Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of recording Nine Song of Yue1 transcribed and performed by Haiyun Yu, on a 12-string acoustic guitar2. The rendition, which is played only on open strings and harmonics, highlights the nuance of tuning in the work.
With no rhythm or tempo markings, Yu allows the resonant beatings to dictate when the next note is placed. Melodies can be understood as musical lines, but also as a chain of relationships, each note activating its neighbours in subtle ways.
The metamorphosis onto the western acoustic guitar, also makes a practical demonstration of eastern and western aesthetics combined – a disposition which becomes very important in music during and after John Cage – particularly the European tradition.
The guitar version takes the work into a different territory, displaced by location and time, and in doing so still captures the vitality which Jiang Kui conjured through his skill and intuition. An expressivity is found in every detail of this work, highlighting that touch of the Dionysian present within the Apollonian.
Law of Song
The Southern Song Dynasty is often regarded for its developments of art.
In regard to music, the court re-adopted the moon-temperament (a system of tuning limited to the 3rd harmonic, 3 being a particularly important numeral in ancient China), as well as standardising principles of form. These aesthetic laws were enforced by emperors of the period, as they had the resources, the scribes and the power.
To summarise, the Southern Song dynasty was an Apollonian era.
In contrast, the periods before and after the Song Dynasty can be thought of as Dionysian eras – aesthetic norms that tend toward expression, ornamentation – essentially, more romantic modes of art making.
The existence of this dialectic makes some intuitive sense, and can be useful in explaining large aesthetic trends of art history. We understand it through see-saw like shifts, swinging between Formal & Romantic or Apollonian & Dionysian.
This pendulum is evoked in other fields, for example, to describe the psychological state of individuals; most commonly, appearing in the division of the brain – the right lobe is Logic, the left is Emotion. Contrary to how we categorise periods of art, this right/left split exists simultaneously within one head.
In this case, the metaphor of the brain is actually appropriate. When discussing history, we have to understand that the eras in which people live don’t fully describe them. There always exist minds, that are contradicting or reinforcing the zeitgeist – and as with our aforementioned brain, these opposing states manifest together in individuals too.
None so much as Jiang Kui, the Whitestone Daoist.
Jiang is remembered as a serene music practicing hermit, who takes up residence in a cave, in the mountains near Lin’an3. In many ways, his minimalistic life dedicated to practice of art, encapsulates the ethos of the rulers of that period.
However, the compositions and history before the whitestone cave tell a different story.
As a member of the literate class, Jiang enjoyed a quality of life far above the common folk. Beyond creature comforts, he had access to all the historical documents and texts, enabling him to understand the history and politics of his time acutely. Privileges like travel afforded him the opportunity for practical research as well.
During his travels, Jiang became fascinated with music performed by common people. Perhaps he admired how even without the courtly training of music, they found a way to express it. And he noticed another thing too; what were these songs they sang? Old old songs that echoed eras past; heroes, river gods, sacrifice of epic proportion.
For Jiang, this must have felt like an emancipation – an expressive art!
In this sense, Jiang found a new motivation for his musical training. So strong that he would trade his social status for the humble life of a hermit. He would no longer practice music for performances in lavish gardens, but for its own sake – music as a ritual to strive for the dao4.
Nine Song of Yue – is an interesting work from Jiang’s hermetic period. We see within this collection of ritual songs, a full embrace of free form poetic expression fused with a training that was strict and precise.
The Collection (which includes 10 songs in fact) acts as a thesis of sorts, utilising a different mode (or scale) for each piece. A general disposition for organising the modes from most consonant to more dissonant is punctuated by the pieces tending to get longer as the set unfolds. Though each is intended for a different ritual, this coherency in large scale structure gives the work a new dimension when performed as a whole.
In an action that seems very appropriate to trends of the Southern Song Dynasty, the organised and systematic formation of this volume is clearly in a more Apollonian mode of thinking.
However the individual works, when truly experienced and heard, are decidedly free of formal restraints, based on those old songs he heard on his travels, Jiang conjures these songs in the form of impressionistic tone-poems, in a decidedly Dionysian mode of expression.
And so we arrive to the crux of the matter, Nine Song of Yue contains within it a conscious rejection of protocol, a yearning for something beyond imposed constraints.
But there is also another presence, an unconscious force grown from a lifetime of practice. Habits too deeply engrained to not concede to. An ear that has been taught to hear a certain way. A mind, still partial to other powers… to a law that he had no choice in creating… no less obeying…
… the Law of Song.
- A collection of ten songs written and composed by Jiang Kui in 1193, known as the Whitestone Daoist living in the Southern Song Dynasty of China. ↩︎
- It was first performed at the poetry-concert Sound of the Waves, which was part of the Microtonal Music Studios Exhibition and Events Week in 2025 at gallery Myymälä 2. ↩︎
- Capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. ↩︎
- Meaning “the way/path/doctrine/principle” in classic Chinese philosophy. ↩︎
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