Lin Gufang | "silent and inaccessible", the timbre performance in Chinese music

I think that the timbre performance in Chinese music is not only rich in character, but also rich in quality. The timbre in Chinese music is diverse, and I often use a phrase to illustrate it: silence is not allowed to enter music. Take opera, for example. Opera since the Song and Yuan dynasties has been an important performing art, and in the opera roles you will find that we are significantly different from the West. The sound parts are different, and the timbre is different. So before we could hear him do anything, the feeling of the image came out. Everything is so direct, the old students should be simple, and the young students should have no chicken power or half yin and no yang. In Chinese opera, playing the old man is the tone of the old man, and the little student is the tone of the little student. Adding the net angle is even more interesting. Thousands of lives, a net is difficult to seek, and it is necessary to sound like a bell, and only then will it show the arrogance of a hero or a great traitor and a great evil. Chinese why we can listen to the play, that's it, we can hear the character even with our eyes closed. The timbre of a squire and the timbre of a princess will be different. And if you look at La Traviata, a lady is no different from a lady. It has nothing to do with good or bad, Chinese just like it. We even form a cognition: a play with a role that is not clear enough is not a big play that is formed.

Where can "silence not be happy" be reflected? It's about the richness of Chinese percussion music. Percussion has always been a frontier in the West, the size of a symphony orchestra, two or three loose percussion instruments, until nearly thirty years later, gradually adopted percussion as a separate form. If you remove percussion in Chinese music, you don't know what it is going to do? From the traditional bell chimes to the folk gongs and drums, without this thing, a large piece is missing. China's percussion forms are probably the most numerous in the world, and I asked a percussion expert, how much percussion is there in China? He said that to put it loosely, it is said that there are six hundred kinds, and the subdivision is about a thousand. The most important and perhaps fundamental manifestation of percussion is the timbre. Today, when a Dan horn appears, it must be accompanied by a small gong, very flexible, she sang: "The slave family is sixteen this year", the willow branch is gently shaken, the lotus step comes in a fine dance, with a small "platform" is just right, if the big gong "beeps", what beauty is gone. And Chinese percussion, to borrow Western terms, it also has a progressive and aborted! Therefore, Mei Lanfang does not dare to offend the drummer, he does not give you the last appearance of the "oh", a straight hit "platform" (progressive), you can not fall on your feet, can not complete the final appearance. Chinese percussion is so wonderful that as early as the Han Dynasty, it could become an independent musical form. For example, "Duck Mixing Mouth", it's all percussion, you can easily imagine a group of ducks arguing, very graphic, right? Music like this can't be sung because it's mainly a combination of timbres, and that timbre is the sound of the percussion itself.

Chinese emphasis on timbre has existed since the pre-Qin dynasty. The classification of musical instruments, eight tones refers to: gold, stone, silk, bamboo, dagger, earth, leather, wood, we have some musicologists in the past said that such classification is unscientific. Indeed, it is not like the Classification of Western Physics, which is not divided according to the operation method, the so-called blowing and playing, nor the structural classification. This classification is in fact a timbre classification. Because different materials produce different timbres. Therefore, in the past, "beating drums to attack" and "singing gold to collect troops" were very clear and absolutely would not be wrong.

There is also a place where you can see Chinese rich timbre system, that is, timbre variation. Only an instrument with a rich variety of timbres can play an important role in Chinese music. For example, piano, the expression is very rich, but it happens that the ring of timbre is lacking in change. In China, fate is affected. As for Chinese musical instruments, let's first say the guqin, there are overtones, scattered sounds, and the difference between sounds. Like the lute has four strings, the winding string, the old string, the middle string, the sub-string, the sub- string, the middle and the old are very life-like. The sub-string has the taste of the sub-string, how is the child's world, I just need to play "Makeup Table Autumn Thoughts" on the sub-string like this, a little bit of resentment, a little bit of coddling, you have a feeling, right? It belongs to the feeling of all the college students here. But the same pitch, the same structure, we listen to the middle chord again, as soon as it comes out, it is the world of middle-aged people here. Listen to the world of old age, bald palace women talk about Tianbao, right? Mourning is greater than death. You see the pitch, the melody is the same, just because we have changed on different four strings, we can go from 16 to 66. So watching a musician play a piece, which string the note is going to put on, in fact, determines where the life situation should be placed.

Flutes have a very special timbre variation in Chinese instruments. We know that there is a bamboo film pasted in the flute, which makes it produce an interesting change, hearing the bass area, the bamboo membrane sound is obviously stronger, in the auditory sense, it will feel that the sound source is close to us; when we encounter the treble area, the bamboo membrane sound will disappear, and we will feel that it is far away. A piece of music has a treble bass, so it will be far away and close. For this reason, the Chinese flute also produces a more special sense of space than the Western flute. For example, "Makeup Table Autumn Thoughts" allows the flute not only to have high and low performances on the pitch, but also to have the effect of depth before and after, which is very three-dimensional. Frankly speaking, such a performance of Chinese music is a bad performance in the Western music aesthetic system, because "the timbre is not uniform", but in China it is very good. The same reason is the same, "the timbre is more varied". So the same phenomenon, because of different aesthetic systems, will get different value judgments. Compared with the West, Chinese music is diverse, it is silent and inaccessible, and as long as any timbre is placed in a proper position in a piece of music, the noise that is generally considered will also become a musical sound. Like "Overlord Unloading Armor", "Ten Faces Ambush", if there is no "noise", what is war like, like a little girl flirting, completely powerless, right? In the West, its emphasis on timbre tends to be unique, the pursuit of a certain beauty.

Stills from "Ambush on Ten Sides"

The second more connotative aspect of Chinese timbre performance is the "sound is everything" concept of timbre. Just like we are writing calligraphy, a person's calligraphy is good or bad, which is the current stroke, that is, the expression of timbre is completed in the timbre, without any external development of melody, melody, and structure. The real tone, virtual tone, and chorus in the timbre have layers. For example, "Si Chun", through the five timbre changes of a tone, you can bring out the heart of the relationship, but the desire to say and stop, and finally finally pour out the mood change. A tone is actually all that is there here.

Regarding the timbre characteristics of Chinese music, "sound is everything", I would like to make a few brief introductions. As we said, any music system has a sound that it likes. Although the Chinese timbre is relatively diverse, it still has its basic timbre. This basic timbre is related to the paulownia tone. Chinese is less resonant in music, it wants the timbre of the material itself. The sycamore is soft and hard, and it can convey a very simple and neutral feeling, and then make changes on the basis of this point.

Chinese music attaches great importance to the essence of sound, taking "Yang Chun" as an example, it has the feeling of "big beads and small beads falling on the jade plate", because of the timbre of the pipa "more bones and less flesh", isn't it? This tune can't be played on a guitar. Perhaps when the guitar plays the twentieth note, the resonance of its first note is probably still there. Therefore, the guitar is very suitable for accompaniment, while the lute can only be the main body, solo performance. Chinese musical instruments have this characteristic, although its timbre stands on the basis of sycamore wood, but the personality is very clear, and the particles are clearly and directly expressed. So we often say that the timbre of Chinese music is very personal, which is what it means.

In addition, the timbre often reflects a character with a more basic basis than the timbre. In the past, the qin people said that the scattered sound did not move, like the earth; the overtone was ethereal, like the sky; according to the sound, it was man who changed it, representing man. A good piece of music must be coordinated among the people of heaven and earth. All guqin songs, at first, are either scattered or overtones. The final end must be a harmonic, why, because the scattered tones represent the earth, the overtones represent the heavens, and the music comes from the heavens and the earth. Finally, good music must return to heaven. The so-called good sentences are natural, and the clever hands are occasionally obtained. It means that a great creator, no matter how great, is only a recipient of the universe, and the plug of the cosmic electric field just happens to plug into you. This reflects Chinese special view of creation.

"Sound is everything" also involves Chinese music's emphasis on the falling strings of the lower fingers. Chinese musical instruments have a characteristic, mechanical function is not strong. The stronger the mechanical function of the musical instrument, the weaker the artificial space, and the strongest mechanical function is the electronic organ, so the electronic organ can not play the characteristics of the musician. Chinese musical instruments because the mechanical function is not strong, rely on people to control it, you have heard the pipe bar, a tone can be blown out of different four degrees out. The same instrument, a person in the line plays a good instrument, a bad person plays, a good instrument also becomes bad. Just like calligraphy, it is paying attention to soft pen to soft paper, I am moved, the nib will move, so there will be a "heart is right pen" saying. When you are young, you will hate this sentence and think that it is so moral, but later find out that there is an intrinsic reason. Why calligraphy can cultivate the body, as long as your mind does not calm down, any change at hand will be reflected in the pen. Chinese music is the same, speaking of soft strings versus soft bows. Peng Xiuwen, a conductor who died before, told me that he saw the best folk huqin family instruments on the mainland, the bow was picked up, the bow hair was hanging below, and when it was picked up, the bow hair could be wrapped three turns. What are the benefits, and do you use towels to smoke people? One truth is that the maximum tension difference can be reached in an instant. And now I find that the bow is getting tighter and tighter, and in a sense it is an aesthetic degradation.

We listen to the 20-year-old "Plugged Song", the middle-aged "Plugged Song", the elderly "Plugged Song", such a kind of emotional correspondence caused by the change of timbre, which can only be felt in concrete practice. I once said that there is no way for a musical score to express timbre. It can express the pitch performance structure, there is no way to express the timbre. Therefore, to recognize a Chinese work from the score, perhaps the origin point is missing. And the lack of such a point of origin will lead to the loss of perhaps the most important piece of Chinese music from the root. It is also prone to a psychological alienation in West Africa. Our richest piece of sheet music can not be recorded, think about how paradoxical! But in fact, is the score really completely unrecordable? Not quite, we know that there are a lot of fingerings attached to Chinese musical scores, and there is a representation of timbre here. Ignoring this piece, we will not understand the development of Chinese music.

[This article is excerpted from "Chinese in The Sound- Professor Lin Gufang's Lecture at Peking University, originally published in Wen Wei Po Weekly Lecture, December 21, 2003)]

Author: Lin Gufang

Editor: Chen Yu

Editor-in-Charge: Yang Yiqi

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.