Tintinnabulations of bells: scoring-prosody in third-century China and its relationship to yueh-fu party music.

• Author: Goodman, Howard L.
• Position: Music in poetry - Critical essay

In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" imagined their manipulation of emotions, even of sanity. Silver ones tinkle on joyous sleigh rides; gold wedding bells rhyme and chime in euphony:

All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells-- From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. Yet, Poe succumbs to the demonic trolls who live in bell towers and pulsate the iron bells of death:

And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone. Something archaic, or even archetypal, in the irrational proportionality of bells may have flummoxed Poe's sense of lexic proportion. Or perhaps he had just read an installment of Dickens' 1847 Dombey and Sons, chapter 12, which mentioned a gong's overpowering "tintinnabulation," as rung out by an apparently mad young man, and so Poe decided to leverage a weird word.

The fitting of bells with words and feelings presented problems in early China as well. Culturally, China's bell-chimes were more than evokers of great events and more than loud, disturbing signals. They were testaments to imperial grandeur and provided auditors access to antiquity, the cosmos, and spirits. The antiquarian aspect implied the classicist, and in some sense primary, musical role of court rituals and entertainment--broadly called yueh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], but frequently denoted as a choreographed spectacle [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or the singing/chanting of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in ensembles. The Chinese classicist term was "high music" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

Bells were nearly magical, providing a glimpse into the ratiocinative holism of the cosmos, as any gifted metal artisan knew, with his empirical, quasi-mathematical knack for setting the scale of a chime-set. Bells' distinctive shape provided rich harmonic possibilities, which the court harmonics master considered, tested, and correlated so as to introduce an expanded twelve-tone array of pitches, some of which were possibly "foreign" and requiring proper naming. (1) After casting, if the harmonics master found (by some means) that a member of the set was off, it could only be slightly altered once or twice, by hand filing. After that, it was back into the smelting pot! Ancient chime-sets often were large and immobile. Their tones were not nearly as focused as those of a flute or reed-pipe or long string, thus bell tone-structure was not handy in tuning other instruments under performance conditions. Even ringing out the bells themselves was difficult because strike speed was in some sense a function of two things: the musical complexity of the piece (how many "muddy," that is, non-standard, scalar pitches, how far the strikers reached to run the scale; was there a mode change?); and second of all, the decay-rate of the tones. The larger the chime-set, the more lugubrious and overpowering its undamped voice. (2)

WEI-CHIN ARGUMENTS OVER BELL VENUES AND PERFORMANCE AESTHETICS

This glory of musical art declined in early imperial China. Fewer and fewer music-masters professed the skills of theoretical harmonics, mathematico-empirical scaling, tuning procedures, and proper strike and transposition techniques. In a previous article, concerning Wei-Chin court music and lyrics, I uncovered remarks about bells. Here, I wish to amplify several and add others. I show that from 200-300 A.D. entertainment music left behind the old bells, and developed aesthetically under certain musicological inventions and with Wei-Chin court supports. If one is allowed to attach this music to the broader literary world of yueh-fu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], then the attenuation of bell sounds shows us something about yueh-fu origins and textures.

By the late Eastern Han, bell-chimes were declining as leaders of the lighter court music. The latter music grew steadily on through the Chien-an [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] period (196-220). A remark by Cheng Hsuan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (127-200) shows us that even scholars banished from the Han courts, as was Cheng, were thinking about the classical precedents for scoring without bells. (3) Later, Ts'ao Ts'ao's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (155-220)

milieu produced a technical argument that signaled a bell downturn. Under Ts'ao Ts'ao high-music bell-mastery in fact had a great start, thanks to his conservative approach to developing proto-imperial legitimacy. Yet in a fascinating biography of a famous music technician, Tu K'uei [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (fl. ca. 180-225), who served general Ts'ao, we see a sharp turn from the old court music to a new one. Tu envisioned his mission as the reconstruction of high-music in the imperial temple venues. Yet, his bell tunings were challenged by another bell-master who was disgruntled after having being forced by Tu to melt down his attempt and start over again. Ts'ao Ts'ao grudgingly interceded to end their open squabbling. (4) But it did not end there.

Discontent about bells and high-music continued. Around 221-25, just after Ts'ao Ts'ao's death, his son Ts'ao P'i [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (187-226; r. Wen-ti [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 220-226) revamped music as part of a larger program to reform his late father's court ritual programs and policies. Tu K'uei was still serving, and in his role as high-music director had brought to the court experts in song, dance, and instruments. As part of the new court style, Ts'ao P'i desired to show off his party music, and thus ordered Tu and his group to entertain on the pipes and zithers. Tu the classicist was openly dissatisfied, and Ts'ao P'i had him arrested and cashiered, after which Tu soon died.

The compiler of Tu's biography, Ch'en Shou [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (233-297), writing in about 270-80, insinuated a certain name at the end, as he listed and judged Tu K'uei's "school." The ill-fitting name was that of Tso Yen-nien [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], who, though seemingly associated in this way with high-music, was also called an instigator of corrupting music: "[His ilk] were all [merely] good at Cheng music" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Tso may well be one of the earliest proto-yueh-fu specialists to assist the Ts'aos after the Chien-an period. He remained an influential court musician under the Wei, participating in discussions about music venues in the reign of Ts'ao Jui [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (206-239; r. Ming-ti [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 227-239) (see below), and was a lyric writer and "recomposer" of others' lyrics, specifically those of Tu K'uei. (5) We may be seeing, then, a very first moment in Ts'ao-court reinventing and retooling of proto-yueh-fu lyrics: here it may have come directly from Ts'ao P'i's blatant dislike of Ts'ao Ts'ao's music-master still warm in his grave. It also signals a strong yueh-fu break from bells: poor Tu was simply objecting to being pulled from his rare bell skills and shunted to the party rooms.

By the mid-230s, music and lyrics were again being debated, this time under Ts'ao P'i's son Jui (the emperor Ming). Scholars talked repeatedly about music's venues and the naming of pieces. They were concerned to differentiate two types of high-music: the solemn spectacles associated with the emperor's sacrifices versus the lighter musics, e.g., the court's travel rituals [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], (6) officials' banquets with the emperor and nobles in palace side-rooms [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and holidays like New Year's day.

A certain adviser memorialized about the propriety of treating the somewhat fancier court music for palace women as truly high-music. He proposed that there should be a system of venue and instrumentation for the women's music, but that it not be conflated with the other venues. In his program, the court "will set up performances using four [sets of] suspended [chimes], and should have inscriptions [on them] that clarify the [strike] order of the scale." (7) The empress's music was given a clearly delineated venue (her family temple) and a mark of solemnity by incorporating bells, even though the bell strike-order instructions were needed. The most powerful court classicist of the day, Wang Su [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (195-256), offered an opinion, responding to some degree to what had just been proposed. Framing his points through ancient precedent, he emphasized the distinct role that bells had always assumed in the highest of all the venues--the emperor's sacrificial altars to Heaven and Earth. He warned, however, that bells, although primary in the temples, should be "unadorned" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (8) Wang thought that the emperor's music should be complete (nothing spared) and replicatable in other venues, but that there should not be too many bells or too many, or better none, of the non-standard scale-notes, use of which over the centuries had elicited negative criticism. Wang's implication was that the empress's bell-chime venue, since it required strike-order instructions, might make the high-music too sophisticated.

Pre-T'ang China court music, and other arts, were dominated by men of Wang's ilk and deep learning; their voices dominated the historiographic record and also their musical ideas are imbedded in other writings, such as verse. Many were technically adept at performance (often on the ch'in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or the p'i-p'a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), lyrics, harmonics, tuning, ensembles, and even scoring. Above, we have seen that venues were being reconsidered. Such venues, as well as demarcating high solemnity from lesser solemnity, also served to segregate aesthetically outmoded media, like...