Taiwan Today

In ancient China, court music was so valued that musicians and their instruments were buried with the emperor after the ruler’s death. In fact, so respected was such music that it spread to imperial courts in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. But in the early 1900s, when the last Chinese emperor was overthrown, the 3,000-year-old musical tradition died out in China.

It was not heard again in Beijing until October 2009, when musicians from Nanhua University, a small private school in Chiayi, southern Taiwan, were invited to play the music at the China Conservatory, a Beijing institution that focuses on the research and study of traditional Chinese music. “The audience clapped really loudly. The instruments were different. They’d never seen them before, or heard the music before,” says Xie Jiaxing (謝嘉幸), director of the China Conservatory’s Institute of Music Research.

The revival of this once-lost genre is the result of painstaking work by Chou Chun-yi (周純一), chairman of the Department of Ethnomusicology at Nanhua. Chou has spent 15 years studying how court music, known as yayue, or elegant music, was played in the past. He has pored over old musical scores, examined ancient paintings of musicians and taught himself to play instruments unearthed from tombs, all of which have helped him piece together what is believed to be the most authentic version of yayue, one of the earliest, most unique forms of music in the world.

A dramatic improvement in relations between mainland China and Taiwan since 2008 has seen Nanhua reintroducing this lost musical heritage to the mainland, creating an unusual situation in which culture that went extinct in mainland China is being taken back to the country by none other than its former foe, Taiwan.

Chou was a music student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the early 1990s when he came across a study about yayue. At that time, no one in Hong Kong or Taiwan, much less mainland China, was playing yayue. Knowing little about it, Chou, whose father instilled in him a love of traditional Chinese culture, delved into research. He later traveled to Japan and South Korea, where he discovered that some of the instruments that were no longer played in the mainland were still being used. But Japanese and Korean court music were only adaptations of their Chinese origins. Chou wanted to revive the real thing.

After landing a teaching job at Nanhua and with the support of university president Chen Miao-sheng (陳淼勝), Chou embarked on a journey that also took him to Vietnam and Myanmar to look for clues to how the instruments should be played, what the music should sound like and how the accompanying dance steps should be performed.

Impossible to Know

“It was very hard in the beginning,” Chou says. “We really couldn’t be sure the sound made by their instruments was the same as in the old days—it was impossible to know. For example, in the Tang dynasty [618–907], more than 100 people would perform one dance, such as a dance to commemorate the enemy the emperor had defeated in war, but in Japan, only one person dances this dance and only 13 to 14 people perform in the ensemble—so while Japan’s court music has a Tang dynasty flavor, it’s not the same.”

Chou also paid numerous visits to Taipei’s National Palace Museum to search paintings for clues about what instruments were played and how many people played them during, for example, a hunt or a court dinner. He even traveled to mainland China to study instruments dug up from tombs and ordered exact replicas to be made.

In 1996, Chou formed the Yayue Ensemble at Nanhua University. It is the only ensemble in the world devoted to playing this form of music and now has about 60 musicians—all of whom are students—as well as a collection of 1,000 instruments and 1,000 costumes.

The ensemble has given more than 200 performances at home and abroad, but the highlight of their years of effort came at the performance in Beijing in October 2009—their first in the Chinese capital. “They were very moved when they heard this music for the first time,” says Nanhua president Chen, who has given the ensemble his full support. “Some of them cried, especially the older audience members in their 70s and 80s who understand the historical stories behind the musical pieces. The ups and downs of the music made them feel as if they were going through the emotional turmoil of their own lives. The music was like a vehicle that brought out their emotions.”

Although many people have heard classical Chinese music, with its diverse string, woodwind and percussion instruments, it is not likely that they have heard yayue, which was typically played only in the emperor’s court. It was largely ceremonial music, performed for various court activities. There were specific tunes for receiving honored guests, celebrating birthdays, praying to deities and praying to the gods for rainfall, as well as for ceremonies held in reverence of personages such as the great sage Confucius. “It was closely related to rituals,” Chou says. “So when they performed this music, they didn’t have a purely musical mindset. They were using music to make their lives more meaningful and weren’t simply trying to enjoy music.”

Some yayue pieces depicted historical events, such as the fall of a state after its defeat by a rival state. There were also more lighthearted songs and dances to entertain the emperor and his guests while they dined.

Uncommon Instruments

The instruments used to play yayue are also not the kind commonly seen in today’s traditional Chinese music ensembles, such as the lute-like pipa or erhu, a two-stringed bowed instrument. In fact, most people have never seen yayue instruments, which include elaborate sets of heavy copper bells, giant drums and a trumpet-like instrument as tall as a person. Yayue instruments also include a large, flat drum hung from a frame shaped like two phoenixes standing atop tigers; a hanging set of 10 palm-sized cymbals; and a large set of fish-shaped stone slabs arranged in two rows that sounds like a xylophone, but has a wider range. In the dynasty era, ordinary people couldn’t afford such instruments; only the emperor and members of the upper class had access to them.

Much of the music was heavily influenced by Confucius, who believed listening to elegant music was a way of cultivating good moral character, promoting proper etiquette, and most importantly, developing a civilized and harmonious society. Thus, yayue music tends to sound grand, measured, solemn and dignified. Accompanying dance steps are often slow and highly stylized, and many of the lyrics are derived from classical poetry.

“This type of music is not necessarily performed to please the audience. It’s aimed at managing oneself, including one’s heart and one’s sorrow,” Chen says. “Because if the individuals are good, the group won’t be bad. This is Chinese people’s belief.”

Yayue evolved over the dynasties and has a long and rich history, with its earliest form dating as far back as the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 B.C.). But in the early 20th century, China suffered invasion and occupation by Western and Japanese powers. As the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) declined, its subjects turned against feudal society and its ancient traditions, including music, blaming them as the root of the country’s problems. When thousands of years of imperial rule ended in the early 1900s and China’s last emperor was dethroned, musicians who had performed in the emperor’s court lost their profession, as there was no longer anyone to perform for. The final blow came after the communists took over in 1949 following the end of the Chinese Civil War, when anything that was part of old, feudal China was banned.

While communist-ruled China continued to treat the old as bad in later decades, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the government of the Republic of China (ROC), which relocated to Taiwan after the war, did not seek to eliminate old traditions, even though its founders were the ones who overthrew the emperor. This enabled Chou to research yayue and come up with something considered much more authentic than the versions played in mainland China today.

Meanwhile, mainland China’s interest in yayue—which calls it gongting, or court, music—has seen a revival of sorts in recent years as the country has become more prosperous and its people more curious about traditional arts and culture. Cities such as Confucius’ hometown of Qufu, for example, hold yayue performances, but they are mainly related to tourism and are not considered authentic.

“We haven’t done enough to research the music. … Nanhua did it from an academic perspective, starting from the foundation. It’s very different,” the China Conservatory’s Xie says.

Sharing Knowledge

Improving relations between mainland China and Taiwan since ROC President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office in 2008 have led to more cultural exchanges with the mainland, allowing Nanhua to share its knowledge of yayue with Chinese musicologists. Shen Qia (沈洽), a retired music professor from the China Conservatory who helped the Yayue Ensemble gain approval for the 2009 performance in Beijing form the mainland’s central and local governments, says friendlier relations definitely made the process easier. Shen also agrees that the Nanhua group’s music left a strong impression on the audience. Unlike the kind played at Qufu or even the Forbidden City in Beijing, Nanhua’s was more authentic, he says.

After the performance in Beijing, several channels belonging to the mainland’s state-run CCTV television network broadcast special programs about yayue, some of which featured extensive interviews with Chou. Although the response in the mainland was very positive, Shen cautions that it is still difficult to say whether yayue will take root there again, partly because government funding and support will be needed.

But since Yayue Ensemble’s performance in Beijing in 2009, the China Conservatory has set up its own yayue research institute—the first in mainland China—with Chou as a director. Cities that served as previous capitals in ancient times have also asked Chou and the ensemble to help them rediscover yayue, and he has already served as a guest professor at four universities in those former capitals.

Amid the significant improvement in relations between Taiwan and mainland China, each is now exploring its different understanding and interpretation of Chinese culture—from arts to music to language—in unprecedented ways. In terms of yayue, both sides are not only sharing, but exploring together their different findings on the music.

Chou admits that it is impossible to say whether the version of yayue he has recreated is truly authentic. There are no recordings of the music from the past, and even the musical scores are notated differently, so various researchers can sometimes come up with different interpretations.

The lack of definitive historical records makes it more important for researchers in Taiwan and the mainland to cooperate, says Peng Qingtao (彭慶濤), director of the materials research committee of the Cultural Relics Bureau of Qufu. “In China, many places are delving into yayue. They’re looking for ancient material, trying to figure out what it was like before. … We should learn from each other,” Peng says. “In China, there are some elderly people who participated in Confucius-honoring ceremonies—they were assigned to strike bells at certain times, beat drums at certain times. After the founding of the Republic of China, there was still music to honor Confucius. Before 1949, there were still honoring ceremonies.”

Such sharing of joint musical heritage is not only happening through the work of Chou and the Yayue Ensemble, but also in other ways. Officials from several of Taiwan’s Confucius temples and the Council for Cultural Affairs, for example, have visited Qufu, and their mainland counterparts have also visited Taiwan. In the past, the two sides only conducted minor exchanges by methods such as telephone calls. Yayue musicians from both sides of the Taiwan Strait are also beginning to share the stage. A percussion performance by the ensemble in May this year in Taipei, for example, featured a performance by a percussion group from the mainland’s Shanxi province.

Along with the improvement in cross-strait yayue research, it is also encouraging to see that the young students in the Nanhua ensemble, many of whom enjoy listening to Taiwanese pop songs, also enjoy performing yayue. At a practice performance at the university, a group of students played a piece of music from scores that are 900 years old using instruments that are based on designs some 3,000 years old. The piece they played was about the fall of a state during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). With a somber demeanor, the performers sang lyrics about “their” former state and the capture of its emperor.

At the practice, another group of students—all girls wearing long-sleeve robes and fancy hair ornaments—later performed a traditional-style, methodical ceremonial dance that looked as if they were moving in slow motion. After the dance, one of the girls, Tung Jun-li (童謹利), described what it is like to be part of the revival of this ancient tradition. “Some of my friends ask me, ‘Isn’t it boring to dance ancient Confucius worshipping dances?’ … But I like it because I have to calm myself first to be able to hear the music and to dance the dance. Dancing slowly has its challenges too. In one minute, we might not move even one inch,” Tung says. “I’ve become more and more interested in this music over time.”

Even though it is not the kind of music that most people would listen to for fun and no recording label expects it to be a money-maker, Nanhua’s Chen Miao-sheng believes in the importance of saving yayue. “A lot of people nowadays are focused on learning Western music through instruments such as the violin or piano. The essence of Chinese music is actually very different from Western music. So we should let people know about this very different kind of music,” Chen says.

Cindy Sui is a contributing writer based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2011 by Cindy Sui