Chinese and Japanese Music-Dramas

Front matter

KENNETH G. LIEBERTHAL AND RICHARD H.

ROGEL CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS IN CHINESE STUDIES NO. 19

Preface

This book is the result of a conference on the relations between Chinese and Japanese music-drama held at The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), October 1-4, 1971, under the auspices of the Association for Asian Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the School of Music, and the Speech Department of The University of Michigan. One important inspiration for the creation of such an interdisciplinary conference was the fact that each participant had found, after years of individual research on music-drama in East Asia, consistent frustration caused by attempts to deal by himself with multiple cultural and technical problems. Another motivating force was an awareness among many members of the four disciplines involved (Chinese, Japanese, music, and drama) that the topic is in fact one of the largest untouched fields of scholarly endeavor in both Asian and theatrical studies.

The conference was founded on the assumption that no one scholar could be an expert in all the topics. Thus, each member delivered to the others copies of a draft chapter on one aspect of one area of the subject in advance of the meeting. The four days were then spent helping each other with comments and added information from each individual's area of expertise, which took on new significance in the context of the studies of others. With the aid of a rapporteur (Dale R. Johnson of Oberlin) all this was put together into the collection which forms this book. The subject is by no means closed; on the contrary, it is now opened in a scholarly "multimedia" direction that we hope will stimulate further efforts in this exciting field.

William P. Malm J. I. Crump Ann Arbor 1975 vii viji

Abbreviations Used

HK Hsi-hsüeh Hui-k'ao

Huo-yeh Chung-hua Huo-yeh Wen-hstian Sixty Liu-shih~chung Ch'ti

YCH Ytian-ch'ti_Hstian

ZIBS Zeami juroku-bu shu hyoshaku

Giants in the Earth: Yüan Drama as Seen by Ming Critics J. I, Crump

"There were giants in the earth in those days and . . . mighty men which were of old, men of renown,"

Genesis 6:4

I Introduction: The Formularies

Early Ming dynasty literature was devoted to forms and criteria belonging to the T'ang and Sung dynasties (probably as a reaction to the "foreign" Ytlan), but as the dynasty matured and drama became more and more a proper medium for serious writers, men began to comment on and appreciate the older Yiian drama and to evaluate, criticize, and admire those mighty men which were of old, and who lived in Yüan times. Possibly because the lingering orthodox view was that all good things had to have come from the great Chinese dynasties of the past, Ming critics of the Yiian giants often comment that "of course, these ch'ü were heavily influenced by northern border music" and so were not to be considered in the same universe, for example, as the Sung tz'u (lyrics). But having got past this pro forma preamble, they then subject classical Yiian musical drama to what is often searching and honest criticism.

There is a saying which reveals a part of the healthy irreverence the Chinese have toward literary criticism: Hsien yu wen; hou yu tsé, "First someone must write literature; others will find rules for it later." It is more than a truism, it is an injunction: the author should be so busied with his creation that he has little time or taste for criticizing the product. If our only alternatives were the literature or the criticism there would be no contest, but happily we have, in the case of Ytian musical drama, both the wen created during the Mongol era and the tse applied to it during the Ming dynasty.

We often find it useful to make some of the same observations about historical periods that we do about humans, and certainly the 1 last part of the Yiian dynasty (ca. 1264-1370) was an age characterized by immense dramatic creativity--an age seemingly absorbed in creating, the way an author should be--and one which left us almost no criticism of the musical drama called tsa-chti or pei-ch'ti which was its chief legacy. There exists, to be sure, a brief set of do's-and-don't's (called Tso-tz'u_ Shih-fa) which Chou Te-ch'ing appended to his Chungylian Yin-yün (Rhymes of the Central Provinces) published in 1323, but even these strictures were addressed to the lyric poet rather than to the poet-dramatist--to the writers of san-ch'ü rather than hsi-ch'iti. There is also the Cho-keng Lu of T'ao Tsung-yi (fl. 1360), which contains anecdotes about dramas and dramatists and is informed more by relish for a good story than a desire to evaluate artistic creations and creators. 2 Other than these, however, there is nothing which seriously concerns itself with passing artistic judgment on the tsa-chti musical drama during its most flourishing age.

But almost as soon as the Ming government was well established (let us say by 1390), we begin to get publication of the so-called "ch'ü formularies" (ch'ti-p'u) which not only gave examples of great lyrics from dramatic ch'ti (arias) on which to pattern one's own efforts, but also included much evaluative, critical and appreciative comment on Yüan drama, dramatic theory, and the requirements of composing to music and for performance--all done in an age when the Yiian dramatic form was almost extinct. Almost without exception these critics show admiration (often amounting to reverence) for Ytian tsa-chii and the men who wrote them even though it was, by the time all but the earliest formularies were written, an art form which could no longer be staged, for the simple but crucial reason that no one living knew the music.

This considerable body of critical literature? is valuable for insights it provides both on the tsa-chü and on Ming tastes. The ch'ü formularies are without doubt our best sources of information, but they must be used with the following considerations in mind:

(1) Many of the best known among the Ming treatises deal indiscriminately with both the longer Ming ch'uan ch'i drama form and the Yüan tsa-chti in such a fashion that one is not always sure which genre is being evaluated. This shortcoming is often informative, however, since the critics (who are frequently composers as well) are trying to synthesize their requirements for Chinese drama in general, rather than for either of the two forms in particular.

(2) Blind chance seems to dictate the contents of many of the formularies and the order in which topics are treated. For example, Chu Ch'tian (+ 1448) in his T'ai-ho Cheng-yin P'u, the earliest and in some ways the most important of the formularies, begins the book with his own classification of musical verse (according to both topic and style), continues with a list of nine types of parallelism, a list of 187 Ytian poets (whose verse he tries to characterize in a sentence or two), 150 others of second rank, sixteen gifted playwrights of the Ming era, general comment, the traditional twelve divisions of Ytian dramatic subject matter, and concludes the whole first section with these interesting but non~sequitur observations:

, + Chao Tzu-ang [a Ytian dramatist] said: "When a youth from a good family plays in a tsa-chti it is called ‘living a life of the troupe,' (hang-chia_ sheng-huo) but when entertainers (ch'ang-yu) act in it it is called a ‘slave play! (li-chia pa-hsi). Men of good family always felt that the shame of acting cost them so dear that there never were very many; and there are fewer today than ever. Therefore, to call acting by entertainers ‘life of the troupe' is to be very wide of the mark."

Someone asked him why [these terms were used] and he replied, 'Tsa-chii come from the pens of scholarofficials and poets or writers who are all freemen. If our class did not write them, how could actors act in them? If one pursues the root of the matter, it becomes clear that actors are truly our 'slaves'."

Much of the rest of this work and several others resembles a literary magpie nest.

(3) As one reads T'ai-ho Cheng-yin P'u, for example, he discovers that even it (near as it was in time to the Ytian) draws heavily upon the Yiian dynasty Chung-ytian Yin-yiin. This points up another weakness of the formularies: they are derivative of each other (see note 3 above) so that despite their number the total information they contain is less than one would expect because they are so often repetitious.

(4) Lastly, some of the statements found in the formularies are simply wrong. It is possible, however, to isolate certain clusters of misinformation (for example, the use of the ch'ti in the Yüan examination system, which will be treated at length in Section IV) and by discounting them make the bulk of the remaining commentary usable.

1. See Yoshikawa Kojiro, Gen Zatsugeki Kenkyu. Tr. Cheng Ch'ing-mao. (Taipei: 1960), p. 252.

Kë It does contain, however, the raw materials for criticism; for example, the valuable complete list of ch'ti-p'ai by modes which is still appended to several modern editions of Ytian-ch'ti Hsüan (hereafter, YCH).

3. It will serve the purpose of those who want to go further into the subject of Ming criticism to append an abbreviated list of the important formularies:

1. Chu Chan, T'ai-ho Cheng-yin P'u (pub. 1398) (written under the pseudonym Tan-ch'iu Hsien-sheng, Han-hsü-tzu).

2. Hsü Wei (1521-1593), Nan-tz'u Hsü-lu (although it concentrates on Southern drama it contains much general information on earlier ch'ti).

3. Ho Liang-chiin (fl. 1566), Ch'ii-lun (very short but very influential).

4. Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590), Ch'ü-tsao (short, derivative from the above).

5. Wang Chi-te (Po-liang), Ch'ti-lii (pub. 1624) (longest and most informative.)

6. Shen Te-fu, Ku-ch'ü Tsa-yen (pub. 1618) (very short but influential).

7. Hsti Fu-tso (1560-1630), Ch'ti-lun (mostly derivative). All of these may be found in the ten-volume set published 1959-

60 known as Chung-kuo Ku-tien Hsi-ch'ii Lun-chu Chi-ch'eng (Peking, 1960), (Vols. I-X), which is incomparably the best edition for all of them, All page citations of these works given below refer to this set.

Compiled by the sixteenth son of the founder of the Ming, a man of quite remarkable talents who wrote on subjects as diverse as Taoist alchemy and the art of ch'in playing and composed some twenty tsa-chii of which two are extant. His knowledge of Ytian music, drama, and verse would have been impressive in a professional and is amazing in a prince of the royal house (he is generally known as Ning-hsien Wang) who was enfeoffed in T'aining in 1403.

The first section of his Cheng-yin P'u is usually included as prefatory matter in editions of YCH where it is attributed to one Han-hsti Tzu (Master of Emptiness), a soubriquet of Chu Ch'iian's.

Il Tsang Mou-hstin and his Anthology

There is another Ming dynasty compilation quite distinct from the formularies which in its way is vastly more important for evaluation and criticism of Yüan drama than all of the formularies taken togeth~ er. I refer, of course, to the Yiian-ch'ti Hstian (Anthology of Yüan Drama) (YCH) which has been more widely read and reprinted than any other similar collection, and through which successive generations of students and scholars gained an appreciation of the genre. The prefaces to the YCH constitute an epitome-~albeit a biased one--of Ming knowledge of and attitudes toward Yiian music and drama which will repay careful reading. The remainder of this paper will consist of a brief introduction to Tsang Mou-hstin, the editor of YCH (Section II), a translation of his prefaces (Section NI), and finally, an analysis of some of the questions the prefaces pose and some of the information to be had from them. In the process of discussing what Tsang's prefaces tell us about Yüan drama and Ming criticism of it, I will draw upon information from most of the important formularies in order to point up or make contrasts with Tsang's statements (Section IV).

Tsang Mou-hsiin (T. Chin-shu, known also as Tsang of Wu-hsing) got his chin-shih degree in 1580 and died in 1621. He was an iconoclast with antiquarian literary tastes, unorthodox interests, and was accused of impropriety by his stuffier contemporaries. He began to publish his collection of 100 Yüan and early Ming tsa-chti in 1615. "The First Collection" (Ch'ien-chi) of fifty appeared that year with its own preface. He did only the first half because he "found it more difficult to collect them" than he had at first thought, and he had run out of money. In his case, the latter reason was important for he had already quit his office and had no means of support-~visible from this distance, at any rate. However, the very next year he published the remaining fifty together with a second preface. The two parts and two prefaces are now generally published together. There is no doubt that Tsang was one of the most informed men of his time on matters of earlier drama, and his selection includes the very best of Yüan tsa-chi. This was recognized by Wang Chi-te (Po-liang) in his Ch'ti-lti (p. 170) at a time when Tsang's anthology could not yet have been a decade old. Wang says:

The literatus of Wu-hsing, Tsang Chin-shu, has recently

edited and published 100 Yiian dramas in two sets. There has never been a richer collection than this since the form originated. . . , Among the hundred, he has included eight out of ten of those excellent dramas which have always satisfied the tastes of men. On the whole, his selection of a hundred has included three of every four worthwhile examples. Of course, some "confusion of fish-eyes with pearls" is inevitable.

In other words, not all of us would have selected all! the things Tsang chose, but every student of drama must be grateful for his taste, skill and passionate love for Yiian theater.

This great affection for the tsa-chti form and the products of its golden age two centuries before Tsang's time led him into somewhat intemperate criticism of the then contemporary ch'tian-ch'i drama which was written to southern music and the otiose nature of which suffers badly in comparison with the tight, orderly musical suites and unitary plots of tsa-chti. Tsang looks upon the Ming ch'uan-ch!'i with their innumerable acts and patrician appeals as little more than decadent tsa-chii. In fact, in his prefaces Tsang, who is very astute about other literary matters, comes perilously close to flaying one genre because it does not have the characteristics of another. He has been taken to task for this love-blindness by many men, the earliest being Meng Ch'eng-shun, editor of the Ku-chin Ming-chti_Ho-hstian (1633), 2 who quite properly notes that not all ages nor places must be expected to sing the same air. Tsang'’s strong preference for tsa-chti over the southern ch'tian-chi works to the advantage of the modern student of drama, for in the process of berating the faults of Ming drama he makes quite clear his critical judgments on what constitutes a good Ytian play. His use of the word ch'ti (arias) to mean Yüan drama (tsa-chti) makes his prefaces at first glance appear to deal mostly with the musical requirements of the genre, but, as you will see, he also pays critical attention to spoken passages, plot, characterization, and even to the use of dialects. It is my opinion that this fondness of his for Ytian drama impelled him to believe (though he claims in the first of the prefaces that "others" say this while he reserves judgment) that the Yüan dynasty government used the composition of Ytian dramas as a means of examining and selecting some of its civil servants. He should have known better, and perhaps he did, but could not resist discovering for the general public yet one more remarkable fact about his beloved Ytian ch'ti. However, more of that later.

Tsang's anthology was originally called "One Hundred Ch'ti by Ytian Authors" (Ytian-jen Pai-chung Ch'ti) and because Tsang's studio was called the Tiao-ch'ung Kuan, the book was also known as "One Hundred Examples from the Tiao-ch'ung Hall". Cheng Ch'ien points out? that it was not until the Commercial Press printed its 1918 edition under the title of Ytian-ch'ti Hstian that the book came to be known by that name. It was the largest of the Ming collections, well edited and printed; it represented the most authors and has been the most popular anthology of Yüan drama for several centuries. Praise for Tsang's work must be somewhat qualified: "There is no question," says Cheng Ch'ien, "that Tsang was a very diligent editor. However, he altered the text of both the spoken and sung sections too often and was too quick to add to or subtract from the number of songs in a t'ao-shu

or the mechanisms of the plot; every time he changed the original he ran great risk of converting gold into iron."

Cheng continues:

There are those who criticize his alterations and claim they "concealed the true nature of things and hid important evidence." I have been thinking carefully about this for several years and have concluded that it is an overly harsh accusation. In the first place...there are so many variorums that it makes one's head swim to read them [by this Cheng means Tsang himself used texts which had already been altered in many little ways for which he was not responsible], so criticism of Tsang on this score is somewhat unrealistic. Secondly, adding beautifying phrases is something like a face lifting. (Whether the face was ugly and coarse to begin with and whether face lifting improved it or made it still more ugly is another matter entirely.) But there certainly is no sense giving a face a handsome nose and luxuriant hair and then hanging signs upon it saying "this nose used to be smashed," or "this part used to be bald.'' No, what I criticize Tsang for has nothing to do with this kind of thing. His alteration of Yüan texts showed a certain arrogance toward what was simple and unadorned and at times did lead him to transmute gold into iron by mistake, but . . . accusing him of "hiding the true nature" and "concealing important evidence" is in no way just, In his age other editions were still in circulation and persons wanting to see earlier texts were free to do so. Tsang could never have guessed that two hundred years later his publication would be everywhere and would have displaced all other versions.

In addition to this temperate and intelligent judgment on Tsang's motives and editorial activities, Cheng Ch'ien (and others) has always cautioned the student of drama to keep uppermost in his mind when criticizing texts and editions that there never were authorized editions of anything in the drama field. Unlike the situation pertaining with classical and canonical texts, piety for received editions and scholarly collections of variants was to the Chinese literatus simply inconceivable in something so frivolous as entertainment.

Tsang's altering of the texts, which we find utterly unconscionable today, was actually quite common among connoisseurs of his day and often was an expression of deep love for the objects of this kind of editorial interference. Chin Wei (+1661), better known as Chin Shengt'an, meddled with the text of Shui-hu Chuan in a manner and to a degree undreamed of by Tsang, yet only the most simplistic view would miss the fact that Chin not only admired Shui-hu greatly but gave it the most serious consideration any piece of fiction had ever had. Tsang's text emendations (and, to be perfectly fair one must add, improvements) were undertaken in a similar spirit of admiration and desire to have others share his enthusiasm for the "One Hundred Ch'ti by Ytian Authors"; his efforts succeeded beyond his fondest hopes.

With this brief preamble concerning Tsang's unique qualifications and crotchets, let me turn to the two prefaces he wrote for YCH. Though they are obscure in some places (and downright wrong in others), they contain some of the most explicit critical judgment ever brought to bear on Ytian drama and by implication they raise many of the questions about artisite and technical values with which the Ming critics were concerned. Even though Tsang was collecting and writing during the earliest years of the seventeenth century, and tsa-chii had not been a part of living theater for well over a hundred years, he could view the earlier form in the light (the strong and revealing light) of Ming ch'uanch'i practices and tastes. This comparison leads Tsang to underrate the theatrical potentials of ch'uan-ch'i, but the compactness and dramatic power of the earlier tsa-chti form stand forth vividly by contrast.

Because Tsang was writing for a contemporary audience of connoissuers and alludes tersely to things well understood by that fashionable

"we group," many more explanatory notes than suit my usual taste have been appended to the translation in Section It this is not as great a loss as it might be, however, for though his periods are balanced and his rhythm is acceptable, the prefaces are important more for their critical content than for their literary appeal. Since Tsang uses the term ch'ti to mean either "aria," "drama," or "song" and since his ch'ti often means tsa-chti or ch'uan-ch'i (Ming drama), I have added in brackets the particular meaning I feel Tsang had in mind when he used the term. The most helpful edition for the translator (although not without its faults) is that found in the so-called

"Chung-hua Looseleaf Anthology" (Chung-hua Huo-yeh Wen-hstian, hereafter, Huo-yeh). °

1. For example, Hsiao Shu-lan (YCH 88) was undoubtedly chosen for its virtuoso use of the four "difficult rhymes" (hsien-ytin) in each of its acts. It is certainly a "fish-eye"; a wearisome thing at best.

2. Usually referred to as the Liu~chih and Lei-chiang Chi.

3. "Tsang Mou-hsün K'ao-ting Yüan Tsa-chü P'ing-yi," Bulletin of the College of Arts, National Taiwan University, #3, 1961, pp. 3-14. See also Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, New Series #7, 2 (1969), pp. 145-55.

4, Tsing Hua Journal, New Series #7, 2 (1969), p. 150.

II Translation of the Prefaces

Preface to the First Collection

The world speaks of the "lyrics" (tz'u) of the Sung dynasty and the "songs" (ch'ti) of the Ytian, but the fact is that "lyrics" were already superbly written in T'ang times by such men as Li Po and Chien [Li] Hou-chu, t so why should the Sung dynasty be given credit for their genesis? Ch'ti [dramas] however, were entirely the creation of the Ytian dynasty. Both the northern and the southern dramas of the Yüan times had music in seventeen modes, 2 but there are, in addition to Hsi-hsiang Chi, several hundred and more northern ch'ü [tsa-chti] while southern ch'ü [dramas] are represented by only two examples--the Yu-kuei Chi and the Pti-pa Chi,” It is said that Yüan civil service examinations required the composition of dramatic verse (t'ien-tz'u) the way we require the writing of essays, and since men were chosen for what they could accomplish "under the windy eaves" of the examination hall and within the "inch of time" afforded them by the tests, even the most renowned scholars of the age, such as Ma Chih-yin and Ch'iao Meng-fu, when they reach the fourth act of their dramatic verse, have lost their impetus. They also say that only the topic, the song titles, and the rhyme were selected by the examiner. The dialogue of these plays, they say, wasn't written until actors supplied it for the stage-~which accounts for its crudity and dependence upon cliche. Still others say that everything in all five books of Hsi-hsiang Chi was written by a single hand and not a word can be removed or added to Jeither dialogue or verse], for which reason it is the crown of Ytian drama--I don't pretend to be able to choose among these statements. But I do take exception to those who write ch'ti [dramas] today, for the music of the south and the north may differ, but the requirements of modes and rhymes remain the same. Ever since Kao Ming's (fl. 1354) line in P'i-pa Chi, "search not for modes here nor number the tunes'4--which he actually wrote to cover up his own weakness--modern writers have cited the statement as evidence that rules for ch'ti composition in the northern style are rigorous but for the southern style they are loose: this is absurd!

In general terms, the marvel of Yüan dynasty ch [tsa-chii] is their seeming efforitlessness. The more elegant draw [ easily] upon all yiieh-fu? for their diction and the cruder could include colloquialisms [with grace]. But after Cheng Jo-yung's Yti-chiieh Chi with its encyclopedic style6 came Chang Po-ch'i with Hung-fu Chi and his disciples with still other thesaurus endeavors beyond counting.

Dialogue should never be excessive. However, a tsa-chü has to tell its whole story in four acts--if you look at the twenty-one acts’ of Hsi-hsiang Chi, you will see that the dialogue [in one act] searely amounts to a thousand words and it will become evident that dialogue here is somewhat too scanty. A thing desired even less in dialogue is using too many parallel phrases: the "huang-men'8 section and other parts of P'i-pa Chi were early offenders in this respect.

At the other extreme, in T'u Lung's T'an-hua Chi there are acts which contain not a single aria [but are all in dialogue] while the dialogue in Liang Ch'en-yti's Huan-sha Chi and Mei Ting-tso's Yti-ho Chi does not contain a single unadorned expression!0--these are much more serious transgressions!

T'ang Hsien-tsu's four works, including the Tzu-ch'ai Chi, 11 contain a number of northern songs; in fact, he all but gallops across the border. But the tenor of the lyrics does not fit the tunes. [By using northern songs] he has fallen into the error of sweetly singing "East flows the Long River" to the sound of the clanging iron. 1 But why are his southern ch'if so lacking in talent that they seem to come from another hand completely ?13 Ho Liang-chtin praised Shih Hui's (fl. 1295) Yu-kuei Chi as far better than the P'i-pa Chi. 14 Wang Shih-chen (T. Ytian-mei) dismisses this are merely a "statement for sensational effect." However, Yu-kuei Chi now contains much which is forgery and I wonder if Ho Liang-chtin is aware of this ?

Wang Shih-chen is a very superior scholar but once when I was taking wine with him I remarked that the aria-sets 'Liang-chou Dat and "Nien Nu-chiao Hsü' in P'i-pa Chi were so totally unlike [the rest of] Kao Ming's work in tonel® that they were likely the insertions of a later writer. He agreed and praised [my observations]. [Since this is so with P'i-pa Chi] I wonder what one can say about Yu-kuei Chi?

I have a great many rare editions of tsa-chti in my library. ‘Recently, passing through Huang-chou Fu, I borrowed some two hundred scripts from Liu Yen-po which he said he had copied from the files of the Imperial Academy: they differ from the texts on the open market, I collated and edited them, therefore, and selected the best from among them; these I carefully edited into two parts both divided into ten sections, one for each of the cyclical signs.16 I publish17 this so that it may have currency in all cities, including the capital itself, for there must be some, like Ho Liang-chtin, who can appreciate it. I hasten to deny that I have made any unjustifiable alterations in the text or that I have hoped to add anything to the geniuses of Ytian times.

The third of the third month

in the forty-third year of Wan-li (1615) written in the monastery on West Lake.