Sháowǔ jiǔchéng yuèbǔ 韶舞九成樂補
Supplement to the Music of the Nine-Movement Sháo Dance by 余載 (Yú Zǎi)
About the work
A short, single-juan reconstruction of the lost Sháo 韶 court music and dance of the legendary Yú Shùn 虞舜, by the Yuán-period commoner-scholar Yú Zǎi. The book is in four diagrammatic sections: (1) the Jiǔdé zhī gē yīntú 九德之歌音圖 (“Diagram of the tones of the Nine-Virtues Song”), (2) the Jiǔdé zhī gē yìtú 九德之歌義圖 (“Diagram of the meanings”), (3) the Jiǔsháo zhī wǔ zhuìzhào tú 九韶之舞綴兆圖 (“Diagram of the dancers’ floor-pattern”), and (4) the Jiǔsháo zhī wǔ cǎizhāng tú 九韶之舞采章圖 (“Diagram of the costume-decoration”). Yú frames the project as a Confucian bǔ wáng 補亡 (“supplement-of-the-lost”) on the model of Shù Xī’s six odes and Pí Rìxiū’s Nine Xià, presented to the Yuán court in the hope of restoring genuine antiquity to imperial ritual music.
Tiyao
[Your servants] respectfully report: Sháowǔ jiǔchéng yuèbǔ in 1 juàn, by Yú Zǎi of the Yuán. The beginning and end of Yú Zǎi’s life cannot be ascertained. From his preface to the present work he refers to himself as “Sānshān bùyī, formerly Recorder of the Confucian School of Fúzhōu Lù”; and from his disciple Zhū Mó’s preface to the Yuètōng Sháowǔ bǔlüè we know he flourished in the Tiānlì 天厯 era of Wénzōng. His zì was Dàchē; on caring for his parents he resigned office, devoted himself to ethical practice and to teaching, and was content with quiet retirement. The present compilation is recorded in the Wényuāngé shūmù, but no transmitted text survives in the world; it remains complete only in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. The first section is the diagram of the tones of the Nine-Virtues Song; the second is the diagram of its meanings; the third is the floor-pattern diagram of the Nine-Sháo dance; the fourth is the dance costume-decoration diagram. — His tone-diagram pairs the five tones with five spoken-language categories, the píngzhuó and píngqīng (“muddy píng” and “clear píng”) — different from the system of Shěn Yuē 沈約 and Xú Jǐngān 徐景安 who divide píng into upper and lower (Shěn’s view recorded in Mǐ Fú’s Huàshǐ; Xú’s recorded in Wáng Yìnglín’s Kùnxué jìwén) — and different also from the schemes of Sīmǎ Guāng 司馬光 and Liú Jiàn 劉鑑 et al. that pair the throat, tongue, lips, teeth, and rear teeth with the five tones. He also assigns the six lǜ (yáng pitches) and six lǚ (yīn pitches) to alternate use, in stark distinction from the standard tradition that places the twelve pitches in sānfēn sǔnyì sequence to generate the seven-tone rotation. — Yet examining Zhōu Déqīng 周徳清’s Zhōngyuán yùn, his “yīn-píng” and “yáng-píng” are precisely Yú Zǎi’s píngzhuó and píngqīng. And the Zhōuguān Dàsīyuè commentary by Zhèng Xuán glosses “the six lǜ match yáng tones, the six lǚ match yīn tones”: this is precisely Yú’s doctrine of separated lǜlǚ deployment. So although the work issues from a fresh design, it is not without classical warrant. — As for taking the Dàyǎn numbers as the basis for designing the Hétú, and the Tàiyǐ xíng jiǔgōng technique for designing the Luòshū: these are post-Chén Tuán speculations and at the time of Hòu Kuí’s directing of music there was nothing of the sort in writing. Yú’s dance-diagrams all derive from the Hétú and Luòshū, hence are not free of forced accommodation. Yet number does not stand outside qíǒu (odd-and-even), qíǒu does not stand outside yīnyáng, the principle of the Yì is vast, and matters can in some sense connect. So the argument is not without internal coherence. Just as Shù Xī supplied the missing six odes of the Shī, and Pí Rìxiū the Nine Xià, the result need not strictly conform to the ancient — it is enough that something of the ancient meaning be preserved, even one part in ten thousand: it is in any case better than the side-modes and ornamental fancies that merely add melancholy. So Yú’s book may be preserved as one alternative account. — The book has been repeatedly transcribed and miswritten characters are common; for example in the eighth chapter of the tone-diagram, the character kūn in “zhì zāi kūn yuán” (alluding to Yì’s 《彖傳》, “How wonderful! the kūn origin”) should, by the meaning-diagram, be in the eighth column, but the old recension wrongly places it in the seventh; the central column in the floor-pattern diagram lacks two positions left and right, and since the dance employs the bā yì 八佾 (“rows of eight”) it must yield 64 dancers — yet from “second-formation” onwards every formation is 64 dancers, and only here we get 60; the recensification “qí cuán” (re-grouping) takes the position-count of the first formation, but the costume-decoration diagram of the later chapter likewise has positions for two yellow-robed figures, so the omission in this country is plain. We have here corrected and restored the original. The use of red and black circles to mark the dancers’ positions is also occasionally garbled, and we have rectified it. Respectfully edited and presented in the ninth month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Editor-Generals: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Editor-in-chief: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
Yú Zǎi’s Sháowǔ jiǔchéng yuèbǔ is a Confucian utopia in diagrammatic form: written under the Yuán dynasty by a Sòng-loyalist bùyī, its author proposes that the now-lost music and dance of legendary Sage-King Shùn — the Sháo — can be reconstructed by deriving the requisite tone-system, dancer-formations, and costume-symbolism from the Hétú and Luòshū numerological diagrams of Chén Tuán’s tradition. The text is preceded by a long author-preface (1328–1330) addressed to the Yuán throne, urging that the dynasty has now reached a peace and ethical achievement worthy of restoring the Sháo music and supplanting the Confucius-temple ritual repertoire it inherited from the Sòng. The disciple Zhū Mó of Xīnān contributed a parallel preface for the related Yuètōng Sháowǔ bǔlüè (now lost). The work was preserved in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn (the only complete copy by the Qīng) and recovered from there for the SKQS. Its principal historical interest is doctrinal: the use of píngzhuó / píngqīng (effectively the yīnpíng / yángpíng of vernacular phonology) as a fifth-tonal correspondence — a position later vindicated by Zhōu Déqīng’s Zhōngyuán yùn — and the yīnyáng segregation of the six lǜ and six lǚ (which has Hàn-period commentarial warrant in Zhèng Xuán’s gloss on the Zhōuguān Dàsīyuè). The reconstructed dance-formation and costume diagrams are essentially numerological, as the Sìkù compilers note. The text was transmitted in a damaged state through Yǒnglè dàdiǎn and the Sìkù editors restored several diagrammatic errors, all noted in the tiyao.
Translations and research
- Joseph S. C. Lam. 1998. State Sacrifices and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity, and Expressiveness. SUNY Press. — Treats Yú Zǎi as the principal Yuán-period Confucian advocate of Sage-King ritual-music revival.
- 楊蔭瀏. 1981. 中國古代音樂史稿. — Notes the work’s reliance on the Hé-tú / Luò-shū tradition.
- Standaert, Nicolas. 2006. “Ritual dances and their visual representations in the Ming and Qing.” East Asian Library Journal 12.1. — Identifies Yú Zǎi as a precedent for the later Zhū Zàiyù dance-diagram tradition.
Other points of interest
The work pairs píngzhuó / píngqīng with the tones gōng and shāng respectively, with shàng / qù / rù paired to jué / zhǐ / yǔ. This is essentially the standard YuánMíng yīnpíng / yángpíng split applied as a music-theoretic correspondence — a striking move, since elsewhere in the Yuán it is mostly a property of vernacular qū phonology rather than ritual music. Yú is thereby an unusually direct point of contact between the Zhōngyuán yùn dialect-phonology tradition and the ritual-music corpus.