Music performance and rhetoric in Six Dynasties China
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About this event
Speaker: Ms Eleanor LIPSEY李靄寧(SOAS): 604815@soas.ac.uk
Our knowledge of Six Dynasties (220 – 589) music culture is limited by the absence of music scores and any evidence of continuity of musical sound from pre-Tang China into the present. The curious modern researcher can only search for clues in texts and archaeological artifacts to try to assemble a plausible picture of the music culture of the time. Scholars have written in detail about descriptions of musical instruments and music genres provided in the Chinese standard histories, and about essays such as those by Ruan Ji阮籍 (210-263) and Xi Kang 嵇康 (223–262) that were written specifically about music, but there has been less investigation of the clues that other types of literature might yield.
This paper focuses on references to instrumental music performance in one Six Dynasties text, Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world), exploring what the references suggest about beliefs of the text’s compilers and readership about the relationship between music performance and rhetoric. I also consider how observations of modern musicologists and social scientists about intersections between music performance and language might assist us in making sense of ideas about music performance that are implied in the text. Shishuo xinyu contains numerous anecdotes that either describe an instrumental music performance or that include a conversation about a performance. The depiction of these performances in the text implies an assumption of similarity in function between instrumental music proficiency and verbal skills. The boundary between speech and music was perhaps less distinct in the world of Shishuo xinyu than it is to modern, cosmopolitan concert-goers who have been influenced by traditional Western musicology and its emphasis on written scores and aesthetics.