Vol. 5: September 16 - QuietTunes V: Looking Inward
Today, we’re looking at some older instruments, that of the Clavichord and the Guqin, both known for their quietness as well as their expressivity. These attributes led to their adoption by a bookish elite as instruments for self-refinement.
I’m particularly fascinated by this, as a former bedroom guitarist, and there are other examples of music which is meant to be practiced diligently and regularly (these seem mostly from a patriarchal culture towards women), but never heard: the amateur piano (the 19th century, to cultivate propriety and marriagability), the oud (similar reasons). Maybe ironically, as a side note, these amateur traditions then led to another tradition of great female composers for these instruments, from Cecile Chaminade to Fairouz (who mixed her music with social and political action).
The Clavichord As Practice Instrument
Nicolas Gigault - Recit a trois
Carl Phillipe Emmanuel Bach, the composer/keyboardist son of big boi Sebastian Bach, loved the clavichord. He found in it’s suppleness a means of nuanced and deep expressivity; and he found in its mechanisms a means of technical refinement, particularly for organists.
The clavichord is an early keyboard instrument which sounds by striking a pin, shaped like a flathead screwdriver, against a string and holding it in tension. Because the string is in tension with the pin and, therefore, the key, the pianists ever so slight movements change that tension and, because physics, the intensity and pitch of the note, called bebung. As you are maintaining tension with the string, you also have control over the decay, called tragen der tone (after the tone). This is impossible in, say, a piano or harpsichord, in which a hammer or plectrum (like a guitar pick) hits a string and then rebounds, leaving the string to vibrate freely. Among the keyboard instruments, the clavichord has the closest relationship between touch and sound. (It’s also very easy to play out of tune on a clavichord: you have to be very precise with how far down you press the key to get the correct intonation). However, this mechanic has a consequence: the tension reduces the string length and softens the vibrations, resulting in a quieter sound. If you are in a larger room, you might not even hear somebody playing a clavichord and you absolutely would not hear one over most other instruments. You have to be close to the clavichord, with little extraneous noise, in order to note its delicacy. These might be seen as negatives (an instrument which few can hear seems oxymoronic), but that affordance offered by the reduced dynamic is an opportunity for a different relationship with an instrument.
As a practice instrument, this quietness serves a clear purpose: you don’t want to bother others with tedious practice (or your mistakes) and you don’t want to be limited to only the hours where no one is around to practice (an issue brass players know too well, yet still ignore). This quietness, and the precision needed for correct intonation, forces you to listen incredibly closely which, in turn, reveals the minute details of a player’s sound and, thus, their touch. When a player moves to a different instrument, such as the organ or the clavichord’s polar opposite, the harpsichord, their sensitivity to touch is still readily available, informing their interaction with a more fixed instrument. Its quietness allows for greater flexibility in when to practice and its precision fosters more focused listening. This is important for practice, an individual endeavour aimed at refining oneself before presenting their achievements to others; it is the quiet labor behind the public display.
As an instrument in itself, its suppleness give it a vocal quality which isn’t found in any other instrument. Clavichordists can change pitch and intensity with just a tiny inflection of their finger, much like a singer can with their voice. This affords an wide dynamic of expression, if not of volume.
Take the sample provided, Recit a trois (recitative (a freely sung work) for three voices) by Nicolaus Gigault, originally a vocal organ work [Full Score Here, starts at bottom]. Listen to the end of the phrases, how they bring you on an emotional journey, rising and falling away from and towards emotional stability. Then listen to the moments just after the note is struck. In the decay is a vibrato, a slight wobble of tone (noted by the + in the score, though this is an organ work, so it’s unclear what that might mean). This vibrato adds an expressive accent to the music, which clarifies the structure, but also brings out the closure, structural and emotional, of the music. It informs and affects. Try singing the melody (or any melody, doesn’t really matter). Notice how, at moments of musical closure, your voice wobbles, as if in relief from the emotion of a phrase or, in my case, a lack of proper breath support (probably both). This combination of expression and limitation exists in the clavichord as well, it gives a very human quality, even though it is a very simple machine.
The clavichord has another advantage over an organ or a harpsichord with the Gigault, but most contrapuntal music as well. The work has three independent voices which a player differentiates through touch and volume. That’s incredibly easy for the clavichord: they can shape a phrase with gradations in volume and touch which follow the music’s melodic and emotional contours. However, it might be hard to bring out the large scale arc of the work with such a limited dynamic range, which is where the clavichord falls short of the forte-piano, a precursor to the modern piano which was extremely modern in C.P.E Bach’s time and which he also adored. In order to show the overall arc, the clavichordist must get creative. The affordances of quietness and minute suppleness allowed for better practice and inflective expression, so the player must fight the instrument. To do this, they roll a chord, meaning play a chord one note at a time, as in the downbeat of bar 5. This, like the vibrato, provides us with another vehicle for structural, emotional clarification: the clavichordist rolls chords which are at moments of emotional closure (this was also a common technique in harpsichord playing. Again, different technologies interacting.). So, while the technology of the clavichord provides some affordances, it simultaneously inspires ingenuity.
So, the clavichord, in the quietness and expressivity which arise from its construction, affords the keyboardist social, technical, and musical advantages towards practice. Thus, in the privacy of their own space and on their own time, they can refine their musicianship towards a public display in the future. It is an instrument of quiet self-refinement.
(pun very much intended)
References
The Guqin As Self-Refinement
Wu Zhao - Wild Geese Over The Calm Sands (Traditional)
The guqin is a Chinese zither (plucked string instrument) which originated about 3,000 years ago, predating even the Dynastic Period. Records really start picking up in the Tang Dynasty as the guqin became favored by the Chinese literati in Ancient China as an instrument for refinement and edification, often connected to Confucian teachings and morals (there are differing schools here, with one side, which came later, advocating for the guqin as a concert instrument). About the size of a longboard, its seven strings are suspended simply by a bridge, like the medieval monochord, but with the strings tuned to different notes (unrelated, here’s a monochord bed). It is, like the clavichord, a very quiet instrument, as it has a small resonance chamber, sound-holes facing down, a short bridge to carry the sound, and, most interestingly, traditionally used silk strings (though today, most use nylon steel).
To make it sound, the musician puts their finger on the string and plucks with their right hand, moving the finger to change pitch. This is an even more direct connection between touch and tone than the clavichord, which was still mediated by a mechanism. On the guqin, the touch is the tone. There are primary ‘tones’ in guqin playing: san yin, or scattered sound is a plucked open string (I love this connection, as an open string will have a richer sound, as it’s not damped by the left hand. So, this ‘scattered sound’ is a very close listening to the complexities of the sound.); fan yin, floating sound, in which the left hand touches a harmonic node on the string to produce a different pitch, often airier in sound (since fewer overtones); and an yin, or stopped sounds, where the finger is applied with more pressure, like you would on a guitar or double bass. In addition to this, there are over a thousand specified tones for the guqin, ranging from sliding pitches, vibrati, connected gestures, hammerings of either thumbs, all the way to the sound of the fingers moving along an unplucked string. This variety and subtlety of touch and gesture affords the player immediate control over the sound and the quiet nature of the instrument creates a closer balance between the various techniques (as we saw with the Sciarrino, last time). Beautiful playing involves bringing to the forefront the sounds of production: the sliding of fingers across the string, the difference in sound when stopped by either hand, the right hand resting on the next string to be played. And there is great consideration given to what happens after a player plucks, how a decay is shaped (see Abrahamsen and Sdraulig), the type of vibrato. It is beautiful, vocal music.
This is what attracted the literati and scholars of Ancient and Imperial China to the guqin. In that subtlety and consideration, they found a means of cultivating righteousness, of good character and morals, restraint from excessive emotions. Edward Ho, in Aesthetic considerations in Chinese literati musical behaviour, explains many of these connections in more explicit detail, but I’ll focus on the most basic: qiyun. Qiyun are two aesthetic principles which ground much of Confucian art, from Ho:
Qi is air in motion or energy with the power to transmit force, to sustain a motion and to communicate between realms; it is vitality; it essentially involves breathing
…
Yun…[means] resonance, residual feeling, melodic motion or musical expression
Perhaps paradoxically, these are not technical aims of the player, but the starting point of playing. Qi is cultivated within the player and with the breath and then expressed through the technical aspects of the hands in order to create yun, the emotion or the ideal (I’ve very, very much paraphrased there). More quotes from within the Ho:
With the qin in front of you, it is imperative that you calm your hands, collect your thoughts and prepare your qi as if the qin was not there; clear your mind of all worries, and maintain a serious and well-behaved disposition. (Taigu yiyin, 1516)
It is essential to manipulate qi when playing the qin. Qi is incorporated with sound. Often we see qin players playing at a snail's pace, indicating the qi of depression and discomfort; or playing hurriedly, indicating breathlessness, so that one's breathing becomes noisy and one's face becomes red, which are all results of bad manipulation of qi. If one can change one's qi while playing, better manipulation will be possible. Qi should be renewed with each change of tone.... (Chun Caotang qinpu, 1744)
A pipa player, Wong Ching-Ping, connects these more explicitly to each other and to kinetic techniques (again, found in the Ho article):
Qi: the beauty of yang Melodic Skeleton-hidden in macro/extrinsic melodic movement; active, energetic and powerful in nature, revealed through the application of various strengths of right-hand finger techniques, including phrasing, intonation, tempi and breath control.
Yun: the beauty of yin Single tones as musical entities-hidden in micro/intrinsic movement; passive, gentle and soft in nature, created by various left-hand slide gestures and other embellishments; also includes timbre, which is determined by different plucking angles, plucking speeds, and plucking positions of a string with different right- hand finger actions
For Confucius, moral character was cultivated through rites. These rites sought a transcendental ideal and they brought the performer of them closer to that ideal: “The rites are not simply a matter of decorum…They are the institutions, orders, and norms that developed from primitive magical ritual and that unite the universe (heaven) with society (people)” (Zehou, 2010) The gestures are rituals which produce sound. So, for the sound to be right (and righteous), the rite must be righteous and point back to the original nature of man. For yun to be achieved, the qi must be cultivated and expressed through the rites (tones).
This was more, still, than merely pointing to some universal, it was about connecting the heavenly order in harmony on Earth :
Music is that which moves man from the internal; rites are that which affects man on the external. Music brings about harmony. Rites ensure obedience. (Confucius, The Musical Records, from Lihuan/Blocker, 2012)
…music is the harmonization of heaven and earth; the rites order heaven and earth. (Confucius, The Book of Rites, from Zehou, 2010)
Put succinctly by Stephanie Hui-Shan Chen: “Rooted in humanity and aiming to purify human virtues and shape human conducts, music has a complementary relationship with ritual. If ritual is the appearance then music is the harmonisation of virtues.” (Hui-Shan Chen, 2003)
Thus, the guqin, in it’s directness of touch and quietness, affords this transcendence. While the clavichord for Bach was aimed refining oneself for public display on another keyboard, the guqin refined oneself. Simply. The act of playing the guqin was a way of enacting the rites which had brought heavenly order to earth and of harmonizing oneself to that heavenly order. It is a self-contained refinement, not aimed at public display, not meant to be heard, but for the self-edification of the performer. It is more tool than instrument.
The school which seems to have won out in modern recordings is the concert guqin. It’s a bit of a slog to find a recording which isn’t pristinely performed and recorded, with little string noise or breathing. In this recording by Wu Zhao, however, you can hear every detail, every touch. The gain is so high, you hear the actual strain of the microphone to pick up the minute grain of the motion. You can hear the breathing, the cultivation of qi, from the performer and feel the pads of their fingers along the grooves of the string. Note the variation is articulation as well. Just as the clavichordist articulates form with vibrato and subtleties of attack, the guqin player articulates that inner order through variations of glissandi (the style, fast/slow/urgent/portamento; whether it’s plucked or not), through rates of vibrato, and right hand attacks. If you attend to just those, cultivating a literally close listening, you might actually miss the music.
References:
Zehou, Li. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.