A Short Prehistory of Western Music, Chapter 3

18 P Tagg: A Short Prehistory of Western Music Chapter 3
Now, any regressive type of cultural regulation — whether it be today’s endless auditing
of British teachers by managerialist bureaucracies (complete with their
vague value words like ‘underachievement’ and ‘excellence’), or whether it be
benchmarking by the Bureau of Music (yue-fu ) in imperial China (with its
equally nebulous ‘right’ or ‘elegant’ versus ‘wrong’ or ‘vulgar’) — has to rely on the
description of practices established in the past to prescribe the sorts of action it can
sanction now and in the future. 32 Oppressive bureaucracy uses measurement and
documentation, not to explain and enlighten but to establish rules, to lay down the
law, and to regulate behaviour in advance on the basis of what went before. In order
to perform such feats of conceptual illusion, bureaucracies need to ensure that
whatever ‘best practice’ they happen to promulgate is at least seen to be: [i] related
to unquestionable and apparently immutable physical and/or moral precepts; [ii]
related to concepts of ‘order’ and governed by strict and often complex rules of procedure;
[iii] in need of special skills and knowledge to be understood and performed;
[iv] reproducible consistently over time by those who know the rules of the game;
[iv] connected in some way with the authority of a respected historical tradition.
3:11 Qianzi pu – abbreviated character tablature
for the qin (7-string zither): tune
‘Water and Cloud of Xiaoxiang’ from
Wuqi zai qin pu, compiled by Xiu Qi
(1722). Columns 1-4 and 9 show the
title and technical details, columns 5-8
and 10-12 contain notation.
The music of imperial Chinese courts, especially
ya-yue (‘elegant music’), was presented
as though it had all these
qualities of ‘best practice’. It was, as we
have seen, related to the cosmic values of
the numerals 2 and 3 which, in their
turn, were related to notions of heaven
and earth, male and female, Yang ( )
and Yin ( ), etc. It was certainly regulated
by strict rules of performance, not
only in terms of ‘stage’ positions for instrumentalists
and dancers, but also, as
our account of the ‘five notes’ and the imperial
Music Office (yue-fu ) shows,
with regard to tonal norms. Intricate division
and subdivision of genres in terms
of both musical style and audience type
illustrate further aspects of complex codification,
as do the number of ancient
texts setting out the history, aesthetics
and metaphysics of imperial music-making.
These sources also imply that knowledge
of such intricacies was important
for those producing and consuming the
‘elegant’ music, whose history, as master
Lu’s annals stated in 239 BP, could be
traced back to what was, even then, the
32. For more about the plight of British university teachers hounded by ‘performativity’ bureaucrats
and their auditing obsession, see www.tagg.org/rants/audititis/audititis.html [2002-02-19].