Le pouvoir en chantant, tome II: une musique d’état impériale (review)

This is Sabine Trebinjac’s second of a two-volume scholarly work on Chinese music entitled Le pouvoir en chantant, tome II: une musique d’état impériale (Power through singing, volume II: music of the imperial state). In volume I, she presents, following extensive fieldwork in China overall and among the Uighur of Xinjiang Province, the political role and political transformations of music, in particular singing, in communist China. The book situates Chinese music in its twentieth-century context, and how the government, both prior to and after the communist revolution, has been using music as a propaganda tool to indoctrinate the masses on communist rules, vision, and philosophy. I reviewed Trebinjac’s volume I in a previous issue of Asian Music (2002).

In this second work, Trebinjac takes a multidisciplinary approach, investigating music at the court of China from a philosophical, anthropological, and historical, as well as an acoustical perspective. As she indicates in the introduction, she applied an inverse strategy with these two books. Volume I was dedicated to the modern Chinese political state of affairs regarding music, while volume II presents and analyzes the historical background of how the Chinese government views and uses music for its political needs. With this second volume, Trebinjac wanted to give a better understanding of the situation in twentieth-century China, showing that although major political and social changes have taken place in the last 100 years or so, the role music played in these changes is quite similar to the role it played around 2,000 years ago.

The main point she mentions in her introduction, and which is the primary theme of volume I, is that Chinese tradition, as it pertains to music, is a state affair. Already more than two millennia ago, each new emperor was changing the rules about music, redefining what was considered proper or improper, thereby influencing new musical traditions that in turn were changed by the emperor who followed. Trebinjac suggests that these changes can be interpreted as the invention of traditions, as has been proposed by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). The aim of this second volume is to show how this historically and politically took place.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part comprises a single chapter, itself in three parts. It presents and analyzes a known historical text on music: the Yueji, meaning “Notes on Music,” a philosophical, theoretical, and political treatise on music. It was possibly written during the Zhou dynasty (sometime around 480–470 BC) or during the time of Emperor Wu of the Han (140–87 BC), although this has yet to be firmly established. The first part of this chapter presents the historical context surrounding the writing of the Yueji. It appears that it was written based on existing texts from different authors, and was therefore a compilation.

The second part of the chapter comprises a translation of the treatise, followed by the original text (printed on separate red paper, as an addendum). In the third part, Trebinjac proposes her analysis of the Yueji. She indicates that it is as much a philosophical as a political reflection on the power of music on the human heart and how it is the role of the emperor and the government to insure that the music its people listen to is harmonious. Overall, as is already known, in ancient China the view was that music is a mirror of the political and social situation. If music is virtuous and harmonious, the entire country will be peaceful, happy, and well governed. “Inharmonious” music is indicative that the emperor does not properly govern his people, or giving at least an idea of how he governs. Music is viewed as...