Chinese and Japanese Music-Dramas

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES MICHIGAN PAPERS IN CHINESE STUDIES NO. 19 CHINESE AND JAPANESE MUSIC-DRAMAS Edited by J. I. Crump and William P. Malm Ann Arbor Center for Chinese Studies The University of Michigan 1975 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright (c) 1975 by Center for Chinese Studies The University of Michigan Printed in the United States of America Cover illustration by Elleanor H. Crown. ISBN 978-0-89264-019-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-472-03802-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12742-9 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-472-90137-1 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ CONTENTS Preface J. I. Crump and William P. Malm vii Abbreviations Used viii Giants in the Earth: YUan Drama as Seen by Ming Critics J. I. Crump 1 Aria Structural Patterns in the Peking Opera Rulan Chao Pian 65 The Musical Characteristics and Practice of the Japanese Noh Drama in an East Asian Context William P. Malm 99 China vs. Japan: the Noh Play Haku Rakuten Carl Sesar . 143 The Structure of the Japanese Noh Play Roy E. Teele 189 Glossary 235 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 Associa- tion for Asian Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies, the Cen- ter for Chinese Studies, the School of Music, and the Speech Depart- ment 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 endeav- or 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 help- ing 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. John- son 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 nmultimedian direction that we hope will stimulate further efforts in this exciting field. William P. Malm J. I. Crump Ann Arbor 1975 vn Vlll Abbreviations Used HK Hsi-hsueh Hui-k'ao Huo-yeh Chung-hua Huo-yeh Wen-hslian Sixty Liu-shih-chung ChTii YCH Yuan-ch'U Hsuan ZJBS Zeami juroku-bu shu hyoshaku Giants in the Earth: Yuan 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.Tf 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" Ytian), 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 Yuan drama and to evaluate, criticize, and admire those mighty men which were of old, and who lived in Yuan 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 Yuan giants often comment that !fof course, these ch'ii were heavily influenced by northern bor- der 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 Yuan musical drama to what is often searching and honest criticism. There is a saying which reveals a part of the healthy irrever- ence the Chinese have toward literary criticism: Hslen yu wen; hou yu tse, "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 Yuan musical drama, both the wen created during the Mongol era and the ts£ 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 Yuan 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-chu or pei-chfu which was its chief legacy. There exists, to be sure, a brief set of dofs-and-donftTs (called Tso-tz?u Shih-fa) which Chou Te-ehring appended to his Chung- yuan Yin-vim (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'u rather than hsi-ch'u. There is also the Cho-keng Lu of T?ao Tsung-yi (fl. 1360), which con- tains anecdotes about dramas and dramatists and is informed more by relish for a good story than a desire to evaluate artistic creations and creators. 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 nchTu formularies" (chfii-pTu) which not only gave examples of great lyrics from dramatic chTu (arias) on which to pattern one's own efforts, but also included much evaluative, critical and appreciative comment on Yuan drama, dramatic theory, and the requirements of composing to music and for performance—all done in an age when the Yuan dramatic form was almost extinct. Almost without exception these critics show admiration (often amounting to reverence) for Yuan tsa-chu 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 in- sights it provides both on the tsa-chti and on Ming tastes. The chTli 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 indis- criminately with both the longer Ming ch'uan ch'i drama form and the Yuan tsa-chu 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'iian (t 1448) in his T'ai-ho Cheng-yin PTu, 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 Yuan 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 Yuan dramatic subject matter, and concludes the whole first section with these interesting but non-sequitur observations: . Chao Tzu-ang [a Yuan dramatist] said: "When a youth from a good family plays in a tsa-chti it is called 'living a life of the troupe,T (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 flife of the troupe' is to be very wide of the mark. n Someone asked him why Ithese terms were usedj and he replied, MTsa-chti come from the pens of scholar- officials 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.

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