Qin Zither Repertoire from Lyrics to Tablatures: Musical Intersemioticism and Performance-oriented Commentaries in Pre-modern China
Résumé
This paper explores the two textual forms of ci 詞 and jianzi pu 減字譜, lyric songs paired with tablatures, that pertain to the qin琴 zither repertoire and its commentarial practices in pre-modern China (15th – 20th c.). It considers the act of illustrating poetry through music as a form of translation. Indeed, if the source text and its illustration both remain in sinograms, they are also both aimed to be performed. However, the semantic system changes partially or even totally from verse to score, from a sung text to a text sung and plucked, or even only plucked. Such shift becomes an original form of genre hopping, where a discourse emancipates itself from its original lyrical structure to sometimes become exclusively instrumental. But the poetic narrative remains thanks to the programmatic nature of the music involved in this illustrative process. The topic is addressed by using two complementary approaches. On one hand, it promotes the well-preserved printed anthologies for qin music. Inaugurated in 1425 with the first the qinpu 琴譜 handbook sponsored by Prince Zhu Quan 朱權 (1378–1448), this textual tradition, covering more than three hundred scores paired with lyrics, was passed down until the beginning of the 20th century as a living practice. This study shows how a source text and its illustration are organically interrelated by clarifying the different functions, registers and layers of these genre-dependent commentaries. On the other hand, a second angle calls upon the latest studies on the qupai曲牌melodic models, but here specifically adapted to their counterpart, i.e. the reduced character notation for qin zither. In particular, the lyric songs are explored for their musicality, as the fingering techniques for their rhetorical dimension. This enriches the analytical approach of the genre through a study that brings to light the various aspects of the text-music relation: metrical and tonal patterns, rhetorical structures, pentatonic modes, monodic forms. The analysis suggests that the qin repertoire creation process can be described today as a form of intersemiotic translation at the frontier of intralinguism, where illustrating lyrics through tablatures plays on similar patterns and rhetorics. Put in historical perspective, the performance-oriented commentaries show that their authors were well aware of how such transfer reflected the everlasting tension between poetry and music, between scripture and performance.