Guqin Improvisation

From personal interpretation to free improvisation 1 古琴即興演奏

又論「即興創作」

How freely should guqin music be played?

Some people argue that guqin music should be played accurately according to the tablature; others say it should be played freely. Some argue for improvisation, and there is even a movement suggesting that at best guqin music should be recreated during each performance through free improvisation. More generally speaking, there is a long tradition of saying that the guqin and or guqin music "should be this" or "should be that", or even that the guqin is this or the guqin is that.2

Unfortunately, all such claims are usually applied using selective reasoning: history and experience show that the guqin tradition is very broad. It has been described as an instrument for scholars and recluses but clearly it has long been played in society. It is generally considered to be largely as a non-professional tradition but it has always included professionals (teachers, in particular). It may be said that the ideal is to play only for oneself, as a form of self-cultivation, but many of the best known players today are trained in conservatories, where the focus is public performance.

Similarly, the tradition has always included people who tried to play old melodies from old tablature, people who tried only to copy the music they heard from their teachers or other contemporaries, people who consciously changed the music they knew, and people who created new melodies. Together all their efforts, plus the appreciation of informed listeners, have given the guqin its rich tradition; take away any part and it is poorer.

On the other hand, it is quite legitimate to ask, "If (insert condition), how freely should guqin music be played?" For example, "If the intention is that the music provide more than superficial communication between the player and a listener, how freely should guqin music be played?" (Of course, within the tradition of playing only for oneself this is not a particularly relevant question.)

In order to try to answer this particular question it is useful to discuss the relatively new term "audiation": 3

Audiation is the process of mentally hearing and comprehending music, even when no physical sound is present. It is a cognitive process by which the brain gives meaning to musical sounds. In essence, audiation of music is analogous to thinking in a language....(Wikipedia)

This concept, developed for use in music education, means that in order to understand an unfamiliar melody a listener must be able to predict patterns within it. This is of course relevant to the question of how freely music can be played and there still be communication. (It also ignores the question of music, such as New Age music, that apparently tries to communicate purely through color.4)

In discussing this it is also relevant to mention glossolalia, 5 defined as,

The vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of religious practice. (Wikipedia)

Glossolalia is sometimes called "nonsense talk". However, in a religious context this may be an inappropriate description. Similarly, musical composition may be so unstructured, or improvisation so free, that no communication is likely to occur. However, to call such music nonsensical would require defining what sort of communication is meaningful.

Boya (see below) is said to have been a great musician. If I see a painting of him playing the guqin and this prompts me to imagine music that is to me beautiful, does that mean Boya is communicating beautiful music to me? Likewise, if I attend a concert and enjoy hearing a musician play apparently random sounds, how much does my enjoyment have to do with the musician?

Thus, if a poet/performer and listener do not share a language, how much beauty can be communicated?6 If you do not know the language of the poet, you cannot fully appreciate the poetry; much of the beauty you find in it may come from you yourself, not from the poet. If you do not know the language of the musician, your appreciation of the music may likewise have little to do with the specific music conveyed by the musician. As with glossolalia, such appreciation may require a leap of faith.7

Another comparison with poetry is as follows. In the Chinese tradition there was a strong value put on extemporizing poetry: on the spur of the moment dashing off poetry, often writing beautiful (hopefully) calligraphy. But what were the limits to such freedom of expression? One of my teachers of classical Chinese put it this way. She spent so many years learning the rules of classical poetry that whatever she wrote was correct, but it had no beauty. Only when she drank a little to much and forgot the rules would she create anything with beauty; it was her training that made the spontaneity possible. Developed systems of music improvisation work exactly in this way. So-called free improvisation tries to break out of such structural requirements. Often, however, what the musician actually does is devise new structures, creating a sort of personal improvisation.

This, then, recalls the original question: How freely should guqin music be played? It would seem that the best answer may be, it depends on what you wish to communicate.



Creating new music: from free to fixed

Within the Western classical music tradition, particularly during the common practice period, new melodies have generally been created by someone sitting down and composing a complete piece designed to be played by someone else. In most oral traditions new melodies are usually created by performers themselves through the trial and error of actually playing them. They may begin with what might called free improvisation, but the players then continuously refine their creations. Perhaps they never stop changing the melodies, in other cases eventually the melodies become fixed.

The survival of over 100 handbooks of guqin tablature combined with the relative lack of commentary on free interpretation suggests that most players wished to copy the tradition. The more or less gradual change of many melodies within those handbooks over time, and the appearance of new melodies, document the types of changes that were most common. Unfortunately, these changes have not yet been studied very systematically.

Throughout history some players have probably been deliberately very free in their interpretations, changing a melody each time they played it. It is difficult to say when such free interpretations can be called "improvisation". It is equally difficult to say when improvisation might be called "free improvisation". But even though it seems very likely that many gradations of such interpretation existed in the past, it is even more difficult to cite specific historical evidence in support of any particular method of free interpretation.