Japonifying the Qin: Music and Legitimization in Tokugawa Politics

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No matter how idiosyncratically Chinese the qin undoubtedly is, it flourished in Japan from the seventeenth through the nineteen centuries. A new style consisting of performing ancient Japanese Imperial court music gagaku on the qin emerged from behind the facade of a musical restoration. Why was there such a drastic change? My presentation will build connections between the intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan and music antiquarianism. In particular, the ideological forces behind the so-called restoration of the Chinese qin launched by the Tokugawa military government are explored through dilemmas of political legitimacy. The Shōgun’s Edo-centred dictatorship was by definition eternally subordinate to the Emperor in Kyoto, so a means had to be found to articulate an alternative legitimacy, and Confucianism proved the perfect vehicle. The qin as a musical invention of ancient antiquity and a route to sagehood was a suitable means to this end.

Yang Yuanzheng is a specialist in the musical history of East Asia whose research interests extend from Bronze Age excavations of musical instruments in China to the reception of Chinese musical philosophies in Japan. He is a recipient of the Association of Chinese Music Research’s Rulan Chao Pian Prize (2016) and the American Musical Instrument Society’s Frances Densmore Prize (2018). Issues connected to the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts and their relationship to canon formation and political undercurrents have long been a central theme of Yang’s work. In respect of the Song dynasty poet-musician Jiang Kui, he has unearthed an array of hitherto unnoticed manuscripts and published them in facsimile along with a monograph on the eighteenth-century reception of Jiang’s oeuvre in his book Plum Blossom on the Far Side of the Stream (2019). As a fluent performer on the qin, Yang’s current work relates to the cultural migration of the instrument into Tokugawa Japan and the effect it had on political and philosophical trends there. As an archaeologist, Yang was entrusted by the Smithsonian Institution with the task of carrying out a full-scale scientific investigation of the entire collection of ancient qin housed at the National Museum of Asian Art. The results were published in Dragon’s Roar: Chinese Literati Musical Instruments in the Freer and Sackler Collections (2020).

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies