The Musical Traditions

APPENDIX B The Musical Traditions I have in my possession a number of COs of "Tang music." I can enjoy these with a good-humored knowledge that any relation to the Tang Dynasty is purely fanciful. I have Pickens's recon structions of Tang music based on speeding up Japanese court music to melodies that sound like the sound track for an Ara bian Nights fllm. I believe that it is not at all impossible that Tang music actually sounded like this, but I do not believe this is "Tang music." • Nowhere is the scholarship on early classical poetry more in tricate and frustrating than in trying to sort out the yuefu lineages of transmission of tune titles and their various cate gories-through the early musical sources preserved in the head-notes of Yuefu shiji, through the Yuezhi of the Song shu, and in various other sources. This is not scholarship for the fainthearted; and if I reviewed it properly here, this appendix would be many times longer than the book to which it is ap pended. Scholars who are not in the least fainthearted-such as Suzuki Shuji, Masuda Kiyohide, and Wang Yunxi-have thoroughly mined the sources for what is there. To attempt to reproduce them would be mere epitome. I have struggled with the primary sources and the arguments of scholars of those sources without finding the information for which I was search ing. This is an exemplary case of how the sources set bounda ries for questions which become all too absorbing in their own detail and whose endless problems easily direct the scholar's attention away from some very basic and essential issues. The Musical Traditions • 309 The pre-Tang sources that we use to reconstruct the history of early musical poetry (yue.fu.) are concerned primarily with titles and taxonomies, and perhaps with song traditions. We can guess what instruments were in vogue in the court in a certain period. We do not, however, know some other things that are very important. We do not know the extent to which song lyrics were committed to writing. We also do not know when song lyrics were committed to writing. Scholars are often willing to believe that if they have an early mention of a title and sometimes of a first line, there is continuity between the piece mentioned and a later textual manifestation oflyrics under that title. But the tradition is always composing new lyrics to old titles, reworking lyrics, reusing first lines, and "filling in" what is missing. We want to know how we received the texts we have, whether those texts appear in the early sixth-century Song shu or in the Yue.fu. shiji, from the turn of the twelfth century. Perhaps the first line of the "Song of White Hair," "Baitou yin" a il"t, attested by its name and first line around the turn of the fourth century, belongs to an old Han ditty-and if we can be lieve the first line, we can probably believe the first four lines. Already we have compounded a "perhaps" and a "probably," conditional on the "perhaps." But, as Di€my has shown and we will recapitulate in a different way, the longer poem preserved in the Song shu is a composite of different segments. What reason do we have to believe this particular confection of segments belongs to the Han? If we had a clear tradition of texts known to contain lyrics, we might believe. But we know musi cians and musical scholars were always reworking things. We know the tradition of the title and the first line (only dating from the turn of the fourth century); but we have no idea from when and how we have the text we have. Perhaps it is indeed an old Han mix; perhaps it is the way the poem was performed in the fifth century. It doesn't matter aesthetically for the text we have, with its wonderful leaps of theme. But it is not a text around which we can tell a historical story of yue.fu.-even though Shen Yue names it specifically as a Han "street song." He knows probably only a little better than we do the origins of the version he has. We are looking for lines of transmission not of lore but of texts. In a note attached to the "Lyrics for the Three Modes in .

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