Further information related to this article, including a short bio of the author, are available by following the included links, most of which are to pages in John Thompson on the Guqin Silk String Zither, the most detailed source of information on this Chinese musical instrument.

Foreigner + guqin cannot, for many Chinese, add up to "natural". This is too much of a contradiction. Nevertheless, though indeed the most quintessentially Chinese music instrument, the guqin is in many ways the one with the most international potential. Such contradictions in the guqin tradition make an interesting study. They also serve to show the depth and complexity of the guqin tradition.

Physically the musical instrument called guqin ("old" qin) can have a variety of styles, but in essence it is simply a "long zither", a long sound box with strings extended across it (compare "lute": any instrument which adds to this a fingerboard, as on a guitar).

Historically the guqin represents the world's oldest continuous solo instrumental written music tradition, honored by Unesco and included in the Voyager Golden Record. Guqin music has been written down for at least 1500 years (see Secluded Orchid) using a form of notation called tablature. Hundreds of guqin handbooks survive from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

However, the complexity of the tablature emphasizes the essentially oral nature of the guqin tradition: one normally learns a melody by copying exactly one's teacher. Disciples should learn to copy their master exactly, only then adding their own interpretations.

In spite of the glorious history of the guqin, the average Chinese person today usually confuses it with another Chinese long zither, the guzheng (see in Wikipedia), which typically has 17 strings and a moveable bridge under each string. The guqin has seven strings but no movable bridges. The lacquer covering its top must therefore be very hard and very smooth. It is difficult to make good instruments. But good ones have not just a rich though delicate sound, they are also art objects, collected and treasured through the ages. Some of them are over 1,000 years old, yet still in playing condition.

During the Cultural Revolution the guqin tradition was very much under threat. In order to survive, the guqin had to be presented as an instrument to be performed not for oneself, but for the masses. In part to meet this challenge metal strings were developed to replace the silk strings that had been used for over 2,000 years and which in many ways epitomized that classical ideals of the guqin.

Today there is a revival of interest in the guqin tradition, but most teachers long ago switched to metal strings and find it too difficult to go back. It is now usually difficult to find silk strings, and most new instruments are designed to be played with metal strings. Many players are not aware of the silk string tradition or how much the use of metal strings changes the nature of the music. There seems to be little consideration of the damage that metal strings can cause. Thus, though the most revered Chinese musical instrument, the guqin is in many ways the least known and understood.

In the Chinese literary tradition the guqin evokes images of the Chinese scholar engaged in lonely self-cultivation as he becomes one with nature. This attitude is epitomized by melodies with such titles as Discussing the Dao at Kongtong Mountain or Moon Atop a Plum Tree.

And yet, in popular culture the guqin is the perfect instrument for seduction.

One of the most famous traditional Chinese stories tells of Cai Wenji, daughter of a famous 2nd century Chinese scholar and guqin player, being kidnapped from the capital (modern Xi'an) by nomads from the northern desert, married to a nomad prince, and forced to spend many years in the barbarian wastelands far from home. As depicted in art and poetry she takes her guqin with her, and throughout her captivity this guqin represents China. A famous guqin melody parallels a scroll painting that narrates and illustrates the story.

Several years ago I was invited to play guqin in a modern opera telling this story. The music score called for guqin and other Chinese plus Western instruments. The other musicians were also mixed Chinese and Western, but after the first rehearsal the stage director (a European) said that because of the essentially Chinese role of the guqin, in the performance it would have to be played by a Chinese person.

More recently I was invited to Qionglai, a small city south of Chengdu in Sichuan, to perform at a "Cultural Festival for the Guqin and Zhuo Wenjun". According to another of China's most famous stories, it was in Qionglai that Sima Xiangru (179-113 BCE) seduced Zhuo Wenjun by playing a love song on the guqin. Two melodies on this story survive in 16th century guqin handbooks: Wenjun Melody and A Male Phoenix Seeks his Mate. I have reconstructed (dapu) both of these melodies, and I performed them in several concerts in both Qionglai and Chengdu.

Playing these melodies in the location of the original stories was very special for me. Some years ago when I was playing the guqin privately for some elderly players I asked them what I should do to improve my technique. One of them said, "Go and play at the famous beauty spots in China." The others nodded their heads in agreement. I also agreed, but decided to focus on natural and historical areas connected to the guqin.

This advice evoked another guqin story. The most famous player in antiquity was Boya, a player whose guqin music no one understood until he met his soul-mate Ziqi. When Boya's music expressed High Mountains and Flowing Streams, Ziqi could physically see them. Boya had learned his technique from a master named Cheng Lian. One day Cheng Lian told Boya that to progress further he would need to learn the true meaning of the music, and for this he needed to study with Cheng Lian's own teacher. Cheng Lian took Boya to an island and told him to wait there. Ten days later, after no one had showed up, Boya realized that the true significance of guqin music lay in the sounds of nature. He responded to this by creating Water Immortals' Melody.

In Chengdu I was questioned and interviewed by many people. None, however, asked how it felt to play melodies about the famous seduction right in the town where it is said to have taken place. And none asked why I, a foreigner, was the only participant at the event to play a traditional melody associated with the story (apparently no one else has reconstructed these melodies).

The only question was, "Why is a foreigner like you interested in playing the guqin".

My own interest in the guqin involves numerous contradictions. I have always liked new music, but to me "new music" simply means music I have never heard before. This rarely includes what is often called "serious contemporary music", which often seems to involve composers trying to invent a new language. More often "new" means something from a different culture. Or, as with newly reconstructed medieval Western music, it is actually something very old.

Related to this, it seems clear to me that in the future, when the academics decide what was the great music of the 20th century, they will write that it was not music from composers writing it down for others to play, but music created by musicians as they played. This includes the high end of music in the jazz and popular music fields, not to mention "world music". Asian music traditions are primarily oral traditions. However, Western influence on Asian cultural establishments has often led in Asia to the rather old-fashioned Western idea that great music must be composed, otherwise it is just "folk music". As a result the old oral traditions are being written down. And they are thereby losing some of their essence.

During my years as advisor to the Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts one of my aims was to show not just the beauty of Asian traditions on their own, but also to show that training in these traditions can also be relevant to developing new forms of contemporary expression. The new creations might be written down, but this is no longer necessary: most new works can quite adequately be documented through aural and visual recordings.

Having thus extolled non-written traditions, however, perhaps it is somewhat ironic that my own performance and research area in Asian music is in perhaps the only Asian instrument with a long and detailed written tradition, and that this is why I first became interested in it. When I hear music I like, I want to know where it came from, its history. This is often difficult with an oral tradition. In graduate school I was studying Chinese language and to a certain extent Chinese music. Program notes would often say, "written by Confucius" or some such thing, but where was the evidence?

Only one Chinese instrument had a detailed written tradition – guqin. Chinese people who know of the guqin will usually emphasize its history and philosophy. This is what connected it to the literati class, thus putting it in the same category (and sharing the same themes) as classical Chinese painting and poetry. But equally important from a musical standpoint was the fact that the literati liked to write things down, so they wrote down guqin music in great detail.

This written music tradiation began at least 1400 years ago, then as now this being descriptions of how certain pieces were played by such and such a person. By at least 800 years ago this system had evolved into a kind of shorthand tablature which copied down all the finger positions and strokes and much of the ornamentation. This was not like composing as we know it in Western music. This was more like transcribing a piece already played in the oral tradition. This is underlined by the fact that the tablature did not directly indicate note values: how long the notes were to be held. Players would learn the pieces by copying their teacher. They would remember the melodies, and so the tablature was mostly used used to help remember which positions, fingerings and ornamentations to use.

However, there did develop a tradition of trying to recover lost pieces from tablature. And since music idioms have their own internal logic, even without the direct indication of note values it is possible to recover much of the old music simply from the tablature. This eventually became the focus of my study of the guqin. I began in 1974 in Taiwan, studying the tradition as it has come up to the present. But at that time the active current repertoire was quite small. Once I had learned the 15 pieces, more or less, that my teacher played, that was about it, unless I tried to learn pieces from the old manuscripts. So I came to Hong Kong to consult the only accessible person I knew of (China was not very accessible in 1976) who had done work with old manuscripts.

Now today almost all the music I play is music I have reconstructed from tablatures surviving from 15th and 16th century publications; much of it quite likely was originally published in the 12th century or earlier. Have I reconstructed it accurately? Who is to say? When it is accurate it is recreating sounds last heard 500 or more years ago. When inaccurate it is my own new music. What could be more fun? Or a bigger contradiction?

This brings us back to one more reason why for me "new" can often mean "old". We have a pretty good idea of what 19th century compositions sounded like, and so in a way the musicians who play 19th century music have less leeway in interpretation than, say, musicians who are playing reconstructions of medieval music. At the beginning of the 20th century you would never hear performances of medieval music – even Gregorian chant was sung in four-part harmony. Medieval music was re-created by 20th century people, and I think one reason medieval music performances work is that these modern people put a lot of themselves into the music, making it new, at the same time following the ancient rules, creating a believable air of antiquity.

This is very much part of the aesthetic of the Chinese scholar. Music was always attributed to someone in the past. Even if someone changed an old piece of music, they would usually claim they were just reconstructing the way it must have been done in the first place. But no one could say for sure the way the music originally was, and so the eternally old was in fact new.

Further information related to this article, and information about John Thompson are available at www.SilkQin.com, the most detailed source of information on this Chinese musical instrument.