Nanguan or Nanyin is a living musical fossil still very much alive in Taiwan. It has embedded within it centuries of ethnic memory that in the past 300 years had been concentrated in Quanzhou, in China's southeastern province of Fujian. Today its antiquity is reflected in the typology of its instruments, its particular musical characteristics, in the manner of its performance, and especially in its language. Over the past few centuries with emigration from Fujian, Nanguan has spread to Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. In Taiwan, audiences nowadays can enjoy an incredibly wide range of musical offerings, from the zingiest metallic hardcore punk rock, to this quiescent sound of 1,000 years ago.
Quanzhou was the terminal host to various waves of refugees fleeing war and turmoil in China's central plains, and it was said that aristocrats fled south bringing with them only their music. A thriving mercantile city with an advantageous geographical position as China's first great trading port--through which eventually Marco Polo landed in China--Quanzhou was the eastern terminal of the maritime Silk Road.
Among the first settlers to come to Taiwan in the mid-17th century were Han Chinese from Quanzhou, who set up Nanyin or Nanguan music groups in Tainan. As commerce and settlement spread northward, so did the music, moving gradually up to Lugang and finally to Taipei. Over the past few decades more than 20 Nanguan groups have sprung up, spreading the music to Keelung, Taichung, Changhua, Kaohsiung and the off-shore islands of Kinmen and Penghu. In recent years Nanguan has received the attention and patronage of the government as well, and has been taught at some public schools. This highly regional music is clearly becoming something of a cultural mainstay in Taiwan.
An Older Tradition
In the West, concerts date back to the Romantic 19th century, the ornate Baroque, and of course the classical period before that. But in America there is less familiarity with the serene madrigal and motet music of the Renaissance that, in its light and airy polyphony which resonated through the tall cathedrals built in mediaeval times, is almost a part of the yet more ancient architecture. Each phase in music, like each phase in visual art, is clear and distinct with its own "timbre," its zeitgeist, a feel for the spirit of its times. Curiously, however, the two arts do not always evolve hand in hand. Renaissance art of the 16th century, for example in the painting of Michelangelo in the south or his northern contemporary Durer, whilst differing in regional styles, share in common a conspicuous awareness of the anatomically structured, corporeal man. Renaissance visual arts are man-centered and even autobiographical where man replaces God at stage-center. Painting and sculpture bristle with proud independence and a dynamic, unctuous personality-consciousness not echoed in Renaissance music. The 16th-century music of Josquin or even Palestrina does not resonate with the full-bodied secularity of the visual arts but flows in limpid, reverberating polyphony that is closer to painters of the previous century like Giotto, Cimabue and Duccio.
Ancient Music with Semitones
Scholars have been debating the age of Nanguan music since they discovered that it is the sole genre that relates in tonal material and temperament to the tuning of ancient bells cast some 25 centuries ago--the set of 65 suspended bells excavated from the lavish tomb of the Marquis Yi of the state of Zeng, dated some time after 433B.C. The Zeng bells are suspended in three rows and cover a range of five octaves including twelve semitones. Each bell produces two pitches when struck by the wooden mallet at its center or side, sounding a major or a minor third. Such tonal complexity has not survived in any other Chinese musical form. Nonetheless, there being no evidence of what kind of music was performed on the bells, the dating of Nanguan must remain speculation.
The surviving repertory of Nanguan includes some 2,000 pieces of sung music, with more compositions devoted to instrumental ensembles. Three categories of Nanguan music include zhi or fingerings, pu or scores, and qu or tunes. Zhi and pu are instrumental pieces, while qu is a vocal-instrumental repertory in which the voice is accompanied by the upper four instruments. Although zhi music shares the instrumentation of pu music, it is in fact relatively more melodic in style and sounds therefore closer to the qu or sung category. The titles usually hint at narratives, these can be a single scene depicting a particular moment in a well-known story, or descriptive poetry set to music.
Nanguan resembles salon or chamber music, in that it is performed with small ensembles, usually with either two sets of four instruments of percussion and melody. The well-known term "silk and bamboo" refers to the traditional combination of stringed instruments (originally with silk strings) and wind instruments made of bamboo. The instruments include both plucked and bowed strings, probably originating from Central Asia and imported perhaps by caravan to Changan, capital of the great Sui and Tang dynasties (A.D. 581-907). These include the nomadic bowed two-stringed erxian, the plucked three-stringed banjo-like sanxian, and the lute-like pipa. Winds include the nomadic multi-reed aiya, the native transverse bamboo flute di and the vertical bamboo flute xiao, the last determines the high note. Long assimilated and sinisized, these instruments are today commonly heard at temple rituals, and of course in practice sessions of Nanguan aficionados.
Nanguan music is melodic and non-harmonic, progressing along melodic lines in a sort of polyphony bolstered by rhythmic accents and emotive strumming from the plucked strings and percussion. The pipa lute supplies the musical mainframe with steady tempo and appropriate rhythm. It is supported by the three-stringed banjo sanxian whose longer vibration of stronger notes an octave below reinforces the percussive line. For melodic support, the dongxiao vertical bamboo flute complements the lute with melodic lines flowing from its long bamboo tube. In like manner, the bowed two-string erxian supports the vertical flute, adding to the melodic meat continuum, especially when the flautist takes a breath. A similar concept is applied to the percussion section. The temporal space, includes melody, percussion and silences, which together weave polyphonic sufficiency. To appreciate Nanguan fully, therefore, the listener must breathe in the swelling silences as much as the undulating sounds.
The Art of Wang Xinxin
From a historical perspective, the wealth of antique content in Nanguan music and prosody imbues it with an unctuously archaic and Chinese quality. The melodies are simple but seem to sigh with elegiac remoteness. Surviving music repertoires comprise at least two types, one of popular street-side performances and the other of more refined recitals for indoors. In Taiwan in the past decade, academia and government agencies have supported the refined genre with concert hall exposure and sponsored overseas tours which, in turn, led to official invitations from arts organizers from Europe and America.
Nanguan lyrics comprise poetry of deep feeling, expressed in highly reserved understatement, hinting at but never overtly dramatizing the palpable emotions. Indeed, in international academic circles its depth and subtlety have been highly admired and have established Nanguan as an important genre among all traditional musical and operatic forms.
This highly reserved aristocratic tradition is best exemplified by Wang Xinxin who was born into the tradition among its Quanzhou roots. She trained in it from the age of four under her father, a professional pipa lutenist, and later mastered all the instruments at the state-run professional music school, excelling in singing, and became lead singer of the Fujian Provincial Music Ensemble. Her distinctive rendering of the lyrics, where each syllable is voiced gradually in its various inflexions, is literally breathtaking: listeners often stop their own breath to savor the slightest shift and nuance in her voice, mesmerized by echoes from the past. Unlike the more robust street singing popular today in many country venues around Taiwan, the exquisite phonology embedded in the poetic lyrics heard in Wang's delicate voicing, evokes the scent of court music from faraway bygone days. No other performer of Chinese music today embodies the same feel of antiquity and inner presence.
The language used by Nanguan singers called Heluohua (Hologi in Taiwanese) is Quanzhou dialect that still retains the ancient pronunciation of the Tang dynasty, ending often with consonants or glottal stops absent in modern Mandarin. Although Chinese words are monosyllabic, in singing the Nanguan singer must take great care in "chewing the word" and clearly enunciate the "head" (beginning), "belly" (middle), and "tail" (end) of each with appropriate breathing in the graceful practice of antiquity called "one sound, three sighs." The unfolding of a single word over several notes and changes in voicing therefore offers an exquisite tingling aesthetic dimension not experienced in Western music, and the resulting timbre acquires a value no less important than tone color alone. When listening, the aficionado follows the shifts in the syllable's vowel or diphthong; the attendant modification in tonal color is like watching a golden foil stretch, flex or turn under sunlight or shade, with its attendant transformation of light intensity. Finely tuned, the experience resembles following calligraphy brushstrokes move in space, as the brush dips and rises, twists and turns even as it moves across the paper or silk surface. And just as in appreciating the spaces between strokes in calligraphy, seemingly "blank" but intentionally focused on the next stroke, the aficionado of Nanguan attentively follows the singer's breathing, expanding the breath-energy with each growing pause, either in the singer or in the instrument, where the silence swells in the heart and mind to bring one more deeply into the entrance into the next sound, with a silent energy that is fully charged.
Roots in Qigong
Nanguan lyrics comprise poetic verses of past dynasties expressing deep feelings but expressed in veiled understatements barely hinting at the palpable emotions. A demeanor of reserve or hanxu has long been the way of the cultivated Chinese gentry, and informs the best arts, including calligraphy and painting as well as qigong. All of China's arts are, directly or indirectly, sourced in qigong--the conscious flowing of breath-like energy along conduits inside the body to circulate and regulate vitality in particular directions, and with particular momentum and dynamics. This inner mind control of breath/energy results in the voicing of a melody, in the formation of a brushstroke, in the extension of an arm or twist of the body.
Interestingly Nanguan musicians enter a note usually by sliding into it from its neighboring note above or below. This phenomenon recalls calligraphy practice after the Song dynasty (A.D. 960-1279), where entering a horizontal stroke moving from left to right, for instance, the brush "backs" into the opposite direction (left) first, then doubles back on itself and, extending its hairs fully, move to the right where, on reaching the end, the brush tip will double back on itself again, creating a sort of "knob" at the beginning and end of the stroke resembling a bone. Previously during the Tang dynasty, brushstrokes were "entered" with the tip pointing left and the brush was dragged in a simple direction to the right till lift-off at the end, forming a pointed even line without bulges at either ends. Both art forms show a deployment of qi energy that, as it were, now backs up before entering, like the recoil before springing. While in athletics the recoil prepares one for hugely overt displays of physical power, in Chinese arts this recoil is released in the most leisurely and pondered deployment of energy in ink on paper or sound in air. This type of reversing on itself in brush-movement during stroke-entrances resembles the voice-movement in Nanguan note-entrances, and may suggest a date--the Song dynasty--for the inception of Nanguan music in its present practice.
The apprehension of energy in reserve, fully charged but not fully exposed, comprises the highest of Chinese aesthetic experiences. Connoisseurs gauge the unexpressed but palpable energy-reserve left unexpressed as "blank" or "silent," whether in a work of calligraphy, calisthenics, poetry, dance or music. Such a void or silence is never "dead" but full of life, being the artist's intention and energy that moves between the notes/strokes linking them in time/space, informing them, entirely controlling their destiny. Unlike the West's love of extremes, of the "-est" and of "knockouts," Chinese refinement is in having immense power but deploying only a fraction, and that with the subtlest mastery in control and grace. Wang Xinxin likens this energy-field to breathing. In a recent interview she mused:
"Nanguan music is so very ancient that to me living this music is very much like sitting in meditation. I hugely enjoy sitting alone playing the pipa lute, just sitting there playing and playing, and without knowing, I am transported into the realm of self-forgetting, in the state of full meditation. Then I feel as if I am in the Void, and of the Void. I am able to reach this state even whilst being physically in a rather noisy, even tumultuous environment. This may appear to be rather difficult, but actually it is only a matter of focusing on my breathing.
"For Oriental artists, the attainment of the ultimate in skill and refinement in the art is based on a foundation of proper breathing. I often see myself, between each inhalation and exhalation, being able to focus on my dantian (the source of qi, about an inch or so below the navel), and my singing is free to flow from this source of energy, becoming one with my breathing. For this reason, to me, singing is nothing but breathing. When I sing, I am actually entirely focused on listening to the rhythm of my own breathing, feeling the body rising and subsiding calmly like gentle waves lapping the shores, entirely one with the music. For this reason it is very easy to enter the state of total self-forgetting, immersed entirely in the music.
"Aside from transmitting the feelings and emotions of the music by means of breathing, I believe that playing any musical instrument should be similarly subjected to the control of breathing. Nanguan melodies are extremely leisurely and measured, the so-called "great music, little sound;" the older the music or aria, the more deeply measured its tempo. When the major Nanguan instrument, the pipa lute strums, there is virtually only a single note, one single, resonant plucking at a time, with notably long intervals between the plucks, rather like the left-over, unpainted reserve areas of ancient paintings. This unsung or blank interval in time can be filled and measured only by the breathing of the player. When you listen to the Nanguan pipa, you not only hear the sound produced by the string, you must also listen carefully for the "soundless sound" beyond the string, and that is the player's breathing.
"Nanguan is not a music of complex techniques. On the contrary, it is very plain. For this reason it is most difficult for the performer to focus body and spirit, to still the heart-mind on the profound quietude, to reach the state of total absorption. This art form is transmitted from mind to mind, whether between performer and audience or between master and pupil; there are no words to describe the transcendent beauty of this state of being. There is only entering the moment of the breathing, emptying one's body and mind entirely... Only then can we experience the continuous energy flowing in the music."
Joan Stanley-Baker is an art historian and art critic based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Joan Stanley-Baker