Yan Tianchi: the man who took the words out of qin music

Almost all guqin performance today is purely instrumental. Nobody sings. A player sits at the instrument, the fingers travel along the strings, and the mouth stays closed. This seems so natural that no one questions it. In fact it was decided by one man, about four hundred years ago.

Before him, things were different.

The age of the qin song

In the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the fashion among qin players was the qin song (qin ge, 琴歌): singing words while playing.

This was an ancient tradition in itself. When Confucius is described as practising "strings and song", it means he sang as he played (see Confucius learns the qin). Pieces such as Yangguan Sandie (阳关三叠, "Three Variations on the Yang Pass") and Qiufeng Ci (秋风词, "Autumn Wind") were songs from the start. But by the mid Ming the practice had become a formula. Some handbooks set words to every single piece, even forcing lyrics onto purely instrumental works like Gao Shan (高山, "High Mountains") and Liu Shui (流水, "Flowing Water"), so that the player sang wherever the music went. The lyrics were often cobbled together, one syllable per note, and the rise and fall of the music had nothing to do with the meaning of the words. Players did not much care. If there were words, you could sing; if you could sing, you seemed cultured.

The other fashion was display: complicated fingering, high speed, endless ornament. A piece might be loaded with dozens of gun and fu (滚拂, rapid sweeps across the strings), cuo (撮, two strings plucked together) and lun (轮, rolled plucks), filling every moment with activity and dazzling the listener.

Yan Cheng could not stand it.

Yan Tianchi

Yan Cheng (1547–1625), courtesy name Daoche, art name Tianchi, came from Changshu in Jiangsu province, in the prosperous region south of the lower Yangzi. His father, Yan Ne, was a grand secretary, one of the chief ministers of the Jiajing emperor. Yan Cheng himself served as prefect of Shaowu, a modest post that he did not hold for long. The real work of his life was the qin.

He studied with two teachers. One was Chen Xingyuan, a local Changshu player. The other was Shen Yin, who had come from the capital. Shen was said to have been a court musician of exceptional skill who had drifted south. From Shen Yin, Yan Cheng learned something quite unlike the fashions of the south: slowness, simplicity and restraint.

Later he organized the Qinchuan Qin Society in Changshu, gathering a group of players who met regularly to play for one another and compare their art. Changshu is also called Yushan, after a local hill, so the school is called the Yushan school, or the Qinchuan school.

In 1614, the forty-second year of the Wanli reign, he completed the Songxianguan Qinpu (松弦馆琴谱, "Qin Handbook of the Pine-String Studio"), a collection of some twenty pieces, none of them set to words. In his preface he attacked the fashions of his time. Putting words to qin pieces, he said, was "borrowing sound in order to attach writing to it", treating music as a servant of text. And complicated fingering and the pursuit of speed "lose the ancient intent".

For him the essence of the qin was sound itself, which needed no text to explain it. Only by playing slowly, and playing less, could one hear each note.

This was the first handbook of the Ming to argue openly that qin pieces should not be set to words. Its influence was great. When the editors of the Siku Quanshu, the vast imperial library compiled in the eighteenth century, later described the Yushan style in their catalogue, they did so in four characters: qing, wei, dan, yuan (清微淡远).

Clear, subtle, light, distant

These four characters became the label of the Yushan school, and almost a synonym for qin aesthetics itself.

Qing, clear, means the sound is clean, not muddy. The finger lands precisely, the attack of each note is clean, and there is no extraneous noise.

Wei, subtle, means small in scale, never exaggerated. Vibrato should be fine, not a broad shaking of the hand.

Dan, light, means not seeking splendor. No showing off, no piling up of effects. What one note can say clearly should not take two.

Yuan, distant, means a long afterglow, with the meaning lying beyond the sound. When a note has been played, you wait for it to fade, and the fading is also music.

But note that Yan Tianchi never used these four characters himself. They are a later summary of the style of the Songxianguan Qinpu. Nor was the Yushan school all of one piece. Xu Shangying, who came after Yan Tianchi, added further, more forceful qualities such as "swift" and "heavy" to the ideal of clear, subtle, light and distant.

Xu Shangying's addition

Xu Shangying, art name Qingshan, was a younger man from Yan Tianchi's home district. He studied with the same teacher, Chen Xingyuan, and also with Zhang Weichuan. His essay Xishan Qinkuang (溪山琴况, "The Qualities of the Qin, from the Stream and Mountain Studio") lists twenty-four qualities of qin playing: harmony, stillness, clarity, distance, antiquity, lightness, tranquility, ease, elegance, beauty, brightness, color, purity, smoothness, roundness, firmness, breadth, delicacy, fluency, vigor, lightness of touch, weight, slowness and speed. It is the most systematic text in the history of qin aesthetics.

The twenty-four include "light" and "distant", but also "breadth", "vigor", "weight" and "speed". Xu clearly felt that clear, subtle, light and distant was not enough. The qin can be slow, but it can also be fast; it can be light, but it can also be heavy. Under the heading of speed he writes:

A small speed is somewhat quick and should be taut. A great speed values urgency, but it must be urgent without becoming disordered.

Speed is acceptable, so long as it does not become disorder. His own handbook, the Dahuange Qinpu (大还阁琴谱, "Qin Handbook of the Great Return Pavilion", printed in 1673), contains more pieces than the Songxianguan Qinpu and covers a wider range of styles, including such broad, dramatic works as Xiaoxiang Shuiyun.

So the true shape of the Yushan school is this: Yan Tianchi set a direction, and Xu Shangying opened it out. Clear, subtle, light and distant is the starting point, not the whole. Players who remember only the four characters often turn Yushan playing into a stagnant pond. What Xu Shangying wanted was breadth inside the lightness, and vigor inside the subtlety.

What is in the Songxianguan Qinpu

The handbook contains more than twenty pieces, most of them well-known works of the time: Dongtian Chunxiao (洞天春晓, "Spring Dawn in the Grotto Heaven"), Xishan Qiuyue (溪山秋月, "Autumn Moon over Stream and Mountain"), Xiaoxiang Shuiyun, Yu Ge (渔歌, "Fisherman's Song"), Qiao Ge (樵歌, "Woodcutter's Song"), Meihua Sannong (梅花三弄, "Three Variations on Plum Blossom"), Pingsha Luoyan (平沙落雁, "Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank"), Qiu Hong (秋鸿, "Autumn Geese") and others. Each is given only in jianzipu (减字谱, the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters), with not a single word of lyrics.

In his preface Yan Tianchi also explained why the qin needs no words. Of the qin as music, he wrote:

It can show the state of a people's morals, it can gather the heart and soul, it can distinguish joy from anger, it can delight the feelings, it can quiet the mind, it can strengthen courage, it can cut one off from the dust of the world, and it can move ghosts and spirits.

The sound of the qin can do all this by itself, without the help of words. His reasoning was that if a piece needs lyrics before anyone can understand it, then the piece itself has not said what it means.

It seems natural today, but in 1614 it was a position. It amounted to saying that most of the qin songs fashionable for the previous century were unnecessary.

The Songxianguan Qinpu was reprinted many times, and most Qing dynasty handbooks acknowledged it as the orthodox line. Its format, a piece given only as notation with a short explanatory preface in front, became the standard format of later qin handbooks.

Why Changshu

Changshu lies in Jiangnan, the region south of the lower Yangzi that was the richest part of Ming China, full of scholars, private libraries and instruments. Yan Tianchi came from a chief minister's family and had the means to gather players and print a handbook. Carving the woodblocks for a qin handbook was a considerable expense in the Ming (see Printing qin handbooks). That the Songxianguan Qinpu survived and spread had much to do with the quality of its printing and the social standing of the Yan family.

There is another piece of background. Next to Changshu lies Suzhou, where Kunqu opera was then flourishing. Kunqu's "water-polished" singing style stretches a single syllable into a head, belly and tail, slow, fine and winding (see Kunqu and the qin). Yan Tianchi's clear, subtle, light and distant and Kunqu's soft, supple, winding line were the taste of the same people in the same place. The difference is that Kunqu was sung, while Yan Tianchi insisted on taking singing out of the qin. In his time that choice went against the current.

For an aesthetic to become orthodoxy, sound argument is not enough. Someone has to print it, and a circle of people has to be there playing it. Yan Tianchi had all three.

His own end was quiet. He lived to seventy-nine and died in his home town, eleven years after the Songxianguan Qinpu was published, and his students carried on the Qinchuan Qin Society. He never held high office and never wrote a great book. All he left was a handbook of some twenty pieces and a qin society. Yet four hundred years later, everyone who plays the qin without singing is his descendant.

Today

After Yan Tianchi, the wordless qin piece became the mainstream. The Guangling school of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and the various schools of modern times play essentially instrumental music. The qin song did not disappear. Yangguan Sandie, Qiufeng Ci and Feng Qiu Huang (凤求凰, "The Phoenix Seeks His Mate") are still sung today. But they belong to a separate category and are no longer the default form of a qin piece.

The significance of this is that the guqin was confirmed from then on as an instrument in its own right, not an accompaniment to song. The sound of the instrument itself, the three timbres of san yin (open strings), an yin (stopped notes) and fan yin (harmonics), and the resonance of the ornaments yin, nao, chuo and zhu, came to be treated as the whole of its expression, with no need for words to explain it. A player sits at the qin, mouth closed, fingers moving along the strings, and the listener hears meaning in the sound alone. That picture was set by Yan Tianchi.

For a fuller account of the qin schools and how they developed, see The schools of the guqin (in Chinese). And to see what clear, subtle, light and distant means under the fingers, start with the entries for yin, nao and ding yin in the technique index. Small in scale and never exaggerated: that is what subtle means.