Reading old scores: dapu

A score for the hands

Open a qin handbook and you see what look like Chinese characters, but none of them is a word. Each is a cluster of abbreviated signs. The upper part tells the left hand which finger to use and where on the string to press, by the position of the hui dots from step 2. The lower part tells the right hand which string to pluck, numbered one to seven, and how. Small signs between them add the slides after the pluck. This is jiǎnzìpǔ, "reduced-character notation". Tradition credits its invention to Cao Rou, in the Tang dynasty (618–907), though nobody can prove it.

What it leaves out is time: no note lengths, no beat, no tempo, only loose hints of phrasing. A teacher used to supply those. When the chain of teachers broke, the rhythm went with them, and the score alone could not bring it back.

The oldest scores

The oldest qin score of all is older than any handbook, and written differently. Solitary Orchid in Jieshi Mode (碣石調·幽蘭) survives in a single manuscript copied in the Tang dynasty, in the 7th or 8th century, and now kept as a National Treasure at the Tokyo National Museum. It has no special signs at all: every movement of the hands is written out in full sentences. It is probably the oldest surviving piece of written music in East Asia.

The oldest surviving collection is the Shénqí mìpǔ, the "Wondrous and Secret Handbook", compiled in 1425 by Zhu Quan, a son of the first Ming emperor. It holds 64 pieces.

Two clocks for one score

The first recording is Drunken Ecstasy (酒狂), from the 1425 handbook. Its preface credits the poet Ruan Ji (210–263), one of the free-spirited Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, though that is legend rather than history. In the 1950s the player Yao Bingyan reconstructed it, first in two beats and later in a lurching triple time, like a man unsteady on his feet. It became so loved that nearly every recording since follows it.

Charlie Huang plays the same tablature in four beats. Both are honest readings of the same notes. The qin scholar John Thompson points out that triple time has never been confirmed anywhere else in traditional Chinese music, which is exactly the kind of question dapu has to weigh: what sounds right, against what the period would allow.

The second recording, Harmony Between Gods and Men (神人暢), survives in only one 16th-century handbook. Its title note links it to Yao, a legendary sage-king of ancient China (no relation to Yao Bingyan). When the player Ding Chengyun began reviving it in 1982, he found it far more rhythmic than he had expected.

Bringing back the silent pieces

In 1956 the qin master Zha Fuxi and two colleagues toured China for more than three months, recording 86 players in 262 pieces and searching out old handbooks. Their work led to the Qinqu Jicheng, the complete collection of qin handbooks, finished in 30 volumes only in 2010. In the same years players set out to revive the silent pieces. The best known, Guan Pinghu (1897–1967), reconstructed Solitary Orchid and the long, dramatic Guangling San. Legend says the poet Xi Kang played Guangling San before his execution around 262, though the music that survives is not proven to be his.

Other players reached other answers from the same pages, and they still do. That is the lesson of this step: an old qin piece is not a fixed object but a conversation between a score and a player. The step after this one leaves the qin for the courts of four countries.

Szavak

打譜 dǎpǔ

“striking the score”: turning old tablature back into living music by working out its rhythm and phrasing

減字譜 jiǎnzìpǔ

“reduced-character notation”, the qin's tablature, in which each sign is built from pieces of Chinese characters

文字譜 wénzìpǔ

“written-word notation”, the older way of writing qin music out in full sentences

神奇秘譜 Shénqí mìpǔ

the “Wondrous and Secret Handbook” of 1425, the oldest surviving collection of qin pieces

Máshol meghallgatható

• Solitary Orchid in Jieshi Mode: the Tang manuscript, on Cultural Japan
• John Thompson on Drunken Ecstasy: the 1425 score, Yao Bingyan's version and his own reconstruction
• John Thompson on Guangling San, with its history and reconstructions