Qin notation
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The notation of the guqin is a unique form of tablature for the Chinese
musical instrument A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...
, with a history of over 1,500 years, still in use today.


History

Written qin music did not directly tell what notes were played; instead, it was written in a tablature detailing tuning, finger positions, and stroke technique, thus comprising a step by step method and description of how to play a piece. Some tablatures do indicate notes using the
gongche ''Gongche'' notation or ''gongchepu'' is a traditional musical notation method, once popular in ancient China. It uses Chinese characters to represent musical notes. It was named after two of the Chinese characters that were used to represent ...
system, or indicate rhythm using
dots Directly observed treatment, short-course (DOTS, also known as TB-DOTS) is the name given to the tuberculosis (TB) control strategy recommended by the World Health Organization. According to WHO, "The most cost-effective way to stop the spread of T ...
. The earliest example of the modern shorthand tablature survives from around the twelfth century CE. An earlier form of music notation from the Tang era survives in just one manuscript, dated to the seventh century CE, called Jieshi Diao Youlan 《碣石調幽蘭》 (Solitary Orchid in Stone Tablet Mode). It is written in a longhand form called ''wenzi pu'' 〔 譜〕 (literally "written notation"), said to have been created by Yongmen Zhou (雍門周) during the Warring States period, which gives all the details using ordinary written Chinese characters. Later in the Tang dynasty Cao Rou (曹柔) and others simplified the notation, using only the important elements of the characters (like string number, plucking technique, ''hui'' number and which finger to stop the string) and combined them into one character notation. This meant that instead of having two lines of written text to describe a few notes, a single character could represent one note, or sometimes as many as nine. This notation form was called ''jianzi pu'' 〔 字譜〕 (literally "reduced notation") and it was a great advancement for recording qin pieces. It was so successful that from the Ming dynasty onwards, a great many qinpu 〔琴 〕 (qin tablature collections) appeared, the most famous and useful being "Shenqi Mipu" (神奇秘譜, ''lit.'' The Mysterious and Marvellous Tablature) compiled by Zhu Quan, the 17th son of the founder of the Ming dynasty . In the 1960s, Zha Fuxi discovered more than 130 qinpu that contain well over 3360 pieces of written music. Sadly, many qinpu compiled before the Ming dynasty are now lost, and many pieces have remained unplayed for hundreds of years.


Development

Major changes in the tablature happened during the
Qing period The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...
. Before, the recording of the note positions between ''hui'' were only approximations. For example, to play
sol Sol or SOL may refer to: Astronomy * The Sun Currency * SOL Project, a currency project in France * French sol, or sou * Argentine sol * Bolivian sol, the currency of Bolivia from 1827 to 1864 * Peruvian sol, introduced in 1991 * Peruvian sol ( ...
on the seventh string, the position the player must stop is between the 7th and 8th hui. The tablature of Ming times would only say "between 7 and 8" 「七八日(
The is a traditional Japanese unit of length, equal to six Japanese feet (''shaku''). The exact value has varied over time and location but has generally been a little shorter than .JAANUS It is now standardized as 1.82 m. Although mostly su ...
)」 or for other positions "below 6" 「六下」 or even say "11" 「十一」 (when the correct position is slightly higher). During the
Qing The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...
, this was replaced by the decimal system. The space between two hui were split into 10 'fen' 〔
A fen () (Cantonese: sin []), is a unit of currency used in Greater China, including the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Island of Taiwan, Taiwan), Hong Kong (called a Cent (currency), cent in English) and Macao (called an ''av ...
〕, so the tablature can indicate the correct position of notes more accurately, so for the examples above, the correct positions are 7.6, 6.2 and 10.8 respectively. Some even went further to split one fen into a further 10 'li' 〔 / 〕, but since the distance is too minute to affect the pitch to a large degree, it was considered impractical to use. Some people argue that the old system is just as accurate as the new system when qin tuning theory is observed. Also, these old positions may actually conform to the rules of
equally tempered An equal temperament is a musical temperament or tuning system, which approximates just intervals by dividing an octave (or other interval) into equal steps. This means the ratio of the frequencies of any adjacent pair of notes is the same, w ...
music, with its pitches slightly flatter, such as in the case of 8 for 7.9 and 11 for 10.8. Another main property for this old system is that it requires the player to "feel for the note", just as one would do for any other fretless stringed instrument, be it erhu or violin, instead of relying solely on fixed positions (which pitches can change slightly depending on how the player tunes their qin). Existing qinpu generally come from private collections or in
public libraries A public library is a library that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also civil servants. There are five fundamenta ...
throughout China, etc. Those that are available for public purchase are
facsimile A facsimile (from Latin ''fac simile'', "to make alike") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, Old master print, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from ...
qinpu printed and bound in the
traditional Chinese bookbinding Traditional Chinese bookbinding, also called stitched binding (Chinese: ''xian zhuang''), is the method of bookbinding that the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese used before adopting the modern codex form. History Scroll Up until the ...
process. More modern qinpu tend to be bound in the normal Western way on modern paper. The format uses qin notation with staff notation and/or jianpu notation.


Modern developments

A number of efforts have been made to further develop qin tablature. A book by Wang Guangqi (王光祈) uses Roman and
Arabic numerals Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...
to express the information provided by qin tablature. The qin player,
Gong Yi Gong Yi ( 龔 一, b. 1941) is a guqin master from Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the south ...
, developed a format using staff notation combined with some tablature marks . Others have tried to write a computer program that will do this. Chen Changlin, a Beijing-based
computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
and qin player of the Min (Fujian) School, developed the first computer program to encode qin notation from ancient tablature sources. The current practice for recording qin scores is to use jianzipu notation together with staff and/or cipher notation so the playing method is preserved and the rhythm, note value, etc. is also shown.


See also

*
Qinpu Qinpu () are tablature Sheet music, score collections for the guqin, a Chinese musical instrument. Description Qinpu are collections of tablatures of music for the guqin. In the past, music was passed on from teacher to student. Only recently ...


References

:''Please see:'' References section in the guqin article for a full list of references used in all qin related articles.


Footnotes

# Zhu, Quan. ''Shenqi Mipu'' 【神竒秘譜】. # Zha, Fuxi. ''Cunjian Guqin Qupu Jilan'' 【存見古琴曲譜輯覽】. Pages 3–44. # Beijing Guqin Research Association. ''Beijing Qin-xun'' 【北京琴讯】. March 2001 (volume 71). Pages 1, 2 and 4. # Gong, Yi. Guqin Yanzhoufa 【古琴演奏法】. Pages 38–42. # Qin music notation web generator (2005) Project Title: Chinese music instrument: 'Qin' notation web generator (http://web.pdx.edu/~candy/qin/index.html, 29 July 2006) {{Qin list N Musical notation zh:古琴谱