Melody

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I have mentioned that Chinese music has a lot in common with systems from South Asia and the Middle East, as opposed to the Western music with which it is most often juxtaposed and combined. In all the former systems there is an emphasis on the selection and combination of pitches in a single line so as to generate specific emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic effects. Harmonic intervals like octaves, fifths, fourths, and very occasionally thirds are used in Chinese music, but not for the purpose of generating tension and release, as in Western music: these harmonies color and accent the melodic line without distracting from it. In the West we are so used to associating “well-developed music” with well-developed harmony that monophony may strike us as a folkloric or primitive mode of musicmaking. The well-documented development of extensive polyphony in Western music over time seems to offer an example of a teleological process that took centuries to accelerate. But if there’s anything we learn from surveying the world’s musics across time and space, it is that people can draw amazing products out of even very limited formal palettes, and consequently that different palettes are not “better” or “worse” but simply offer different options to the musician. Monophonic music has remained prevalent in many cultures with long histories of great sophistication, so while it may necessarily have developed before polyphony, there is nothing inherently consigning it to a lower level of musical range and expressiveness. In fact, if making a lot out of very little is a measure of musical intelligence, the Chinese might very well top all competition. Single-line Chinese classical melodies, using only five notes per octave, attained such a high level over the centuries that they virtually “seem” diatonic, chromatic, harmonic, etc.; that is, it’s very easy to forget that what you’re listening to is built on such simple foundations.

Melodically-oriented musical systems can work their magic over seconds or hours. It’s especially impressive to witness a logical, sequenced development of musical ideas over an hour or more of single-line music. If we can believe ancient accounts, Chinese ritual and ceremonial music employed mammoth compositional forms which unfortunately have not survived. The longest surviving notated pieces for qin combine great length with huge internal complexity, and can only have been the result of generations of focused musicianship. This complexity takes the form of simple patterns of pitches, combined and varied to yield surprise and expressive contrast; developments can take place on multiple scales simultaneously as with a fractal. In keeping with the extra-musical or allusive focus explained above, these long pieces tell long stories or present exceedingly complex poetic ideas. Examples include an assassination narrative in 45 parts (complete with vivid depictions of hair-raising anger and suicidal violence), a meditation on flying swans in 36 parts, and a vision of roaming with immortals in 20 parts. These contrast with pieces so short they only have “one part”, but which deal with equally expansive images. At both extremes one finds impressive compositional pacing on the large scale, and densely crystalline texture on the small.

And now for a word about scales and modes. I mentioned in “Apophasis” that the Chinese palette here is puzzlingly limited. Pentatonicity, the practice of dividing up the octave into five pitches, is one of the most distinctive and immediately recognizable characteristics of Chinese music. The “standard” or anhemitonic pentatonic scale can be modeled as CDFGA (in any transposition you please), or by the black keys on the piano. While variations and exceptions abound, all traditional Chinese music as currently performed is pentatonic in basis. Combined with the lack of developed polyphony, and the consequent prevalence of monophonic or heterophonic texture, pentatonicity seems to place China on a fairly low level musically. In the West we typically associate pentatonicity with a “sing-songy” or folksy flavor, while the standard pentatonic scale is recognized as an exceedingly ancient and widespread scale out of which more complex ones developed. How is a Chinese musician to react in the face of the 72 diatonic scales of the CM system, the eighth-steps (that is, a quarter of a half-step) prevailing in Turkey, not to mention the chromatic harmonies of the West? All of these systems seem substantially richer at rendering melodic material than a system based mainly on the anhemitonic pentatonic scale.

There are two ways to respond in favor of Chinese music. Firstly, its scale resources are not quite so limited as “CDFGA”. Chinese music is in theory fully chromatic, and modulations among pentatonic scales are frequent. In standard Western parlance, modulation refers to the switching among keys in a piece of music—changing the tonic and sometimes also the key signature. In a more general melodic context, modulation refers to switching among scales, thereby changing the melodic content of the music. There are two ways to modulate: (1) shifting the tonic without changing the pitches used, and (2) changing the pitches used, with or without shifting the tonic. As an example of (1), from playing CDFGA with tonic C one could shift the tonic to D and yield a totally contrasting musical result. The anhemitonic pentatonic scale with tonic C is “happy” as opposed to the “sad”, “angry”, or otherwise “negative” anhemitonic pentatonic scale with tonic D. Since there are five notes in a pentatonic scale that can act as the tonic, there are five main “forms” of the basic scale. As an example of (2), from playing CDFGA with tonic C one could sharpen D to D#, or add E. In practice Chinese music is usually uncomfortable with type (2) modulations, but it does use them to transition between pentatonic scales. For instance, sharpening D to D# can mean a transition between CDFGA and CD#FGBb; it also does the modulation without introducing any half-step transitions, which are seldom seen in Chinese music. By shifting pentatonic scales in this way, and by emphasizing different notes within a single pentatonic scale so as to shift the tonal center, Chinese music does embrace much melodic variety. If we include ornaments, “shading” of main scalar notes, microtonal variations, etc., the variety increases.

Another way China “gets by” on the anhemitonic pentatonic scale is by working it with tremendous subtlety. You can think of this by analogy with a hydraulic system. Imagine a buildup of water pressure, which is the impulse to create melodically sophisticated and varied music. The many scales of non-Chinese music systems act as “outlets” for the pressure: a lot of the interest in, say, Indian and Middle Eastern music comes from the sheer variety of scales they employ. In Chinese music the options are radically restricted, with the result that a lot of effort has gone into maximizing their use. If we tend to think of pentatonic music as “folksy” and simple, less varied and expressive than diatonic music, we could stand to learn from the more sophisticated Chinese genres, including especially qin music. The bottom line on pentatonicity is that close study of Chinese melodies reveals a flexible and insightful use of “reduced” musical resources. The coin is two-sided: flexible and insightful the melodies may be, but they’re still, after all, working with a reduced arsenal.

There is some heptatonicity written into qin music, usually in older pieces (published before, say, 1600) which can even verge on the chromatic. There is also heptatonicity in practice—often players will add heptatonic ornaments and teasers in a piece. Some, like Wang Huade, seem to re-conceptualize pentatonic melodies as heptatonic ones full of modulation (try following his “Pei Lan”), but this practice has yet to attract much attention.

So far I’ve been talking about the ways in which Chinese melodies combine pitches in a single line. There’s another layer to consider, a rather esoteric one that is seldom addressed outside of Indian music: namely, the microtonal manipulation of pitches. (Some Middle Eastern theory allows for defined variants of notes separated by intervals as small as eighth-steps; I must confess I am ignorant of exactly how this is applied, and my relative familiarity with Indian treatments will guide my presentation here.) Imagine two pieces in different modes but sharing the note C. If piece 1 features a C that is slightly lower or higher than the C in piece 2, we have microtonal manipulation going on. The pitch is still considered to be “C” and plays that role in its scale, but the actual frequency is different. The reasons for this typically have to do with the effects desired within a particular mode. Furthermore, even within one mode, C may have its precise pitch raised or lowered depending on context; in India (as seems always to be the case) there are specific rules governing this. Nothing in qin music seems to forbid microtonal manipulation, but I’ve never come across any discussion of it, and thus I can’t determine whether apparent examples in recordings are deliberate or not. Here I’ll simply note that I regard microtonal manipulation as an interesting and effective addition to traditional qin play.