The Musicalization of Poetry

The importance of the song lyric in the long history of the relationship between Chinese poetry and music resides in the particular characteristics of the music to which the lyric was set and in the fact that it represents the culmination of generations of poets' attempts to use the distinctive features of the Chinese language to create a kind of music in poetry—what has been called the "musicalization" of poetry by Chinese literary historians.^[19] The musicalization of poetry can be said to have begun in the fifth century, when for the first time educated Chinese became fully aware that their language possessed tonal features—that is, the tones p'ing (level), shang (rising), ch'ü (departing), and ju (entering).^[20] The discovery subsequently led fifth-century poets to ex-

[16] See Mao shih chu-shu , vol. 2 of Shih-san-ching chu-shu (Taipei: I-wen yin-shu-kuan, 1965), pp. 13 and 16.

[17] Jen Pan-t'ang, T'ang sheng-shih , pp. 171, 342–44.

[18] Ibid., pp. 374–79.

[19] In his Tz'u yü yin-yüeh Liu Yao-min uses the term shih-ko yin-yüeh-hua , or "the musicalization of poetry," to refer to the process by which the tonal properties of the Chinese language are used to create a kind of music in poetry.

[20] Ibid., pp. 100–104.

periment with employing tones for euphonic effects. Prior to this, the tones no doubt had some bearing on the rhythm of poetry (because Chinese had probably always been a tonal language), but only on an unconscious level. By contrast, the experiments of the fifth-century poets were a self-conscious attempt to create an "intrinsic music" within the written texts themselves.^[21] Interestingly, this intrinsic music was first created in the form of poetry—shih —that lacked a corresponding musical setting, or "extrinsic music." Shih poetry had emerged in the first century B.C. and was in fact originally associated with folk songs, but it was not until the second century A.D. that it became popular among literati poets, who began to use it as a mode for self-expression in isolation from its original musical setting.^[22] The shih poem is constructed almost entirely of end-stopped lines of equal length (of either five or seven characters each), which are further organized into basic units of couplets, with rhyme occurring at the end of each even-numbered line. It was within this regular and rigid form that the self-conscious poets of the fifth century tried to create a kind of music with the newly discovered tonal features of their native language.

Shen Yüeh has been traditionally credited with having defined the four tones and some of the rules of tonal euphony.^[23] In the "Lu Chüeh chuan," the biography of Lu Chüeh, a contemporary and intellectual companion of Shen Yüeh, it is recorded that Shen Yüeh and others of his time "infused musical qualities into their writings and used the 'level, rising, departing, and entering' tones to regulate their resonance and euphony. . . . Within every line of five characters, all tones and final sounds differ from one another, and within every two lines, each word differs in pitch."^[24] Shen Yüeh himself made a key statement about the "music" of poetry:

One needs to make the notes alternate and the high and low sounds intermix to form a rhythm. If there is a floating sound in the front, there should be an intense sound in the rear. Within a single piece of writing, make the tones and final sounds of the words distinct; within every two lines, vary the light and heavy sounds. Only when one understands this principle can one be allowed to discuss writing.^[25]

[21] Ibid. The terms nei-tsai yin-yüeh , or "intrinsic music," and wai-tsai yin-yüeh , or "extrinsic music," are defined in these pages.

[22] Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 16.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Chi Yün, Shen-shih ssu-sheng k'ao (rpt., Changsha: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1941), pp. 154–55.

[25] Ibid., p. 151.

Shen Yüeh's goal clearly was to use the four tones of the Chinese language to parallel the five notes on the pentatonic scale of ancient Chinese music, and to use them in such a way as to create a kind of rhythm and melody similar to that of music. By drawing an analogy from music, Shen Yüeh thus drew attention to the aspects of variation and modulation. But he had nothing explicit to say about harmony or regularity of rhythm, and his arguments were limited to the individual line and the couplet, without any concern for the overall structure of an entire poem.

From the above quotation, we can see that Shen Yüeh spoke of the four tones as if they possessed two sets of opposing properties. He used the words "high" (kao ) and "low" (hsia ), "light" (ch'ing ) and "heavy" (chung ), as well as "floating" ( fu ) and "intense" (ch'ieh ) to describe them. In T'ang times these pairs of opposing traits were essentially defined as the distinction between "level" (p'ing ) and "oblique" (tse ) tonal qualities.^[26] There are different theories regarding the exact nature of the level/oblique distinction: it is one based on a contrast—either in duration between long and short, or in pitch between high and low, or in contour between level and oblique—when a sound is enunciated. Words in the level tone belong to the level category and words in the rising, departing, and entering tones all belong to the oblique category.

Although fifth-century scholars were the first to discuss the four tones and their bipartite division, they were by no means the first to observe in writing the distinction between two opposing tonal categories. In a pioneering investigation into tonal patterns in writing, Hsia Ch'eng-t'ao argues that some observation of the distinction between two apparently opposing categories can already be found in poetry and rhymeprose (fu ) composed before the fifth century.^[27] He points out that in the Book of Songs and the Songs of the South , alternation between rhyme words belonging to opposite tonal categories (as distinguished in later historical times) often exists within a single piece; that in the rhymeprose of the Han dynasty, the tonal properties of the words ending lines are often found to alternate from line to line; that in some rhymeprose of the Han, especially of the latter half of the dynasty, alternation between the

[26] For a concise description of this bipartite division, see Yu-kung Kao, "The Aesthetics of Regulated Verse," in The Vitality of the Lyric Voice: Shih Poetry from the Late Han to the T'ang , ed. Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 352–53. According to Hsia Ch'eng-t'ao, Yin Fan in the eighth century was the first person to use the terms p'ing and tse in his preface to the anthology of T'ang poetry he edited, the Ho-yüeh ying-ling-chi . See Hsia's article "Ssu-sheng i-shuo" in idem, Yüeh-lun-shan tz'u-lun chi (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1979), p. 156.

[27] Hsia Ch'eng-t'ao, "Ssu-sheng i-shuo," pp. 149–60.

two tonal categories is also found; and, finally, that in shih poetry of the second century, words in the corresponding key (i.e., the second and fourth) positions within a couplet are often found to belong to opposing tonal categories.^[28] Since we no longer have the music for the works in the Book of Songs and the Songs of the South , there is no way we can determine whether, or to what extent, the tonal patterns observed there (if Hsia Ch'eng-t'ao's findings are indeed valid) were the result of setting words to music. But in light of these findings, it is at least clear that Shen Yüeh's attempt to create an intrinsic music in poetry was built upon centuries of previous experience.

The bipartite division of the four tones came into wide use by poets experimenting with the tones after the second half of the fifth century. By the seventh century, the new genre of poetry called lü-shih , or "regulated verse," had appeared, with its distinctive metrical structure based on the "level/oblique" tonal contrast—a major breakthrough in the musicalization of classical Chinese poetry. In regulated verse level and oblique tonal properties are organized into a rhythmic fabric. Normally, the two adjacent disyllabic metrical units within each line are opposite in level/oblique tonal distinction. Since the second syllable in each disyllabic metrical segment and the last syllable in each line are slightly stressed in reading, their tonal qualities, either level or oblique, are customarily fixed. Other unstressed places are allowed greater freedom in actual practice. This alternation between level and oblique tones in stressed positions constitutes the linear or temporal aspect of the rhythm of regulated verse. The lines in a piece of regulated verse are further organized into four interrelated couplets. The tonal properties of the corresponding lines, especially of the stressed positions, within each couplet must be opposed to one another. Both the combination of metrical units into lines and the juxtaposition of lines into couplets reflect the principle of "maximum contrast."^[29] Between two adjacent couplets the same tonal properties are used in the corresponding stressed positions in the neighboring lines. The repetition of tonal qualities between adjacent couplets and the opposition of tonal qualities within each couplet create a conceptual kind of spatial layout of the rhythm of regulated verse.

The linear and spatial dimensions of rhythm discussed here constitute the intrinsic music of regulated verse, a remarkable advance from the meter of Chinese poetry prior to the late fifth century, which was

[28] Ibid., pp. 150–51.

[29] Yu-kung Kao, "The Aesthetics of Regulated Verse," p. 354.

based largely on the measure of syllables or beats.^[30] This intrinsic music no doubt contributed to the beauty and dynamism of the aural aspect of regulated verse, but it also had its limitations. There were only a few metrical patterns available to poets for the expression of a wide variety of themes and feelings. Moreover, the metrical patterns tended to be extremely regular and rigid. It should be noted here that the quatrain form, chüeh-chü , the other form of T'ang recent-style verse (chin-t'i shih ), which was crucial to the development of literati tz'u before the middle of the ninth century,^[31] shared the same intrinsic music as regulated verse.