…is, of course, always a work in progress! While I spend much of my time playing and agonizing over qin music, exploring its strengths and weaknesses, and while I think I’ve arrived at some rather nifty conclusions, I know that my views will change and change again. I want to reserve this section for a brief treatment of what I think “the qin can give to the world” and what “the world can give to the qin”.

No music is less about music than qin music. This should be evident from the discussion above on “Music Beyond the Strings”. I think the biggest contribution the qin can make to the world of music is on the level of ideology: how different would things be if people gave more credence to the idea that art is about self-perfection? Self-perfection is of course always an open book, and people can, should, and will debate what it amounts to for as long as we’re around. Whatever the content and discipline of self-perfection, the motivation to pursue it is what matters. The qin challenges every listener to think less about beauty, less about enjoyment, less about emotions, certainly less on fame and recognition, and more about what their life is all about. What are you doing here? Where do your priorities lie? As I approach it, the qin tradition is a way to work through precisely these questions. The dual emphasis on strict discipline and on boundless exploration makes for a tremendously broad palette with which to do this. I mentioned elsewhere that literati music can be rendered on any instrument; self-perfection can also, I suspect (against the puritanical mandarins!), work through many different formal systems. This is part of the reason I am so interested in changing qin music through the use of other musical systems: the motivation, the meaning, the aspiration is deeply Chinese, and that is what gives the qin its identity.

Second in importance to ideology is the basic aesthetic orientation of qin music. This can be seen as the tradition’s “answer”, in broad strokes, to the question of what self-perfection amounts to. Confucius famously praised a certain ode as expressing “joy without license, grief without injury”—that is, epitomizing emotion that was delicate rather than overwhelming. Most traditional qin music is moderate music; I have already discussed how its various musical elements make it unusually delicate, suggestive, and efficient in its use of musical resources. Chinese pieces can frequently be more emotionally powerful exactly because of this moderation: they express pain, anger, fear, joy, and other strong feelings filtered through a restraining sentiment that can make the reality of those feelings that much more arresting. (How often we know people who cannot or will not give their emotions free rein.) There are consequently various moods and dispositions that the qin is uniquely equipped to express—mystical, inquisitive, vast, and elusive moods. The moderate nature of qin music is also extremely effective at inspiring introspection, and every qin player learns the delights of simplicity, minimalism, and “not saying too much”.

Third is the qin’s connection with other arts. One of the most important things my teacher taught me was to treat qin play as painting or calligraphy. The motions of the body and the qi apply force to the instrument much as they apply ink to paper. I have already discussed the dense allusiveness of the traditional repertoire, which encourages imaginative thinking and imagistic experiencing in the act of performance. What I have not touched on is the integration of mind, body, and activity that runs throughout traditional Chinese arts. This is too much to go into here, but the basic point is that one’s creativity can be fired by “cross-modal” thinking that treats all artistic media as basically the same. I paint, and narrate, and exercise my body while playing qin music, because the traditional approach provides ways for me to integrate the subjective experiences of all these arts. This is one of the numerous aspects of the qin that are geared more toward the player than to any listener.

Beyond ideology, broad aesthetic character, and an integrative approach, the qin transmits a huge number of fabulously well-composed pieces. The “composition” of a qin piece involves not just the music itself, but the intentions behind and surrounding it, such that these are really inseparable in the finished product. I mentioned that in the absence of much formal theory, the greatest contributions the qin can make to melody and composition are all embodied and locked away in the pieces that come down to us. That means that, rather than being taught forms divested from concrete melodies, traditionally one simply has to learn one melody after another after another. This may be frustrating to those who want an “immediate answer” to questions like “how is one to convey x,” but at least the material one has to learn is generally interesting! Indeed, the more sophisticated qin pieces are endlessly challenging on both formal and artistic levels, not to mention on the extra-musical plane. This is particularly true given their counter-intuitive texture, which I will discuss more in other sections. Also notable is that most of these melodies seem very tightly adapted to the organological resources of the qin, making them difficult or impossible to render in other media.

The last point I’ll touch on here is the dizzyingly sophisticated way that qin players are taught to “interpret” the skeletal melodies that stare at them from the printed page. I have talked about the myriad phrasal, microtonal, rhythmic, dynamic, and timbral changes that the player is taught to apply in accord with her feelings and understanding. The range of ornaments is vast, and masters combine various musical elements into textures whose restraint often masks their structural complexity. It is very difficult to talk more about this; one simply has to listen to a lot of good playing before discussion can continue. Suffice it to say that both the highly personal approach to interpretation and the range of resources developed to enable that interpretation are unique and distinctive in the world of music. It is especially important to note, for those (like some CM aficionados I know) who think all structural complexity lies on the level of melody, that Chinese achievements in dynamic and timbral manipulation demand sustained attention.

As for what “the world can give to the qin”, I have some firm opinions about this, as well as some not-so-firm opinions. Rather than expositing them all here, I’ll integrate them into the section on “Non-Chinese influences.”