Guqin notation
Encyclopedia
The notation
of the guqin
is a unique form of tablature
for the Chinese musical instrument
, with a history of over 1,500 years, still in use today.
Written qin music did not directly tell what notes were played; instead, it was written in a tablature
detailing tuning, finger positions, and stroke technique, thus comprising a step by step method and description of how to play a piece. Some tablatures do indicate notes using the gongche
system, or indicate rhythm
using dot
s. The earliest example of the modern shorthand
tablature survives from around the twelfth century CE. An earlier form of music notation from the Tang era survives in just one manuscript, dated to the seventh century CE, called Jieshi Diao Youlan
《碣石調幽蘭》 (Solitary Orchid in Stone Tablet Mode). It is written in a longhand form called wenzi pu 〔文字譜〕 (literally "written notation"), said to have been created by Yongmen Zhou (雍門周) during the Warring States Period
, which gives all the details using ordinary written Chinese characters. Later in the Tang dynasty
Cao Rou (曹柔) and others simplified the notation, using only the important elements of the characters (like string number, plucking technique, hui number and which finger to stop the string) and combined them into one character notation
. This meant that instead of having two lines of written text to describe a few notes, a single character could represent one note, or sometimes as many as nine. This notation form was called jianzi pu 〔減字譜〕 (literally "reduced notation") and it was a great advancement for recording qin pieces. It was so successful that from the Ming dynasty
onwards, a great many qinpu 〔琴譜〕 (qin tablature collections) appeared, the most famous and useful being "Shenqi Mipu" (The Mysterious and Marvellous Tablature) compiled by Zhu Quan
, the 17th son of the founder of the Ming dynasty . In the 1960s, Zha Fuxi discovered more than 130 qinpu that contain well over 3360 pieces of written music. Sadly, many qinpu compiled before the Ming dynasty are now lost, and many pieces have remained unplayed for hundreds of years.
Major changes in the tablature happened during the Qing period
. Before, the recording of the note positions between hui were only approximations. For example, to play sol
on the seventh string, the position the player must stop is between the 7th and 8th hui. The tablature of Ming times would only say "between 7 and 8" 「七八日(間)」 or for other positions "below 6" 「六下」 or even say "11" 「十一」 (when the correct position is slightly higher). During the Qing
, this was replaced by the decimal system
. The space between two hui were split into 10 'fen' 〔分〕, so the tablature can indicate the correct position of notes more accurately, so for the examples above, the correct positions are 7.6, 6.2 and 10.8 respectively. Some even went further to split one fen into a further 10 'li' 〔釐/厘〕, but since the distance is too minute to affect the pitch to a large degree, it was considered impractical to use. Some people argue that the old system is just as accurate as the new system when qin tuning theory is observed. Also, these old positions may actually conform to the rules of equally tempered
music, with its pitches slightly flatter, such as in the case of 8 for 7.9 and 11 for 10.8. Another main property for this old system is that it requires the player to "feel for the note", just as one would do for any other fretless stringed instrument, be it erhu
or violin
, instead of relying solely on fixed positions (which pitches can change slightly depending on how the player tunes their qin).
Existing qinpu generally come from private collections or in public libraries throughout China, etc. Those that are available for public purchase are facsimile
qinpu printed and bound in the traditional Chinese bookbinding
process. More modern qinpu tend to be bound in the normal Western way on modern paper. The format uses qin notation with staff notation and/or jianpu notation.
and Arabic numerals
to express the information provided by qin tablature. The qin player, Gong Yi
, developed a format using staff notation combined with some tablature marks . Others have tried to write a computer program
that will do this. Chen Changlin, a Beijing-based computer scientist
and qin player of the Min (Fujian) School, developed the first computer program to encode qin notation from ancient tablature sources.
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
of the guqin
Guqin
The guqin is the modern name for a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument of the zither family...
is a unique form of tablature
Tablature
Tablature is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches....
for the Chinese musical instrument
Musical instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...
, with a history of over 1,500 years, still in use today.
History
Written qin music did not directly tell what notes were played; instead, it was written in a tablature
Tablature
Tablature is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches....
detailing tuning, finger positions, and stroke technique, thus comprising a step by step method and description of how to play a piece. Some tablatures do indicate notes using the gongche
Gongche notation
Gongche notation or gongchepu is a traditional musical notation method, once popular in ancient China. It uses Chinese characters to represent musical notes. It was named after two of the Chinese characters that were used to represent musical notes, namely "工" gōng and "尺" chě...
system, or indicate rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
using dot
Dot
- Typography :* Full stop, also called period in American English, used as a sentence terminator and as a decimal separator in numerals - Typography :* Full stop, also called period in American English, used as a sentence terminator and as a decimal separator (decimal point) in numerals -...
s. The earliest example of the modern shorthand
Shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...
tablature survives from around the twelfth century CE. An earlier form of music notation from the Tang era survives in just one manuscript, dated to the seventh century CE, called Jieshi Diao Youlan
Jieshi Diao Youlan
Jieshi Diao Youlan means "Solitary Orchid in the Stone Tablet Mode" or just "Solitary Orchid"...
《碣石調幽蘭》 (Solitary Orchid in Stone Tablet Mode). It is written in a longhand form called wenzi pu 〔文字譜〕 (literally "written notation"), said to have been created by Yongmen Zhou (雍門周) during the Warring States Period
Warring States Period
The Warring States Period , also known as the Era of Warring States, or the Warring Kingdoms period, covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC...
, which gives all the details using ordinary written Chinese characters. Later in the Tang dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
Cao Rou (曹柔) and others simplified the notation, using only the important elements of the characters (like string number, plucking technique, hui number and which finger to stop the string) and combined them into one character notation
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
. This meant that instead of having two lines of written text to describe a few notes, a single character could represent one note, or sometimes as many as nine. This notation form was called jianzi pu 〔減字譜〕 (literally "reduced notation") and it was a great advancement for recording qin pieces. It was so successful that from the Ming dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
onwards, a great many qinpu 〔琴譜〕 (qin tablature collections) appeared, the most famous and useful being "Shenqi Mipu" (The Mysterious and Marvellous Tablature) compiled by Zhu Quan
Zhu Quan
Zhu Quan , The Prince of Ning , was the 17th son of Ming Emperor Hongwu Zhu Yuanzhang; a military commander, historian and playwright, great tea connoisseur and a qin player....
, the 17th son of the founder of the Ming dynasty . In the 1960s, Zha Fuxi discovered more than 130 qinpu that contain well over 3360 pieces of written music. Sadly, many qinpu compiled before the Ming dynasty are now lost, and many pieces have remained unplayed for hundreds of years.
Development
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
. Before, the recording of the note positions between hui were only approximations. For example, to play sol
G (musical note)
Sol, So, or G is the fifth note of the solfège starting on C. As such it is the dominant, a perfect fifth above C.When calculated in equal temperament with a reference of A above middle C as 440 Hz, the frequency of Middle G note is approximately 391.995 Hz...
on the seventh string, the position the player must stop is between the 7th and 8th hui. The tablature of Ming times would only say "between 7 and 8" 「七八日(間)」 or for other positions "below 6" 「六下」 or even say "11" 「十一」 (when the correct position is slightly higher). During the Qing
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
, this was replaced by the decimal system
Decimal system
Decimal system may refer to:* The decimal number system, used in mathematics for writing numbers and performing arithmetic.* The Dewey Decimal System, a subject classification system used in libraries....
. The space between two hui were split into 10 'fen' 〔分〕, so the tablature can indicate the correct position of notes more accurately, so for the examples above, the correct positions are 7.6, 6.2 and 10.8 respectively. Some even went further to split one fen into a further 10 'li' 〔釐/厘〕, but since the distance is too minute to affect the pitch to a large degree, it was considered impractical to use. Some people argue that the old system is just as accurate as the new system when qin tuning theory is observed. Also, these old positions may actually conform to the rules of equally tempered
Equal temperament
An equal temperament is a musical temperament, or a system of tuning, in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical frequency ratio. As pitch is perceived roughly as the logarithm of frequency, this means that the perceived "distance" from every note to its nearest neighbor is the same for...
music, with its pitches slightly flatter, such as in the case of 8 for 7.9 and 11 for 10.8. Another main property for this old system is that it requires the player to "feel for the note", just as one would do for any other fretless stringed instrument, be it erhu
Erhu
The erhu is a two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, which may also be called a "southern fiddle", and sometimes known in the Western world as the "Chinese violin" or a "Chinese two-stringed fiddle". It is used as a solo instrument as well as in small ensembles...
or violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
, instead of relying solely on fixed positions (which pitches can change slightly depending on how the player tunes their qin).
Existing qinpu generally come from private collections or in public libraries throughout China, etc. Those that are available for public purchase are facsimile
Facsimile
A facsimile is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale,...
qinpu printed and bound in the traditional Chinese bookbinding
Traditional Chinese bookbinding
Traditional Chinese bookbinding refers to the method of bookbinding that the Chinese have used in recent centuries, before converting to the modern codex form.It is also called stitched binding...
process. More modern qinpu tend to be bound in the normal Western way on modern paper. The format uses qin notation with staff notation and/or jianpu notation.
Modern developments
A number of efforts have been made to further develop qin tablature. A book by Wang Guangqi (王光祈) uses RomanRoman numerals
The numeral system of ancient Rome, or Roman numerals, uses combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet to signify values. The numbers 1 to 10 can be expressed in Roman numerals as:...
and Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals or Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals or Indo-Arabic numerals are the ten digits . They are descended from the Hindu-Arabic numeral system developed by Indian mathematicians, in which a sequence of digits such as "975" is read as a numeral...
to express the information provided by qin tablature. The qin player, Gong Yi
Gong Yi
Gong Yi is a guqin master from Shanghai, presently one of the instrument's leading figures. Born in Nanjing, he trained first under several local players before proceeding to the Shanghai Conservatory where he absorbed a range of styles from such prominent masters as Zhang Ziqian, Xu Lisun, Gu...
, developed a format using staff notation combined with some tablature marks . Others have tried to write a computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
that will do this. Chen Changlin, a Beijing-based computer scientist
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
and qin player of the Min (Fujian) School, developed the first computer program to encode qin notation from ancient tablature sources.
Footnotes
- Zhu, Quan. Shenqi Mipu 【神竒秘譜】.
- Zha, Fuxi. Cunjian Guqin Qupu Jilan 【存見古琴曲譜輯覽】. Pages 3-44.
- Beijing Guqin Research Association. Beijing Qin-xun 【北京琴讯】. March 2001 (volume 71). Pages 1, 2 and 4.
- Gong, Yi. Guqin Yanzhoufa 【古琴演奏法】. Pages 38-42.
- Qin music notation web generator (2005) Project Title: Chinese music instrument: 'Qin' notation web generator (http://web.pdx.edu/~candy/qin/index.html, 29 July 2006)