J. I. Crump - Chinese and Japanese Music-Dramas

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS IN CHINESE STUDIES

NO. 19

CHINESE AND JAPANESE

MUSIC-DRAMAS

Edited by

J. I. Crump

and

William P. Malm

Ann Arbor

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

1975

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Copyright 1975

by

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

Printed in the United States of America

Cover illustration by Elleanor H. Crown.

ISBN 978-0-89264-019-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-472-03802-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12742-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-472-90137-1 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

CONTENTS

This book is the result of a conference on the relations between Chinese and Japanese music-drama held at The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), October 14, 1971, under the auspices of the Association for Asian Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the School of Music, and the Speech Department of The University of Michigan. One important inspiration for the creation of such an interdisciplinary conference was the fact that each participant had found, after years of individual research on music-drama in East Asia, consistent frustration caused by attempts to deal by himself with multiple cultural and technical problems. Another motivating force was an awareness among many members of the four disciplines involved (Chinese, Japanese, music, and drama) that the topic is in fact one of the largest untouched fields of scholarly endeavor in both Asian and theatrical studies.

The conference was founded on the assumption that no one scholar could be an expert in all the topics. Thus, each member delivered to the others copies of a draft chapter on one aspect of one area of the subject in advance of the meeting. The four days were then spent helping each other with comments and added information from each individuals area of expertise, which took on new significance in the context of the studies of others. With the aid of a rapporteur (Dale R. Johnson of Oberlin) all this was put together into the collection which forms this book. The subject is by no means closed; on the contrary, it is now opened in a scholarly "multimedia" direction that we hope will stimulate further efforts in this exciting field.

William P. Malm

J. I. Crump

Ann Arbor 1975

J. I. Crump

There were giants in the earth in those days and... mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Genesis 6:4

I Introduction: The Formularies

Early Ming dynasty literature was devoted to forms and criteria belonging to the Tang and Sung dynasties (probably as a reaction to the foreign Yan), but as the dynasty matured and drama became more and more a proper medium for serious writers, men began to comment on and appreciate the older Yan drama and to evaluate, criticize, and admire those mighty men which were of old, and who lived in Yan times. Possibly because the lingering orthodox view was that all good things had to have come from the great Chinese dynasties of the past, Ming critics of the Yan giants often comment that of course, these ch were heavily influenced by northern border music and so were not to be considered in the same universe, for example, as the Sung tzu (lyrics). But having got past this pro forma preamble, they then subject classical Yan musical drama to what is often searching and honest criticism.

There is a saying which reveals a part of the healthy irreverence the Chinese have toward literary criticism: Hsen y wn; hu y ts , First someone must write literature; others will find rules for it later. It is more than a truism, it is an injunction: the author should be so busied with his creation that he has little time or taste for criticizing the product. If our only alternatives were the literature or the criticism there would be no contest, but happily we have, in the case of Yan musical drama, both the wen created during the Mongol era and the tse applied to it during the Ming dynasty.

We often find it useful to make some of the same observations about historical periods that we do about humans, and certainly the Other than these, however, there is nothing which seriously concerns itself with passing artistic judgment on the tsa-ch musical drama during its most flourishing age.

But almost as soon as the Ming government was well established (let us say by 1390), we begin to get publication of the so-called " ch' formularies" ( ch'-p'u) which not only gave examples of great lyrics from dramatic ch' (arias) on which to pattern one's own efforts, but also included much evaluative, critical and appreciative comment on Yan drama, dramatic theory, and the requirements of composing to music and for performanceall done in an age when the Yan dramatic form was almost extinct. Almost without exception these critics show admiration (often amounting to reverence) for Yan tsa-ch and the men who wrote them even though it was, by the time all but the earliest formularies were written, an art form which could no longer be staged, for the simple but crucial reason that no one living knew the music.

This considerable body of critical literature is valuable for insights it provides both on the tsa-ch and on Ming tastes. The ch' formularies are without doubt our best sources of information, but they must be used with the following considerations in mind:

(1) Many of the best known among the Ming treatises deal indiscriminately with both the longer Ming ch'uan ch'i drama form and the Yan tsa-ch in such a fashion that one is not always sure which genre is being evaluated. This shortcoming is often informative, however, since the critics (who are frequently composers as well) are trying to synthesize their requirements for Chinese drama in general, rather than for either of the two forms in particular.

( the earliest and in some ways the most important of the formularies, begins the book with his own classification of musical verse (according to both topic and style), continues with a list of nine types of parallelism, a list of 187 Yan poets (whose verse he tries to characterize in a sentence or two), 150 others of second rank, sixteen gifted playwrights of the Ming era, general comment, the traditional twelve divisions of Yan dramatic subject matter, and concludes the whole first section with these interesting but non-sequitur observations:

... Chao Tzu-ang [a Yan dramatist] said: "When a youth from a good family plays in a tsa-ch it is called living a life of the troupe, ( hang-chia sheng-huo ) but when entertainers ( chang-yu) act in it it is called a slave play ( li-chia pa-hsi ). Men of good family always felt that the shame of acting cost them so dear that there never were very many; and there are fewer today than ever. Therefore, to call acting by entertainers life of the troupe is to be very wide of the mark.

Someone asked him why [these terms were used] and he replied, Tsa-ch come from the pens of scholar-officials and poets or writers who are all freemen. If our class did not write them, how could actors act in them? If one pursues the root of the matter, it becomes clear that actors are truly our slaves.