September 24, 2020 57
What China Sounded Like
Larry Wolff
the percentage of Black people in the
population, rather than asking what
prison is for and whether it should exist.
If whiteness is just a story about sin
and salvation, then it becomes a meta-
physical condition, outside history. One
of the bleakest recent books about race
is Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism.
“Blacks are not human subjects,” writes
Wilderson, “but are instead structur-
ally inert props, implements for the
execution of White and non- Black fan-
tasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.”
This ontological commitment to non-
being is, as Wilderson’s title indicates,
the counsel of despair. If Blacknessis necessary as the inferior pole to an
eternal, immutable dyad, nothing can
ever change. And where does that leave
the rest of us non- Black people of color,
rendered invisible in this schema? Are
we just subaltern tormentors, as we are
for Wilderson? For those who find this
answer unacceptable, race cannot beeverything, at least not in this abso-
lute, metaphysical sense. Nor can it be
nothing. The indecent haste with which
commentators rushed to praise Amer-
ica as a “post- racial society” after the
election of Barack Obama drew a lot of
hollow laughter at the time. The joke
has only worn thinner. QListening to China:
Sound and the Sino- Western
Encounter, 1770–1839
by Thomas Irvine.
University of Chicago Press,
263 pp., $55.00
On September 14, 1793, a British
envoy, George Macartney, appeared
for the first time before the Qianlong
Emperor, who ruled China from 1735
to 1796. The audience took place in a
ceremonial yurt at the mountain sum-
mer palace of the Qing emperors at
Chengde (or Jehol), close to their Man-
chu homeland north of the Great Wall,
and Qianlong’s arrival was heralded
by gongs and Chinese musicians. The
mission failed to obtain its principal
objectives—new trade concessions
and permanent British diplomatic rep-
resentation in China—but it could at
least claim a moral triumph: Macart-
ney insisted upon only kneeling rather
than prostrating himself in the kowtow
position, as was customary in the em-
peror’s presence.
For some members of Macartney’s
entourage, however, the most striking
aspect of the audience was musical. Jo-
hann Christian Hüttner described the
music that accompanied the enthrone-
ment of Qianlong: “The simple melody,
the clear succession of tones, the solemn
procession of a slow hymn gave my soul,
at least, the kind of élan that propels the
sensitive enthusiast into unknown re-
gions.” It made Hüttner think of Handel
and “put all of us, not expecting any-
thing of the kind, into a state of pleasant
astonishment.” What was unexpected
was not simply the beauty of the music
but the ways in which it recalled Eu-
ropean classical music. There was so
much that felt unfamiliar in China, but
music seemed to bridge the gap, to con-
nect cultures and sensibilities.
In his new book, Listening to China,
the musicologist Thomas Irvine exam-
ines how Europeans encountered and
responded to Chinese music from the
age of Enlightenment to the outbreak
of the First Opium War between China
and Britain in 1839. Irvine, however,
goes beyond music and, following what
scholars have called the “sonic turn,”
has attempted to conjure an auditory
world of “soundscapes” as reported by
“earwitnesses.” The historical past, as
discovered in the documentary sources,
has been more readily seen than heard,
and the field of “sound studies” seeks
to remedy that imbalance.
For Irvine the crucial task is to dis-
solve, in part, the distinction between
performed music and quotidian noise,
both of them registering on the human
ear but not always clearly distin-
guished. One of the points he persua-
sively makes is that for some Western
listeners, Chinese music was consid-
ered just noise. In a striking chapter
on the sounds of Canton—one of very
few places where foreigners could re-
side and trade with China until the
First Opium War—he notes the sounds
of gongs and firecrackers, and quotes
accounts of “screeching” Chinese
beggars and “screeching” Chinese
opera singers. He further observes
the incomprehensible mixing of lan-
guages that could make Canton sound
like “Babel”—not just Cantonese and
Mandarin, with their elusive tones that
Westerners could not even distinguish,
but also Malay, Bengali, European lan-
guages, and “pidgin” English.
Local music could be so distressing to
foreigners that at one musical evening
in a Chinese residence in the 1830s the
European guests brought cotton ear-
plugs “to protect themselves” from the
noise. This was far from Hüttner’s ex-
perience of Handelian elevation at the
imperial audience in 1793, and Irvine
notes the very different inclinations of
Europeans who wanted to shut out the
sounds of China (which he attributes
in part to a “proto- colonial” sense of
superiority) and those who recorded
their aural impressions with interest or
avidly sought to know more about Chi-
nese music from far away in Europe.
Matthew Raper, for example, a Brit-
ish Canton trader of the 1770s, learned
to play the erhu, a Chinese folk fiddle
with two strings and no frets or fret-
board. Trimmed with a piece of pythonskin, played with a horsehair bow, its
strings tuned at an interval of a musi-
cal fifth, the erhu produces a plaintive,
eerie, throbbing sound that you could
still hear today from a street musician
in a public park in China—or even in
Central Park in New York. Raper ob-
served that “on account of having no
finger board you must press the strings
very hard.... I have performed 4 of
their tunes as well as many English
airs on it.” His engagement with Chi-
nese music—playing Chinese reper-
tory, even performing sometimes with
a Chinese band—is suggestive of the
level of commitment to cultural dia-
logue that existed within the world of
the Enlightenment.
One of the important figures in Ir-
vine’s book is the leading British music
historian of the age, Charles Burney,
who never went to China but did cor-
respond with Raper. Burney prepared
a questionnaire about Chinese music
for the members of Macartney’s mis-
sion to take with them. He even helped
choose a group of five wind players,
two of whom could also play string in-
struments, to accompany the mission.
Qianlong was interested in copying the
wind instruments, and, according to
Macartney, an officialsent for a couple of painters, who
spread the floor with a few sheets
of large papers, placed the clari-
nets, flutes, bassoons and French
horns upon them, and then traced
with their pencils the figures of
the instruments, measuring all the
apertures.Qianlong conceived of himself as a
universal ruler and entertained accord-
ingly vast cultural aspirations; he was
an accomplished poet, a collector of
jade and paintings, and the sponsor of
a vast edition of Chinese literary clas-
sics in more than 30,000 volumes. We
have no reason to suppose that he was
impressed by hearing the wind band
play “God Save the King,” and no rea-
son to suppose that anyone in Macart-
ney’s group understood that a Chinese
opera composed just for them, about an
epic struggle against a giant sea turtle
to allow the English envoys to return
home across the ocean, was being per-
formed in their honor.
The historian James Hevia, in his
influential study Cherishing Men from
Afar (1995), described the Macartney
mission as the encounter between two
mutually incompatible and incom-
prehensible imperial perspectives.
Macartney was the man who first said
that “the sun never sets” on the British
Empire, while Qianlong, in response
to the mission, sent a letter to George
III that declared, “Our dynasty’s ma-
jestic virtue has penetrated unto every
country under heaven, and Kings of all
nations have offered their costly tribute
by land and sea.” Irvine suggests that
the musical encounter at Chengde in
1793 reflected some of that imperial
incompatibility, but also some possi-
bilities for accommodation. The wind
band did not return to England with
Macartney; its five members stayed be-
hind in Canton and disappeared from
British history to become part of the
musical soundscape of China. At al-
most the same time, in 1791, the Chi-
nese gong, or tam- tam, made its first
recorded appearance in a European
orchestra, in François- Joseph Gossec’s
funeral march for the comte de Mira-
beau, a hero of the French Revolution.Wind bands were newly important
for classical music in late- eighteenth-
century Europe. Haydn and Mozart
created stunning works for bands of six
to eight wind instruments harmonizing
in parts, culminating in Mozart’s seven-
movement Gran Partita Serenade in B-
flat. The Hungarian Esterházy princes,
Haydn’s patrons, and Emperor Joseph
II, Mozart’s Viennese sovereign, kept
wind bands in attendance, and at that
time the clarinet was utterly modern,
only just beginning to achieve its or-
chestral importance.
The presence of a clarinet in China
among the harmonizing of the wind
instruments was meant to demon-
strate the progress of European clas-
sical music. Yet Burney, based on his
very incomplete knowledge of ChineseFragments of a silk painting from the Astana Tombs, Xinjiang, China, circa 200 – 800Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images