Jìngshān yuèlù 竟山樂錄
Jìng-shān’s Music Record by 毛奇齡 (Máo Qílíng)
About the work
A four-juan music treatise by Máo Qílíng, ostensibly transmitting the doctrines of his father Máo Jìng 毛鏡 (zì Jìngshān 竟山, hence the title). Máo’s central documentary source is the Míng prince Zhū Quán’s 朱權 Lǐngwáng dísè pǔ 寧王笛色譜, a (now-lost) Tang music flute-fingering chart that uses the seven scale-color characters 四乙上尺工凡六 to encode the seven tones (sì = principal gōng, yǐ = biàngōng, shàng = shāng, chě = jué, gōng = zhǐ, fán = biànzhǐ, liù = yǔ) — and then by elimination of yǐ and fán (the two biàn) and substitution of higher-octave principal tones generates a 9-tone cycle. Máo argues that this practice is the surviving remnant of Táng court music, that the orthodox HànSòng sānfēn sǔnyì gébā tradition is therefore a fiction (he goes so far as to dismiss the Guóyǔ discourse of Líng Zhōujiū as a fabrication), and that the entire pre-Sòng tradition of lǜlǚ should be discarded. The final juan is the Cǎiyī táng lùn yuè qiǎnshuō 采衣堂論樂淺說 in 14 essays, attributed to Máo’s elder brother Máo Wànlíng 毛萬齡 but written in Máo Qílíng’s own polemical style.
Tiyao
[Your servants] respectfully report: Jìngshān yuèlù in 4 juàn, by Máo Qílíng of our dynasty. The book takes as its standard the Táng yuè dísè pǔ of Prince Níng (Zhū Quán) of the Míng. With the seven characters 四乙上尺工凡六 cycling, one obtains the seven modes: 四 as the leading mode, 乙 as biàngōng, 上 as shāng, 尺 as jué, 工 as zhǐ, 凡 as biànzhǐ, 六 as yǔ; further, since yǔ has no clear-tone, the two characters 乙 and 凡 are not used; from 六 one derives upward, 高四 = clear gōng, 高上 = clear shāng, 高尺 = clear jué, 高工 = clear zhǐ — and combining these makes nine tones. The fingering-chart of xiāo and dí and the modal modes of Jīn and Yuán qū movements all turn within these nine tones; the court musicians transmitted them in succession, calling them the yífǎ (residue) of Táng music. — Máo accordingly takes this to expound “the five tones and twelve pitches mutually rotating as gōng,” and to examine Sīmǎ Qiān’s Lǜshū and Cài Yuándìng’s Lǜlǚ xīnshū, intending to discard wholesale the doctrine of sānfēn sǔnyì and gébā xiāngshēng that has come down from antiquity, even rejecting Líng Zhōujiū’s reply as fabrication. — Now whether Prince Níng’s flute-color chart is truly an old Táng work cannot be ascertained. Even granting that it really is from the Táng, the elegant music of the Táng has never been claimed to rank with the Three Dynasties, and to use the leftover charts of court musicians to fix the original tones of heaven and earth, and to brand all the post-Hàn Confucian transmissions as mistaken — judged by reasonableness, this is implausible. But Prince Níng’s chart no longer survives, and preserving the present work allows one to investigate the ancient repertoire of the jiàofāng from the Táng onwards and the residual sound of yuànběn from the Jīn dynasty onward. It is one variety of artistic skill. The book was originally Máo Qílíng’s own work, attributed to his father (Máo Jìng) for transmission’s sake, hence the title Jìngshān yuèlù; Jìngshān is his father’s zì. The final juàn is the Cǎiyī táng lùn yuè qiǎnshuō in 14 short essays, said to come from his elder brother Máo Wànlíng (the jiàoyù of Rénhé County); but the diction and tone strongly resemble Máo Qílíng’s own, with no corroborating evidence — and we listen to it with the appropriate scepticism. Respectfully edited and presented in the ninth month of Qiánlóng 42 (1777). Editor-Generals: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Editor-in-chief: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
The Jìngshān yuèlù is the historical-philological extension of Máo Qílíng’s musical xuéshuō. Its claim to attention rests almost entirely on the now-lost Lǐngwáng dísè pǔ of the Míng prince Zhū Quán 朱權 (1378–1448) — Máo preserves the only known transmission of this Tang-music flute-fingering chart, and the Jìngshān yuèlù has thereby become an indispensable source for any historical reconstruction of Tang court flute repertoire. The Sìkù compilers’ verdict is sceptical: they doubt that the chart is genuinely Tang, and they reject Máo’s polemical use of it to discard the entire orthodox tradition. But they explicitly preserve the work for the historical value of the chart itself. The book’s attribution to Máo’s father Máo Jìng is a literary device — like the Zhòngshì Yì’s attribution to his elder brother Máo Xīlíng, this is a way to authorize Máo’s own arguments by ascribing them to a senior. The final juan, attributed to Máo Wànlíng, is also pseudepigraphic. Composition: contemporary with the rest of the trilogy (KR1i0015 and KR1i0016), Kāngxī 31–38 (1692–1699). The catalog meta gives no precise date.
Translations and research
- 楊蔭瀏. 1981. 中國古代音樂史稿. — Treats the Jìng-shān yuè-lù as the principal source for the Lǐng-wáng dí-sè pǔ.
- 任半塘. 1962. 唐戲弄. 上海: 作家出版社. — Uses the Jìng-shān yuè-lù as a primary source for Tang court music repertoire.
- 沈知白. 1982. 中國音樂史綱要. — Brief notice.
- No further substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The seven 工尺-color characters 四乙上尺工凡六 are the foundation of the modern Chinese music gōngchě notation that survives to the present day, and Máo’s careful exposition of how they relate to the seven modes is the principal early-modern philological treatment of this notation system. The work is therefore a critical link in the genealogy of Chinese music notation that connects Tang court flute to the modern practice.