Schedule
9-9:15 Coffee
9:15-9:30 Welcome Remarks
9:30-10:30 Peng XU, Asian Languages & Cultures, Virginia Military Institute
10:40-11:40 XIA Taidi, Chinese, Shanghai University of Electric Power
11:45-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Casey Schoenberger, Asian Studies, Sewanee University
2:10-3:10 Joseph Lam, Ethnomusicology, University of Michigan
3:20-4:20 HUA Wei, Chinese Literature, Chinese University of Hong Kong
4:30-5:30 Discussion
Abstracts (listed in order of presentation)
The Missing Message: Late-Ming Accounts of Literati Singing and Scholarly Vocal Training
文獻何以不足徵：晚明“士夫唱”及其學者型發聲方法之考述
Peng XU, Asian Languages & Cultures, Virginia Military Institute
Singing gained increasing significance in the daily life of scholars in the late Ming. In contemporary characterizations of literati singing, the singer appears to be a classically trained artist, sometimes singing alone in his secluded studio, sometimes singing with like-minded friends in mountain excursions. But what these accounts share in common is a peculiar lack of any mention of specific music genre. Based on the established narrative of Ming music history, it is tempting to assume that what they sang was in the music genre of kunqu, a music genre originated in the Kunshan region (also known properly as kunshanqiang) that literati successfully appropriated and transformed, through supporting a genius professional singer named Wei Liangfu, into a kind of elite music and henceforth the main music form for which they wrote numerous new plays.
This essay challenges the presumption and proposes a more complex vision about what’s really missing. Above all, it sees the lack of information as a literary phenomenon, a collective choice of the literati singers. It then asks why. To answer this question, I read the literary phenomenon against the backdrop of the arrival of Wei Liangfu’s popular singing style in the early to mid sixteenth century and its interactions with a time-honored tradition of scholarly singing. While the lowbrow popular genre and the highbrow scholarly tradition (related to classical philology and Taoist health theories as well as qigong practice) merged into a highly hybrid style, I argue, literati singers felt the urge to reinforce social boundaries in the increasingly mixed singing world. One way to do it was to highlight their classical training and meanwhile to avoid specifying the popular music genres in which they sang. My hypothesis about the dynamic between the two vocal traditions and the hybrid nature of the final product complicates the established interpretation of kunqu’s early history that emphasizes literati’s intellectual and social power alone.
晚明時期，歌唱在士夫的日常生活中愈來愈凸顯其重要性。文人往往將自己描寫成經過經典歌唱訓練的藝術家，有時獨自在書齋中浩歌，有時與三五好友在山林旅途中高唱。但是這些文獻都不提他們用何種聲腔歌唱，因此無從考述。但是基於明代音樂史的敘述，我們又容易武斷地認為他們唱的是崑曲或者崑山腔——這種聲腔經由士夫提倡天才歌唱家魏良輔的改造而升華為一種“精英音樂”，從而成為士夫寫作傳奇劇本的音樂基礎。
本文擬提出一種較之以上論斷稍微複雜的理論。首先，我們將這種“文獻不足徵”的情況視為一種文學現象，也就是說，把沉默看成士夫的集體選擇。然後我們再試問為甚麼有這樣的選擇。為了回答這一問題，我們不妨將這種文學現象放在十六世紀中期魏良輔改革的崑山腔及其與有著悠久歷史的文人唱歌傳統的互動關係中去考量。當“低級”的大眾文藝與“高級”的士夫唱傳統（該傳統與音韻學、道教修身理論以及氣功）相遇並且融為一體的時候，士夫歌唱家們面對這樣一個社會階層混雜的歌壇感到無措，從而感到重申階層差別的必要性。解決的辦法之一就是強調他們的歌唱之道的經典訓練，同時絕口不提屬於大眾音樂範疇的聲腔問題。這是我的關於晚明的陽春白雪和下里巴人兩種歌唱傳統的互動的假設。這個假設如果成立，那麼我們應該對崑曲早期歷史所強調的文人士大夫在社會和知識上的絕對強勢地位產生懷疑。
Kunqu Performance and Folk Practices in Ming Dynasty Nanjing
明代南京城市民俗活動中的昆曲演出
XIA Taidi, Chinese, Shanghai University of Electric Power
Folk practices provided the soil for the development and survival of Chinese opera, and opera performance imbued folk festivities with greater vitality. Nanjing, as the residual capital of the Ming Dynasty, was renowned as the cultural center of southern China; it was a place for the coming together of many different opera genres, with Kun opera most prominent among them. Most of these performances were ancillary New Year’s celebrations, market festivals, wedding banquets, ritual occasions, and other folk customs; and they penetrated every aspect of urban life. The unique political, cultural, and business environment of Nanjing, and especially commoner consumption and entertainment practices, deeply affected the performance of Kun opera.
民俗活動為戲曲的生存、發展提供了土壤，戲曲演出的加盟則使得民俗生活更富生命力。南京作為明代留都，是南中國最富盛名的文化之都，也是各類聲腔較為集中的戲曲都市，尤以昆曲演出為盛。這些演出大多借助于歲時節慶、社集雅會、喜慶宴飲、祈禳賽會等民俗活動而行，滲入了都市民俗生活的各個方面。而南都城市特有的政治、文化和商業環境，特別是民俗生活的消費性、娛樂性等特點，也使得侵淫於其中的昆曲演出活動深受影響主題詞：南京 明代 民俗 昆曲
Kunqu’s Diverse Musical and Poetic Origins: “Plays” within Plays
Casey Schoenberger, Asian Studies, Sewanee University
It is well known that Kunqu combines tunes of Northern and Southern origins, as reflected in the use of both heptatonic and pentatonic scales. Perhaps less well known are the truly diverse origins of Kunqu aria matrices, which draw not only on elite and popular song traditions, but also traditional ci poetry, Tang and Song court music, and even a variety of prosimetric chantefable arts like zhu gongdiao.
I will here focus on a small subset of Kunqu tunes like Shua hai’er (“Playing the Haihai Singer”), Shua xiucai (“Teasing the Graduate/Playing the Graduate”), Tang xiucai (“Reclining Graduate”), and Jiuzhuan huolang’er, also known as Cunli xiucai (“Village Graduate”), the titles, structures, and early usages of which hint at origins in Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolian performance traditions. Though titles like “Teasing the Graduate” may, as Wilt Idema has observed, reflect the social reality of students flocking to urban centers since the Song Dynasty, I will argue that they also connect to other performance traditions popular in the Song, Yuan, and early Ming, some of which survive to this day. By examining the nature of storytelling and foreign musical/prosodic elements in traditional Kunqu suite structure, we may better understand the intended affective quality of playwrights’ choices to include them.
Kunqu as Chinese Music History
编写中国昆曲音乐史
Joseph Lam, Ethnomusicology, University of Michigan
Twenty-first century China promotes kunqu as a 600 years old genre of classical opera, one that revealingly demonstrates Chinese biography, history, culture, and society with multi-media performances. As a result, China tells many stories about kunqu as operatic representation/evidence of Chinese memories, realities, and dreams from the past. These stories, however, reveal little about the ways in which the genre constitutes, and/or represents, Chinese lives with multi-media performances created and structured with sound/music. To remedy this lacuna, this paper calls for the writing of musical and historical narratives that explain kunqu as sound expressions of Chinese lives in past and present contexts. Towards that goal, this paper will begin with a short critique of conventional histories of kunqu, and then illustrate the writing of musical kunqu history with a case study on “Tanci” (“Ballad Singing”) from Hong Sheng’s Changshengdian (Palace of Lasting Life).
21世纪中国表扬昆曲为有600年历史的戏曲，是呈示中国人物传记、历史、文化、社会现象的多媒体演出艺术。因此中国历史著作中有很多昆曲故事，把它的舞台演出解释为国人的历史记忆，时代真相， 甚至是个人梦想的陈述。这些故事内容丰富但不能说明昆曲或昆曲音乐如何通过声音表现中国人的生活经验感受。为了填补这样的不足，本文提出编写音乐分析与历史事实描述并重的昆曲音乐史的建议，希望学者们把昆曲艺术家及曲友的音乐思维和行动清楚纪录下来。本文是这建议的一个草稿，它以批判评现有昆曲史为序，以洪昇《长生殿：弹词》的个案导入讨论编写昆曲音乐史的理论与实践。
The Journeying Emperor Zhengde on the Qing Stage: Meanings and History
清代舞台上的「正德微行」：意義及歷史
HUA Wei, Chinese Literature, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Despite apparent taboo, the emperor figure appeared quite frequently on the Qing stage. Many plays from the popular theater involved journeying emperors who left the palace due to disasters of war, or because of libertine impulses, whereas in the court theater, emperors were shown most of the time as leaving the palace to win wars or to consult with sage ministers. In this paper I will focus on probably the most popular emperor figure on the Qing stage, namely, the Zhengde Emperor of the Ming dynasty, as he is the main character in quite a number of plays throughout the Qing. Li Yu’s Yu Saotou (The jade hairpin) in mid-seventeenth century, for example, deals with his historically famous romance with a courtesan née Liu. About a century later, Tang Ying’s Meilong zhen (The Meilong town) portrays the same emperor’s reputed courtship of an innkeeper’s sister named Phoenix. Then the mid-nineteenth century saw Huang Zhi’s play Yuzan ji (The jade hairpin), which again treats the relationship between the emperor and the courtesan. Aside from above, there is an interesting lantern play featuring the Zhengde Emperor and the courtesan Liu Qianqian by an anonymous author on the occasion of, perhaps, the Qianlong Emperor’s visit to Yangzhou. Under what circumstances did the Zhengde Emperor become such a popular hero in urban imagination? To what extent did his image as an unbridled libertine in official history lend him popularity among commoners? Does his stage image undergo any change in the course of the Qing? This paper will explore the aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of his representations in order to discover the cultural significance of kunqu drama in the Qing dynasty.
雖有禁令，清代舞台上依然常見帝王角色。民間劇場中，不少戲曲演出帝王因逃避戰亂，或追求逸樂而出行。宮廷劇場中，帝王出行則多半是為了親征或者訪賢。在清代舞台上出行帝王中，以明武宗正德皇帝的刻畫最多。從十七世紀中葉李漁的傳奇《玉搔頭》演他微服出行與名妓劉倩倩的愛情，到十八世紀唐英的雜劇《梅龍鎮》演他與當地村店主之妹李鳳姐的邂逅，再到十九世紀黃治的雜劇《玉簪記》重演武宗與劉氏事，正德天子都是主角。此外，另有一部罕見而有趣的《正德觀燈》（又名《遊龍傳燈戲腳本》）同樣演出他去妓院尋找劉倩倩之事。該劇或有可能是揚州鹽商為歡迎乾隆皇帝南巡的承應戲。在城市居民的想像中，正德皇帝作為戲劇主人公為何如此受到歡迎？是否因為正史中他的荒誕不經反而使他在民間獨具魅力？從清初到晚清，他的舞台形象有無變化？本文擬由美學、倫理與政治的視角，析論戲曲舞台上「正德微行」的再現，藉此窺探崑劇在清代的文化意義。