History through Qupai

A music-centric investigation of the history of qupai, and in fact, much of Chinese music, can be challenging. The first difficulty is characterized by the so-called ‘there is no music in Chinese music history’ phenomenon. ¹ Because of discontinuities in aural and written transmission, as well as the nature of traditional notation systems, it is often only possible to approximate the structure and sonority of old Chinese music. A sophisticated and well-thought-out reconstruction, albeit sensitive to extant and preexisting Chinese or non-Chinese models, ² is but a matter of conjecture and can still be subject to personal, cultural, and ideological interpretations. In the case of qupai music, especially vocal qupai, or instrumental qupai with a vocal precedence, the level of complexity is compounded by the intertwined relationships between music, language and literature, deeply rooted within the tonal nature of Sinitic languages. Such relationships have led to a traditional overemphasis, or even bias, of scholars and literati on the literary aspects of qupai, evidenced by the abundance of clichés and rhetoric, ³ vocal texts without musical notations (Figure 2.1), and the shear amount of writing on poetry and opera, often with no direct mention of the musical aspects at all.