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I. Chinese Ci Songs in Historical and Contemporary Contexts
In the traditional literary and performing arts of China, lyrics, music, and performance have inseparable but unequal and unstable relationships, a phenomenon generated not only by creative and expressive practices, but also by cultural and historical forces.1 A vivid demonstration of the phenomenon is ci, a genre of Chinese poetry or song. When the genre first emerged in late Tang China (618-907), its compositions were performed as popular songs (quzi), namely lyrics set to melodies vocally performed by entertainers and commoners alike, with or without instrumental accompaniment.2 As the genre blossomed in subsequent times, its production and consumption began to emphasize reading above singing. From the fourteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth, a long period during which educated elites continuously practiced the genre, ci lyrics were more composed and read than chanted or sung. From the 1920s on, canonized ci lyrics have been repeatedly set to newly created melodies with piano accompaniments and performed as contemporary Chinese art songs (yishu gequ). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, canonized ci songs are increasingly being reconstructed and sung as historical songs (gudai gequ) with authentic, or reconstructed, melodies from the past.3
Creative or reconstructive singing of ci compositions raises a web of aesthetic, cultural, historical, literary, musical, and performance issues, linking the Chinese genre and its practices with international scholarship on song as text and/or music.4 What is ci ? Is a ci composition a poem or a song, or both?5 If poems are verbal expressions primarily created for critical reading, and songs musical-verbal expressions primarily created for aesthetic listening, then does a ci song become a poem when it is read but no longer sung? Does a ci text written for literary reading become a song when it is sung? How should it be sung? How do lyrics, music, and performance complement or conflict with one another as distinctive modes of expression?6 These are fundamental questions that a prosperous twenty-first century China must confront in reclaiming ci songs as a repertory of classical music that it wants to promote as part of its intangible cultural heritage in a globalized world.
To probe the phenomenon of ci as lyrics, music, and performance, this essay...