostly correspond to Western counterparts. Shengs fill in for brass, including a massive bass sheng meant to match the tuba. Various huqins, from the erhu on down, fill in for strings — the gehu (革胡 literally, “reformed hu”), resembles a cello more closely in form and function than any Chinese instrument. Canonized “Chinese” classics have been rewritten for full orchestra, usually in Western-style staff notation. See for example this video of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra (arranged like a Western orchestra into sections with a conductor) playing the classic “Ambush From All Sides”. The piece is traditionally played by a pipa soloist.
Such instruments and pieces sometimes mix well with the Western concert tradition, and have been featured in major venues like Carnegie Hall. But they would be far more familiar to Beethoven than Bai Juyi, the Tang poet who experienced the solo pipa’s sonorities as “a burst of rain,” “an intimate whisper,” and “pearls falling on a plate of jade.”
Like urban planners who see bulldozing labyrinthine hutongs into wide, straight boulevards as the price of modernity, Chinese musicians are mostly unsentimental about the brutal consolidation of their heritage. This is hardly unique to China — in the West, “historically informed” performances that use the instruments and techniques of Mozart’s time to play his music are a recent innovation. While China’s major institutions of culture in cities tend to toe the guoyue line, older instruments and subtler sounds can still be heard in pockets of rural China, notably in ethnic minority areas. And of course, it is up to Chinese musicians themselves to decide what things, old or new, are authentically “Chinese.”
Assessing traditional Chinese music today, it would be too harsh to lean solely on Eric Hobsbawm’s idea of an “invented tradition”: “a set of practices…governed by … accepted rules of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with… a suitable historic past [where such] continuity…is largely fictitious.” There is some continuity — of style, of melodies, of instrument construction. Nonetheless, Chinese politicians’ 20th-century habit of standardizing and deploying music to represent the modern state of “China” is something to keep in mind during your next concert, tourist trap performance, or tacky CCTV gala spectacular.
Further comparisons of old and reformed instruments
• Silk- and metal-string versions of the same guqin piece, “Flowing Water” (流水) played by Zhao Jiazhen (赵家珍)
Guqin with silk strings
Guqin with metal / nylon strings
• Silk- and metal-string versions of the same erhu piece “The Moon Reflected on the Second Springs”
The Moon Reflected on the Second Springs, performed by Abing (1952 – silk-stringed erhu)
The Moon Reflected on the Second Springs, performed by Wu Zhimin (erhu) and Zhang Liduo (harp) (rec. 1982, Shanghai)
• Image of a Tang dynasty pipa with silk strings and no frets; Image of a post-1949 pipa with metal/nylon strings and frets played with plectra (picks) taped to the fingers:
• Photo of the gehu (革胡, literally “reformed hu(qin)” alongside its inspiration, the cello.
