Written instructions for micro-tuning of single notes on the qin in or before the Tang Dynasty as found in the earliest known qin manuscript and its impact on tuning methods, microtone intervals and unwritten vibrato.

Dominic 隐啸 Yin Xiao Eckersley, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2024

Abstract

Instructed micro-tuning of a single note on the qin can be seen from the very earliest moments of written musical composition, the first indication marking of the oldest known manuscript of qin music and, for that matter, the oldest substantial surviving playable manuscript known. 碣石調幽蘭 Jié Shí Diào Yōu Lán, ‘Stone Tablet Mode Secluded Orchid’, a composition, written down in the Tang Dynasty, and currently in Japan, lays before us a song probably from the mid to late Han Dynasty. The first two characters of the manuscript represent an instruction to micro-tune a pressed-string note to bring it—and each subsequent note at that hui (mother of pearl harmonic) marker—in tune with an open string until the request is neutralised, much as sharps and flats are neutralised in Western music. This paper demonstrates that the author of the 幽蘭 Yōu Lán manuscript tuned the qin using only open strings with string three as the primary tuning note, and not by using the method employing only harmonics. 

This paper demonstrates that tuning the fundamentals of strings (open strings), rather than harmonics, produces different—and more accurate—pitches of the open strings, in particular the overwound strings one and two, due to their being foreshortened, i.e. they are the same length as strings an octave higher but have a greater diameter to compensate. The harmonics at the 5th hui therefore are out of tune with the fundamental due to this inharmonicity. The tuning of open strings also allows for micro-tonal pitches to harmonics passages enabling partial-semitone step chromaticism as a result. This paper demonstrates that a repair was undergone to a torn portion of the beginning passage by a person who was indeed in possession of the torn segment of the scroll, and/or with very accurate knowledge of the performance of the piece. It resolves a long-standing question regarding a subsequently poorly corrected character in this section of the manuscript in addition to demonstrating that a kind of vibrato between unisons on open strings and/or with harmonics played on different strings, by way of the beating of their slightly out of tune partials, resulting from good pure fifth ‘pythagorean’ tuning, was a desired function of the music, while additional  unwritten vibrato, so common in the modern playing styles, is not only no longer required but countermands the clearly directed and desired purity of accurate internal intonation of pressed or open string notes, and also negating the affect of desirably mis-tuned unisons, both with, and without, harmonics.

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