Currently there are several excellent web resources in English concerning the guqin and its music; you can find them on the links page. I won’t bother repeating what qin friends like John Thompson, Peiyou Chang, and Charlie Huang and have already covered in superb detail. If you’re new to the qin, you should probably read their pages before continuing with mine. There are many more-or-less obvious things one could say about the qin, but I prefer to focus on the less obvious: on elements of the music that it has taken me a long and difficult time to discover.

Much of my reflection on the qin is driven by my commitment to several non-Chinese musical traditions, especially those from India and the Middle East. It’s interesting to me that the Chinese musical establishment automatically looks to “the West” for ideas in renovating Chinese music, because it has always struck me that Western and Chinese music are not a good match at either the theoretical or the aesthetic level. (Henceforth and throughout, I’ll be using “Chinese music” to mean “traditional/authentic Chinese music”, i.e. Chinese music before strong Western influence started at the turn of the 20th century. This includes folk, popular, and classical registers alike.) Chinese music is monophonic, makes sophisticated use of melodic modes, gives much attention to ornamentation and to dynamic and timbral manipulation, and is generally oriented toward the lyrical, the detailed, the intimate, and the subtle. This is obviously an oversimplification that privileges the more refined genres, but in outline it holds true even for the most extroverted (including opera and festival music). This music has much more in common with traditional forms from India and the Middle East than it does with post-Baroque Western art music. To compare Chinese music with any sophisticated tradition based in monophony and modes—and that includes much early Western music as well—yields insight upon insight that comparison with received Western classical music does not. I will not argue this point further, but I hope it will become evident especially as one reads the pages detailing the international influences that have shaped my music.

While I have never wavered in my commitment to qin since I first took it up, many times I have thrown up my hands at frustration with the qin tradition. It seems to lack so much that makes other musics great. For the sake of brevity I’ll restrict my comments to just one “competing” system—Carnatic music (CM, also spelled Karnatak or Karnatic), the classical music of South India, with which I have become rather intimately familiar in recent years. There are many ways to analyze and present CM; the one I offer here is the one that I prefer and use most frequently. CM, at its basis, consists of rules for arranging pitches in sequence. The raga system is really nothing more than a body of rules determining which pitches to combine in what order, on small and large scales. The breadth, complexity, and subtlety of this system arise from the many aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual effects that pitch sequencing can yield, and the inexhaustible number of ways in which they can be sequenced. While raga governs the selection and sequencing of pitches, the tala system governs their duration and the rhythmical patterns into which they fall; both raga and tala can be expanded and explored indefinitely, and together they serve as the basis for compositions and improvisations of vast power and variety. CM has many genres, an enormous repertoire of sophisticated pieces, a large pantheon of legendary performers, and a theoretical system as highly-developed as any in the world.

How many of these can the qin tradition offer? Exactly none. There is barely anything like a “genre” of qin music; a qin piece is pretty much just a qin piece. The repertoire is quite large but modern performers play a tiny fraction of the total; while many of the pieces are indeed fantastically deep and surprising, not everyone seems interested in bringing them to light or giving due treatment to their riches. The “pantheon of legendary performers” is severely underpopulated, with perhaps only a half-dozen living players commanding universal assent. As for a theoretical system: I almost have to laugh and say “what theoretical system?” From a scalar perspective, qin music seems ridiculously stripped-down, with four modulations of the anhemitonic pentatonic scale virtually its only resource. (That’s right, qin music doesn’t even make good use of all five modulations of its base scale!) There is no rhythmical system at all, no formal modal system for generating melodies, no improvisation, and no method for composition. There is no explicit microtonal manipulation; there are no rules for ornamentation. In traditional treatments there is also little emotional range: qin music does scale the heights or plumb the depths of exultation, sorrow, anger, and creativity; instead it prefers moderate feelings. Until recently, there were no concerts, such that that many qin players severely lack a performing ethic. The sound of the instrument itself is frequently flat and lacking in sustain, thus carrying little presence or emotional power. This dreary analysis would run much the same from a Hindustani perspective, or a Persian, Arabic, Turkish, or Western perspective. In the face of so much dearth, so many lacunae, just what in the world does the guqin have to offer?

It will be obvious to anyone who spends a bit of time listening to and thinking about qin music that it does indeed have much to offer. What the foregoing paragraphs suggest, however, is that we must look for its value in different places than we are accustomed to. The value of the qin tradition will not lie in a pantheon of great composers, or in the flexibility and perfection of its theory, or in the range of moods in can evoke in the listener, or even in its being well-suited to communicate to an audience at all. Indeed, we can use mainstream objections to qin music as a precise rubric for demonstrating its strengths. Most of its “lacks” are deliberate, and the strangeness of the resulting product is itself a careful creation of generations of musicians. Understood for what they are, and in their proper context, these very “lacks” go far toward making the qin one of the world’s most highly-developed and fascinating musical legacies.