Perhaps the most direct way to come face-to-face with the unique power of the qin tradition is to ask what it’s all about. Why do people play the qin? What’s it supposed to do for them?

Some people find qin music beautiful; some find it expressive of their feelings; these motivations are familiar from all musical traditions. But in addition, qin music is characterized by some rather more unusual concerns. While people everywhere use music for enjoyment and self-expression, only a minority of people in each culture use music for deliberate self-perfection. Religious music is commonly used to connect with the divine, and some classical systems (like those from India) see themselves in pervasively religious terms. The literati tradition in China, inspired by the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist religio-philosophical traditions, tends to view music first and foremost as an instrument for self-cultivation and the attainment of sageliness or transcendence. In fact, the extent to which a given Chinese genre or performance sees itself as an act of self-perfection rather than of entertainment is a good measure of its closeness to classical ideals. What constitutes self-perfective music has been the subject of extensive (and ongoing!) disagreement, but the earnest focus on the goal of making oneself into a “better person” or a “more valuable person” or “a more perceptive person” through music has never been far from the center of attention.

To my mind there is a spectrum along which attempts at “self-perfective music” in the Chinese tradition are arranged. One pole, which I will call the formalist pole, is concerned above all with correctness, understood as an attitude of strict observance of or adherence to particular moral and aesthetic models. The other pole, which I will label the discovery pole, is concerned with exploration and freedom beyond any particular models or expectations. These poles define a philosophical as well as a musical spectrum, and millennia of Chinese thinkers have articulated varied and subtle perspectives on how to live that negotiate between the two. An example of a highly formalistic thinker would be Xunzi, an influential Confucian of the 3rd century BCE, who invested much attention in the problem of controlling and redirecting—rather than indulging or taking cues from— spontaneous human desires. At the opposite extreme would be Zhuangzi, a formative “Daoist” of the 4th-3rd century BCE whose philosophical writings present a world singularly chaotic, crazy, and fascinating, and a way of living that is appropriately unpredictable and uncodifiable. To negotiate between formalism and discovery in qin music, as in many areas of Chinese culture, is to learn about and understand the ways in which the human personality is affected by adherence to carefully-considered guidelines on the one hand, and by plunging into the unknown on the other.

The formalistic side of the tradition is more well-known to those outside it. Many people in China know distantly of qin music as something strict, sober, and stripped-down, meant to moderate rather than exhaust one’s emotions. Sometimes elaborate conventions surround and dictate how it is to be played: in late imperial times, lists of “dos and don’ts” proliferated, requiring qin players to purify themselves in certain ways before playing, to think certain thoughts while playing, and to forbid any person of crude morals (or low social standing) from hearing the music. Attitudes have liberalized, but many more conservative qin players today continue to balk at departures from inherited norms—or rather, the norms they imagine to be inherited. Restraints of various kinds play an extremely important role in qin music, helping to guide the player toward tranquility, subtlety, modesty, and other desirable feelings and mental states. Indeed, the oldest and most famous etymology of the word qin holds that it derives from a word meaning “restraint”.

From the formalistic perspective, the various “lacks” in qin music constitute a deliberate assault on incorrect aesthetic and moral ideals. At many times the traditional focus on self-perfection through music has gone hand-in-hand with a certain puritanism and elitism. Straight-laced literati commonly condemned anything they saw as “vulgar” or “licentious”, and that includes just about every kind of music you and I have ever listened to. Including Bach and CM, not to mention most genres of Chinese music. Aesthetic and moral ideals were seen as one and the same: if an aspiring sage was to be circumspect morally, she could not but listen only to the most correct and ennobling music, music that conveyed and instructed in things like “benevolence”, “righteousness”, “propriety”, “wisdom”, “harmony”, and “vacuity”. (It is important to note that there is nothing specifically “Confucian” about this approach, which is why I included the final “Daoistic” term.) These aesthetic and moral ideals were thought to translate directly into certain formal properties of music. The prevalence of pentatonic scales in China is older than the ideology of self-cultivation, but self-cultivationists quickly began defending pentatonic scales precisely on the grounds that they were emotionally moderate, not to mention mathematically and metaphysically harmonious. An exciting rhythm is destabilizing; better to employ rhythm that is calmer or freer. To build up formal, theoretical, and genre complexity is to distract from the essential task of music, which is correcting the mind—not expressing, not communicating, and not enjoying anything per se. To listen to and enjoy music like Bach and CM, let alone popular music of any kind, is to be morally reprobate, cultivating unhealthy dispositions and engaging in behavior ultimately harmful to oneself and others. Their wonderful harmonies, lush melodies, and staggering improvisations are precisely what make them bad for the human heart and mind.

Obviously the position I’ve just articulated is rather extreme, and has probably been taken seriously by very few. It was, however, taken seriously enough that one famous poet wrote a satirical set of “rules for qin music” that required each piece to be no more than 20 notes long, without any embellishment or dynamic variation whatsoever! It’s important to note that while the extreme formalist position may seem ridiculous to modern liberal observers, it has sophisticated reasons and justifications backing it up. For the sake of space, however, I won’t go into them just now.

The other side of qin music, which is essential to understanding it fully, stresses freedom and discovery rather than strictness. The music can still be austere and minimalistic, but the governing reasons are different. For instance: playing a 20-note piece very slowly and with no embellishment at all can be a profoundly interesting and artistic experience. It may not be morally necessary, but it is still highly valuable. Likewise valuable is any musical experience that expands self-knowledge, which can include musical experiences animated by the very emotions formalists would seek to purge. There is anger and sadness and madness in traditional qin music, and weirdness at every turn. Some contemporary schools and players are freer with these effects than others, and they have been given particular impetus by the 20th-century adoption of Western extroversion and professionalism. The experimental, irreverent, and even amoral (or anti-moral) dimensions of Chinese thought are less well-known than the more moderate, formalistic, and conformist mainstream, but their roots are deep and their expressions varied. As an exploratory experience, qin music can embrace extremes of frenzy and restraint, complexity and simplicity, purity and hybridity, all in equal measure and with equal justification.

I have titled this section “The Music Beyond the Strings”, but so far I have not given any conventional account of what this means. As far as my personal priorities go, qin music’s extensive focus on self-perfection is its most valuable contribution to the world of the arts—I believe that, through a combination of reflection, learning, and practical and aesthetic experiences, people can improve their lives and go beyond what we think is normally possible. I share this belief with many of the primary voices in Chinese cultural history, and feel that Chinese traditions have developed this point of view to a degree not commonly found in other cultural environments. The traditional discourse on “music beyond the strings” emphasizes the integration of art and life, and of musical effect with extra-musical meaning. While not all qin players will share my view on the centrality of self-cultivation to our tradition, nearly all will likely agree that the meaning of qin music is primary, its structure and technical aspects secondary.

All Chinese music is deeply intertwined with poetry, painting, philosophy, and other disciplines, and thus in a sense there is no such thing as “abstract music”. Pieces have concrete associations with people, places, literary works, and other “points of reference” outside the music itself—they are identified not only by programmatic titles like “Wild Swan in Autumn” or “Flowing Water”, but by in-depth section headings that explain what image or feeling is being called up in each part of the piece. Typically the allusions mix the general with the specific, the concrete with the abstract—“Flowing Water”, for instance, deals not only with the material and abstract qualities of water, but with the character of the gentleman who takes water as his model, with Confucius’s sentiment that the benevolent love water, and with the story of an ancient qin master who connected to his lifelong friend by playing programmatic music about water! A piece with a title like “Drunkenness” will conjure forth as many associations as there are allusions to drunkenness in the body of Chinese literature. Philosophical ideas, famous poems, and historical figures are all fair game as topics for music. The sheer density of the allusion in each piece means that for the attuned listener every note and phrase can carry a load of meaning. For the performer, additionally, such pieces can be worlds unto themselves, consistently surprising and multi-faceted.

The emphasis on “content” in Chinese music poses some distinct challenges for appreciation. Unless one is already well-acquainted with a piece’s associations, one may be ill-equipped to “get” it aesthetically. “Implication” is highly valued in traditional contexts, such that emotional transparency is sometimes regarded more as a sign of crudity than of sophistication. (This resonates in other areas of Chinese culture as well, for example in the preference for concise and carefully-worded writing over long exposition.) Also, because associations can proliferate of their own internal logic, there can never be a fixed or definitive rendition of a piece: every player, every time she plays, must articulate her own personal understanding of the associations, and listeners may be more or less “attuned” to her particular perspective. “Drunkenness”, for instance, is played more energetically or in a more subdued fashion, its rhythm regular or broken, according to the performer’s feelings about the topic. The more complex a piece’s content, the more interpretations are possible. “Mist on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers”, one of China’s supreme musical creations, centers on the act of withdrawal from society and retreat from an apparently hopeless situation. Far from his former life and responsibilities, the protagonist experiences both the mystical joy of union with nature and bottomless despair and rage at what he has been forced to do, as he is torn between freedom and obligation. Think how many ways a person could render that in music! While the range and possibilities of this theme are obvious, even the simplest theme—lamenting in the autumn night, waking at dawn, chopping firewood—can provoke interpretations of great density and subtlety, in the same way that poetry can embellish and deepen the tiniest quantum of experience.

So far I have talked about the role of self-perfection in qin music and about the importance it places on extra-musical association. Now I want to connect this with a point made earlier, when I was comparing qin music with CM. I complained (as I often complain) that Chinese music generally seems to have no music theory as it relates to selecting and combining pitches for particular desired effects. Such theory is arguably the backbone of most classical systems, and forms the bedrock of composition and improvisation. What theory does exist in qin contexts has everything to do with conveying meanings, and little directly to do with musical structures. The player is taught—systematically, at times—how to reflect on and identify with the occasions and implications of each twist and turn in the musical line. She is taught how to use minute aspects of interpretation to bring forth a full understanding of those implications. Little is said about composing, though presumably much the same logic works there: when qin masters composed (as they did aplenty, at least before 1949), they worked with meanings as filtered through the structures familiar to them from the received qin repertoire, rather than using structures divorced and synthesized apart from that repertoire. As such, the musical brilliance of the qin tradition lies in the pieces as composed and reinterpreted by generations of performers, not in the kind of modal, melodic, or harmonic theory we see used so successfully elsewhere.

Which is not to say that such theories cannot be successfully integrated with qin music. Indeed, I see this as a big part of my task as a qin musician, and I address it in other sections.