ABSTRACT
‘In treating the repertory of the seven-string zither’, writes Bell Yung, ‘one has to redefine one’s concept of the identity of a piece of music.’ Less regulated than Western ‘art’ traditions by the demands of ensemble performance and professionalism, the qin tradition represents some of the most salient features of music—any music—in performance, and especially its inherent variance, writ large. There are areas of Western musical practice where specific parallels might be drawn: preparing a performance of one of John Cage’s indeterminate scores is one example, while the scores of ‘New Complexity’ composers like Brian Fernyhough present comparable problems of interpretation, if for very different reasons. The one-way relationship between analysis and performance—what Wallace Berry called ‘the path from analysis to performance’—is based on an abstract-to-concrete schema: the analyst says how the music is, the performer puts the insights into action.
