Kunqu: the voice that entered the heritage list two years before the qin

Suzhou, in the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty (1573–1620). In the hall of a private garden, a family banquet is under way.

On the small stage a young female lead is singing. She is Du Liniang, walking through a spring garden she has never been allowed to enter:

So the deep purples and bright reds were blooming everywhere, and all of it was left to broken wells and crumbling walls.

One word is drawn out at great length. It starts level, rises a little, falls again, and finally comes to rest. The single word for "everywhere" takes four or five seconds to sing. A bamboo flute follows the voice. It never pushes ahead. It only supports.

Below sit the host and his guests, all men of letters. They do not applaud; they listen, some with eyes closed.

Afterward the host invites his guests into his study, where a qin, the seven-string Chinese zither, lies on the table. One of the guests plays a piece. As he plays, one vibrato is drawn out at great length. It starts small, widens a little, then draws back in.

These two sounds, one in the hall and one in the study, belong to the same evening and the same people.

First, the heritage listing

On May 18, 2001, UNESCO announced its first Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. There were nineteen items from around the world, and China's kunqu was among them. It was approved unanimously and stands first on that list. Two years later, in 2003, the art of the guqin was included in the second proclamation.

That the two were chosen one after the other is no coincidence. They are two faces of the same tradition.

What kunqu is

Kunqu is a form of Chinese opera, sung in what is called the Kunshan tune. Its accompaniment is led by the qudi, a bamboo transverse flute, together with the sheng mouth organ, the three-stringed sanxian and the pipa lute. Unlike most Chinese opera, it does not rely on gongs and drums to carry the music. In kunqu singing, each syllable is delivered in three parts, a head, a belly and a tail, and drawn out very slowly. For this reason the style is called shuimo diao, the "water-polished tune", after the way rice flour was ground fine with water in a stone mill.

Kunqu performs chuanqi, long plays written by Ming and Qing scholars. A play may have dozens of scenes and take days to perform in full. The most famous is The Peony Pavilion (1598) by Tang Xianzu, in which the young woman Du Liniang walks in the garden, dreams of a lover, searches for the dream, dies of longing, and comes back to life. Others include Hong Sheng's The Palace of Eternal Youth, on the Tang emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei; Kong Shangren's The Peach Blossom Fan, on the fall of the Southern Ming; and Gao Lian's The Jade Hairpin, on a Daoist nun in love.

Kunqu lyrics follow a system of fixed tune patterns called qupai. Each passage of lyrics is written to a set pattern with a name such as "Black Silk Robe", "Mountain Slope Sheep" or "Too Lazy to Paint the Brows". Once the pattern is chosen, the number of characters, the tones and the rhymes are fixed, and the writer fills in words to fit.

From the Kunshan tune to the water-polished style

At the end of the Yuan and the beginning of the Ming, in the fourteenth century, the area around Kunshan near Suzhou had a local style of singing called the Kunshan tune. It was one of the four great singing styles of the time, with the Haiyan, Yuyao and Yiyang tunes, and originally a rather unrefined country style.

In the Jiajing reign of the Ming (1522–1566), a man named Wei Liangfu spent ten years remaking it. Wei came from Jiangxi and lived in Taicang. Unable to match the best singers of northern-style songs, he turned to southern songs and shut himself away. What he did was slow the tempo and refine the diction, dividing each syllable into head, belly and tail and articulating each part clearly before releasing it. He also absorbed techniques from northern singing and added the flute. The remade Kunshan tune was "clear, soft and sinuous", nothing like its rustic original.

Wei's friend Liang Chenyu wrote a play for the new style, Washing Silk, about the legendary beauty Xi Shi and the statesman Fan Li. It was the first chuanqi sung in the water-polished manner. From then on kunqu spread from Suzhou across the country. By the Wanli reign it had become the yabu, the "elegant division", of the scholar class, as opposed to the huabu, the "flowery division" of regional styles such as clapper opera.

In the middle of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the flowery styles rose. They were lively, easy to follow and loud with percussion, and kunqu slowly declined. By the early twentieth century only a few troupes in Suzhou were barely holding on. In 1921 the Suzhou Kunqu Training Institute took in a class of students who later became known as the "Chuan generation", because each was given a stage name containing the character chuan, "transmit". They were the last thread connecting kunqu to its past. In 1956 the Zhejiang Kun-Su Opera Troupe brought its production of Fifteen Strings of Cash to Beijing, and Premier Zhou Enlai remarked that "one play has saved a whole genre". In 2004 the writer Bai Xianyong produced a "youth edition" of The Peony Pavilion, whose tours introduced a new generation of young people to kunqu.

This thread runs almost parallel to that of the qin. Both fell to their lowest point at the end of the Qing and the beginning of the Republic, both were kept alive by a handful of people, and both have come back in the twenty-first century (see the Jinyu Qin Society).

Kunqu and the qin are one family

Both belong to the scholars. Kunqu scripts were written by scholars, and qin handbooks were compiled by scholars. In the Ming and Qing, those who sang kunqu and those who played the qin were often the same people. Tang Xianzu, the author of The Peony Pavilion, played the qin. When Yan Tianchi of the Yushan school was compiling his qin handbook, kunqu was flourishing in nearby Suzhou (see Yan Tianchi). For the host in the opening scene, kunqu in the hall and the qin in the study were both perfectly normal.

They share an aesthetic. The water-polishing of kunqu grinds one syllable into a head, a belly and a tail. The vibratos of the qin, yin (narrow) and nao (wide), give one note its rise and fall. Both are slow, both are fine-grained, and both care most about the changes that happen inside a single unit, one syllable or one note. The Yushan school of the qin is summed up as "clear, subtle, plain and distant", and kunqu is described as "clear, soft and sinuous". The phrases are almost interchangeable.

Neither is loud. Kunqu does without gongs and drums, and the qin is a quiet instrument. Both need a quiet place and quiet listeners. The flowery styles needed percussion to rise above the crowd at temple fairs and markets; kunqu in the hall and the qin in the study did not.

Both use notation to record the scholar's voice. Kunqu uses gongche notation and the qin uses jianzipu, the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters. Neither records precise rhythm, and both depend on oral teaching. Both are still in use, and both are sometimes called "unscientific", but they leave out rhythm because rhythm was always taught by the teacher.

"Courting with the Qin" in The Jade Hairpin

The most direct evidence is a kunqu scene built around the qin.

Gao Lian's The Jade Hairpin tells of the young scholar Pan Bizheng, who lodges at a Daoist convent and falls in love with the nun Chen Miaochang. In the scene called "Qin Tiao", Courting with the Qin, Pan hears the sound of a qin on a moonlit night and follows it to Chen's room. The two test each other through music. Chen first plays Guanghan You ("Roaming the Moon Palace"), and Pan hears in it the cool detachment of someone who has left the world. Pan then plays Zhi Chao Fei ("The Pheasant Flies at Dawn"), whose meaning is a male bird seeking its mate. Chen understands, and blushes.

The word qintiao, courting with the qin, comes from the story of Sima Xiangru (see courting with the qin), and kunqu put it on the stage. The scene is still part of the standard kunqu repertoire. The actors perform the movements of playing on stage, while the flute offstage plays the melody of the qin piece. In its own way, kunqu performs the qin.

The actors do not really play the qin on stage; their hands only hover over the strings. But the movements are correct: the right hand's gou and tiao, the left hand's yin and nao. Older actors all learned them from qin players. Those who know the qin watch the hands: if they are right, this scholar truly plays; if not, he is only acting. Kunqu's demands on stage movement are as exacting as a qin player's demands on a single gou.

What the heritage listing protects

Kunqu was listed for almost the same reasons as the qin: a complete body of technique, six hundred years of transmission, and a large repertoire, together with very few people who truly master it. Thousands of kunqu scenes are recorded in historical sources, but fewer than two hundred can still be performed today.

The heritage list is not an honor roll. It is a list of the endangered. When kunqu was listed in 2001, there were fewer than a thousand professional kunqu performers in all of China. When the qin was listed in 2003, players were also few. Twenty years later, both are much better off. Kunqu has young audiences, and the qin has more than a million learners. But the distance between being able to do it and doing it well is as great as ever. Many can now sing a few arias or play a few pieces, but those who can carry a full-length play, or make a single vibrato truly speak, are still few.

Hear it once

If you study the qin, go and hear kunqu at least once, ideally "Strolling in the Garden" from The Peony Pavilion or "Courting with the Qin" from The Jade Hairpin. In that drawn-out singing, with its rise and fall inside a single syllable, you will recognize yin and nao. The four or five seconds spent on the word "everywhere" are the same thing as one long yin.

The reverse is also true. Kunqu listeners who take up the qin will find that qin songs such as Yangguan Sandie ("Three Variations on the Yang Pass") and Qiufeng Ci ("Autumn Wind Song") work on the same principle as kunqu: one syllable, one breath, released slowly. For what became of the qin song, see the opening of the article on Yan Tianchi.

On that evening in Suzhou, the kunqu in the hall and the qin in the study were two forms of the same sound.