Music and Dance

Marnix was immediately attracted by the unique timbre qualities of Chinese music, the low- pitched seven string qín and high-pitched suônà reed-trumpet, their subtle slides and percussive strokes and vibrati, recreation of natural sounds. He has retained a fascination with the problems of setting its classical lyrics, often highly asymmetric in form, to ancient surviving scores, and the interpretation of their rhythmic phrasing.

From his first visit to Hong Kong in 1969, he was fortunate to get lessons with pípá maestro Lyû Peíyuán who regularly performed in the Hilton lobby, and later with Lyû Peí in Taipei. There he also took lessons in qín, and suônà with Liú Fèngdaì (of Laíyáng, Shandong) whose services were principally required for funerals and Peking operas. Like a jazz trumpeter he could make his instrument laugh or cry.

Marnix subsequently took lessons with a number of experts, notably in qín with Caì Déyùn at Hong Kong and with Chéng Yù in London. I also attended classes there in Peking opera with Joanna Qiu Zenghui, Kathy Hall and percussionist Wan Ying.

Chinese music was until recent years a very much neglected field. Yet Confucius, like Plato, saw music as the key element of education in goodness. China has a rich tradition in religious, operatic and folk music but it is the meditative qín (ch’in) that has proved most popular internationally. Chinese music uses few chords, mostly octaves and fifths if any, but places great emphasis on fingering slides or vibrato and percussive stroke. Touch and timbre provide the key to its musical dynamics.

The music traditionally had various systems of musical notation, but is now written either in European stave or the Chevé numerical system (1 = do, 2 = re etc) of ‘moveable solfa’ which is the same for all keys. The barring is usually 2/4 or 4/4, but, while the skipping 3/4 of European music is generally absent, underlying triple rhythm phrasing of six-beat (2-2-2 or 3-3) and eight-beat (3-2-3, 2-3-3 or 3-3-2) are common.

Marnix has lectured and published papers on various aspects of rhythm in traditional and ancient Chinese and Korean music. He deciphered and transcribed ‘West River Moon’ (Xijiang Yuè) with lyric setting from the Dunhuáng cave library (sealed in 933 AD). On 16 September 2007 he sang and acted four arias which he had deciphered from the earliest surviving scores of West Chamber Story (Xixiang Ji), the famous Yuan dynasty opera, at the Vanbrugh Teatre in London. He gave a paper on the influence of Jurchen music and the Daoist ‘Blue Sky Song’ (Qingtian Ge) at the CHIME conference in Dublin on 13 October 2007. He plans to publish a book shortly.

Music and poetry, whether in the form of folk or art lyrics, share a vital link. While melody is the succession of musical pitches, generally to a constant pulse or beat, rhythm is the division of its duration in time into recognisable repeating units, usually reducible into counts of two or three. A musical line of several bars roughly mirrors a line of verse which in Chinese as in English usually ends on a rhyme word.

Within the line, aside from the stresses on the regular bar-beats, certain notes and words may be emphasised, and micro-pauses or ‘breathing marks’, introduced, which over-power the regular stresses of the bars. In other words, this may create more complex patterns of syncopation or cross-rhythm within the framework of the bar-lines. Thus, a tension and release is generated which adds an element of unpredictability, excitement and vitality to the familiar format of the music.

Traditional Chinese music is now transcribed in European manner, in duple barring (2/4 or 4/4), whether of numerical solfa or stave. This does not mean however that ‘authentic’ Chinese music has no triple rhythm. Rather, it frequently mixes triple and duple phrases and may employ six-beat phrases in hemiolas of 2+2+2 and 3+3 betas; or eight-beat couplets of 4+4 and 3+2+3 beats. Examples of such combined phrasing have been demonstrated in percussion figures of pyramidal or ‘pagoda’ (jinzìtâ) shape. Here is a form using only big-gong Cang strokes, with syncopation by ‘yi’ extensions, in ten bars of 2/4 or (2-2-2) + (3-3) + (3-2-3) = 20 beats:

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