Last Friday, following the British Library Dunhuang concert, in the latest stage on the Silk Road caravanserai the British Museum hosted a series of musical events, wisely curated by Rachel Harris in association with SOAS as part of the public programme supporting the BM Silk Roads exhibition until 23rd February.

Besides the current exhibition, I’m always amazed by the inexhaustible riches of the galleries. Three of them made the setting for the musicians, the ambience of the surrounding artefacts lending a more palatable, less formal atmosphere than the concert stage—albeit still remote from social life along the medieval Silk Roads. So while the tension between medieval and modern soundscapes can never be resolved, I found the whole experience more satisfying than the BL concert. On a gratuitous historical note, I muse idly that chairs are a feature of later eras…

The performances comprised

• South Asian and Afghan pieces on sarod and rubab (close cousins) with William Rees Hofmann, setting forth from enchanting alap
• Maqam-based music from Turkey and East Turkestan, blessed by the wonderful creative rapport of Ozan Baysal (Turkey) and Shohret Nur (Uyghur)
• Iranian classical dastgah with the outstanding Pouyan Biglar, in the Albukhary Gallery of the Islamic World. Here he is at SOAS earlier this year:

Funeral procession (detail), Afrasiab (modern Samarkand) murals South wall. Wiki.

• Inspired by the 7th-century murals from the Sogdian Hall of the Ambassadors, the event opened in the Hotung Gallery, with its numinous arhat, featuring recreations of melodies from the medieval culture of Sogdiana, heard at the capital of the Tang court in Chang’an. Directing the SOAS silk-and-bamboo ensemble, Hwee-San Tan gave a cogent introduction to Laurence Picken‘s great project to recreate the Tang scores exported to Japan, where they were soon retarded and overladen with the bewilderingly gorgeous patina of sound heard in gagaku.
  This, the event’s only attempt at “recreating” the medieval soundscape, made a fitting venture—though having long defected from early Chinese music sources to groups serving living folk communities, I now feel bemused by the complex issues involved in trying to perform such repertoire. In the absence of recruiting Chinese folk musicians from venerable folk traditions such as Xi’an guyue, academic reconstructions tend to resort to the unsatisfactory compromise of silk-and bamboo ensemble style around south Jiangsu—among the most junior of Han-Chinese folk traditions. Inheriting Picken’s transnotations as we do (this was the only intrusion of music stands!), the result could only sound twee by comparison with the other living folk traditions on display. *

Context is everything: we may have become used to attending Afghan, Uyghur, and Persian musics in concert, but one can at least imagine them in a more personal social setting—whereas academic recreations, however worthy, seem doomed to the staid atmosphere of the concert hall, remote from that of medieval Sogdian wine bars.

Regarding the performers, as Rachel Harris observed, it’s a privilege to work in a city where such people share their gifts with us.

See also A Dunhuang symposium.

---

* Sogdians held influential positions at the Tang court. Their music and dance—and wine bars—were all the rage there, influencing elite society further afield in north China (note the research of Chinese scholars such as Ren Erbei; on a lighter note from the great Tang scholar Denis Twitchett, see here). Topics to ponder include the degree of sinification of Central Asian ensembles at the Tang court, and how they differed from those of the oasis towns further northwest (clues here).

Musicians on camel, Tang dynasty. National Museum of China, Beijing.

Perhaps the most ambitious attempts at reconstructing the Tang repertoire result from the research of Zhao Weiping 赵维平 in Shanghai (here and here, among several related items featured on David Badagnani’s YouTube channel—the drastic retardation of the pieces in gagaku is quaintly illustrated here and here). I still feel the way forward is to approach early notations in the light of the varied ways in which folk musicians of diverse regional traditions decorate their skeletal gongche scores. Even for a relatively recent tradition like the “suite-plucking” of Qing-dynasty Beijing, this recording of the great Pu Xuezhai is far more convincing than later conservatoire recreations.

If it’s hard to find suitable Chinese musicians to recreate the Central Asian component of the Tang repertoire, perhaps a more radical project might involve shashmaqom musicians, in similar vein to early-music specialists like Jordi Savall.

Still, I approve David Urrows‘ comment on recreations of music from a later era:

In my experiences in China studies, when it comes to music repertoire in the missions from the late 16th century onwards, most of what people write—and then perform—is 10% based on documentation, and 90% based on fantasy, resulting in a kind of musical chinoiserie of a New Age type. I don’t want to promote, much less add to this pile of pseudo-scholarly dreaming, pleasant as it is to listen to…

For the xenophobic late-Tang backlash against foreign culture, see They come over ’ere, under A Tang mélange.