Gǔjīn yuèlù 古今樂錄
Records of Music Ancient and Modern by 釋智匠
About the work
The Gǔjīn yuèlù 古今樂錄 is a treatise on the history, instruments, and repertoire of Chinese music compiled in 568 (光大二年) by the Buddhist monk 釋智匠 Shì Zhìjiàng under the Chén 陳 dynasty. The original was already lost by the Yuán (the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo no longer registers it, although the Sòng catalog Zhōngxīng shūmù 中興書目 still does), and what survives are citations preserved in Yuèfǔ shījí 樂府詩集, Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽, Hòu Hàn shū 後漢書 commentary, Chūxuéjì 初學記, Lùshǐ hòujì 路史後紀 and other later works. The text in the Kanripo edition is one such fragment-collection: a sequence of unnumbered notes covering pitch-pipe tests (hòuqì 候氣), the origins of regional and ritual song (the songs of Yáo and the four directional musics), accounts of personalities such as Xìnduō Fāng 信都芳 and Xǔ Yóu 許由, and short notices on instruments (qín 琴, pípá 琵琶, qìng 磬, táo 鼗, gǔchuī 鼓吹 with its sub-types, héngchuī 橫吹). Each fragment is keyed to its citing source.
The work’s outsized importance in literary history rests on its preservation of early yuèfǔ 樂府 song-lore — most famously its identification of the Mùlán cí 木蘭辭 as belonging to the Liáng gǔjiǎo héngchuī qū 梁鼓角橫吹曲 repertoire, with the laconic note “Mùlán bù zhī míng 木蘭不知名” (“Mulan’s name is unknown”) cited at Yuèfǔ shījí j. 25.
Abstract
The Gǔjīn yuèlù is attributed to a Buddhist monk by the religious title 釋, but no biographical entry for Zhìjiàng survives in either the Confucian standard histories or the Gāosēng zhuàn / Xù gāosēng zhuàn hagiographies. The dating to Guāngdà 2 (568) — the second year of Chén Fèidì 陳廢帝 — derives from the Zhōngxīng shūmù and is repeated in Wáng Yīnglín’s Yùhǎi 玉海; both notBefore and notAfter are set to that year, since the dating is precise.
The name itself was already unstable in medieval transmission: Tàipíng yùlǎn cites the compiler as 智象 (Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 attributed this to shēng jìn ér é 聲近而訛, phonetic corruption); 能改齋漫錄, 演繁露 and 漁隱叢話 give the inverted 匠智. Guō Màoqiàn’s 樂府詩集 preserves the form 釋智匠 used here.
The original was a single juàn. Quān Mò 王謨 (1731–1817) reconstructed it for the Hàn Wèi yíshū chāo 漢魏遺書鈔 (jīngyì erji 經翼二集); Mǎ Guóhàn produced a competing reconstruction in Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書. The CHANT edition followed here (CH2b1656) is a parallel fragment-corpus drawn from Tàipíng yùlǎn (esp. j. 565, 571, 925), Lùshǐ hòujì, Chūxuéjì (j. 16), the Zhānghuái Tàizǐ 章懷太子 commentary to Hòu Hàn shū (Bān Chāo zhuàn), Shìlèi fù (j. 11), and other sources. In its present form it is essentially a documentary anthology rather than a sustained treatise, and its evidential value is greatest for early yuèfǔ repertoires (the 梁鼓角橫吹曲, Mùlán cí, the songs of the four directions) and for sixth-century pitch-pipe and ash-divination practice (the testimony on Xìnduō Fāng 信都芳 of the Northern Qí, and the Suí-era hòuqì experiments of Máo Shuǎng 毛爽, Cài Zǐyuán 蔡子元 and Yú Jìnmíng 于晉明).
Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual registers the Yuèfǔ shījí 樂府詩集 of Guō Màoqiàn 郭茂倩 as the principal medieval anthology for Han–Six Dynasties song; the Gǔjīn yuèlù sits one step upstream in that transmission, as Guō’s primary source for the Liáng héngchuī repertoire.
Translations and research
- Wáng Mó 王謨 (comp.), Gǔjīn yuèlù 古今樂錄, in Hàn Wèi yíshū chāo 漢魏遺書鈔 (Qing dynasty). The standard reconstruction.
- Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 (comp.), Gǔjīn yuèlù in Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書 (Qing dynasty). Parallel reconstruction with editorial notes on textual variants of the compiler’s name.
- Birrell, Anne. Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993. Discusses the Yuèfǔ shījí tradition through which most Gǔjīn yuèlù fragments are now read.
- Chou, Ying-hsiung. “The Yüeh-fu of Han, Wei and Six Dynasties.” Discusses the transmission of yuèfǔ poetry through medieval anthologies including the Gǔjīn yuèlù.
Other points of interest
The Gǔjīn yuèlù is the locus classicus for the medieval acknowledgment that Mùlán cí 木蘭辭 was an anonymous Northern song of unknown date: the line “Mùlán bù zhī míng” 木蘭不知名 is the earliest known attestation of the ballad’s existence, predating the Wényuàn yīnghuá attribution to the Táng poet Wéi Yuánfǔ 韋元甫 by several centuries. The fragment also identifies the ballad’s repertoire affiliation as Liáng gǔjiǎo héngchuī qū 梁鼓角橫吹曲, anchoring its earliest sixth-century reception in southern court music.