58 The New York Review
music, did understand the traditional
importance of the monophonic single
musical line, and therefore concluded
that Chinese ears could not properly
appreciate principles of harmony. He
made this observation in a condescend-
ing footnote in 1789:
The Chinese, allowed to be the
most ancient and longest civilised
people existing, are displeased
with harmony, or Music in parts;
it is too confused and complicated
for ears accustomed, after re-
peated trials, to simplicity.Burney was deeply curious about Chi-
nese music and interested in questions
of cultural difference, but implicitly be-
lieved in the superior standard of Euro-
pean classical music.
The burning musical question about
China during the age of Enlightenment
was whether Chinese and European
music converged in some universal ap-
preciation of the principles of harmony,
pleasing to all human ears—as, for
instance, when Hüttner admired the
Handelian qualities of Qianlong’s mu-
sicians. The leading advocate of a uni-
versal music was the French composer
Jean- Philippe Rameau, who in a mu-
sical treatise of 1760 insisted that Chi-
nese music measured the mathematical
vibrations of musical sound in exactly
the same intervals as the European har-
mon ic s c a le. A s w it h so ma ny En l ig hten-
ment insights into China, this one could
be traced—in Rameau’s footnote—to
a brilliant Jesuit. Father Jean- Joseph
Amiot had been living in China since
1750, translated European languages for
Qianlong, composed a French–Manchu
dictionary, discovered the Chinese yo-
yo or diabolo, and sent back to Europe
Chinese musical instruments, includ-
ing a wind instrument called the sheng.
Burney tried to play the sheng himself
and found its tone “more sweet and del-
icate” than European woodwinds.
Rameau’s conviction of universal
harmony received its most spectacular
demonstration in his opera- ballet Les
Indes galantes, whose settings ranged
from Turkey and Persia to the imag-
ined domains of “savage” America. It
was performed in Paris in 1735—the
same year that Qianlong ascended
the throne in Beijing—and was one
of the most celebrated works of the cen-
tury. It returned to the Bastille Opera
in Paris in the fall season of 2019, with
the French- Senegalese choreographer
Bintou Dembélé bringing elements of
hip- hop and voguing to her interpreta-
tion of Rameau’s spectacle of Enlight-
enment anthropology. “I chose various
dances like these that have come from
the street to the stage,” explained Dem-
bélé, who found Rameau, the quintes-
sential composer of the ancien régime,
fully adaptable to the operatic sensibil-
ities of the twenty- first century.
The Enlightenment coined the word
“civilization,” and philosophers of the
time believed that it could be applied
as a universal standard. The island peo-
ples of the South Pacific encountered on
the voyages of Captain Cook were often
seen as primitive and remote from civili-
zation, but China, though undeniably re-
mote from Europe, was also undeniably
civilized. For Burney it was a troubling
paradox that the Chinese—“the most
ancient and longest civilised people ex-
isting”—did not appreciate European
musical harmony. When he inspected a
Chinese instrument in Paris, a sort of
dulcimer (probably sent by Amiot), he
scrupulously noted, “There are but 17
notes on it—It has no semitones that I
could find, and but five sounds from a
note to its octave.”
While there were Enlightenment phi-
losophers who wondered if the Chinese
had no God, that question was posed
with less fervor and interest than the
musical question of whether Chinese
music had semitones—that is, the black
keys as well as the white keys on the Eu-
ropean piano for a total of twelve semi-
tones in a musical octave, rather than
a five- tone “pentatonic” scale. Hüttner
concluded, following the Macartney
mission, “that the Chinese, in playing
on instruments, discovered no knowl-
edge of semi- tones, nor did they seem
to have any idea of counterpoint, or
parts in music.” Yet Burney was cer-
tain that the sheng was quite capable
of playing semitones, and therefore the
urgent question about the Chinese was:
If they were capable of playing semi-
tones and achieving classical harmony,
why didn’t they? Irvine shows that in
the early nineteenth century, this ques-
tion was shaped by German music his-
torians into a narrative of stagnation in
which the Chinese were stigmatized for
being stuck in an earlier stage of mu-
sical development, unable to attain the
complexities of classical style exempli-
fied by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who radi-
cally doubted the value of all civiliza-
tion and believed that “savages” were
happier in the “state of nature” than
modern men and women in civilized
cities, also affirmed that simple music
might be more beautiful than complex
harmony. In his Dictionnaire de mu-
sique (1768) he published two lines of
an “Air Chinois” on the musical staff—
basically pentatonic in its simplicity—
which became immediately hummable
for thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Burney wondered whether Rousseau’s
melody resembled the music of the
Highland Scots, reflecting a common
primitivism, and Johann Gottfried
Herder promoted the idea of the un-
complicated folk song as an ancient
and admirable form of music, different
from culture to culture but globally om-
nipresent. “Noble simplicity” became
the slogan of the musical revolution in-
troduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck
in the 1760s and 1770s, with operas like
Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste.
Rousseau’s “Air Chinois” was con-
sidered an authentic document of an-
cient Chinese folk music, and it was
taken up forty years later by the Ger-
man composer Carl Maria von Weber
as the theme for an overture and in-
cidental music to Friedrich Schiller’s
translation of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot,
performed in Stuttgart in 1809. Weber
begins in all simplicity by introducing
Rousseau’s five- note melody on the
flute, and then enriches it with the dif-
ferent timbres of the orchestra.
Turandot was destined for a very
different operatic incarnation in the
1920s as Giacomo Puccini’s final and
incomplete opera. Representing a fic-
tional Chinese imperial court even
more intimidating than the one that
confronted Macartney in 1793, Pucci-
ni’s Turandot made use of pentatonic
scales, Chinese folk tunes, and Chinese
percussion effects produced by gongs
and xylophones, deploying supposed
authenticity to create a masterpiece ofoperatic Orientalism. In March 2020,
as the epicenter of the Covid pandemic
moved from China to Italy, a group of
young Chinese opera singers, trained
in Italian conservatories, created a mu-
sica l a f fi r mation of sol ida r it y w ith Ita ly,
singing from their isolation an online
collective performance of the tenor
aria “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot.
The Sino- Western musical encounter,
as Irvine rightly observes, belongs to
a global music history, and it remains
complex and entangled right up to the
present.Irvine concludes his study with the
First Opium War (1839–1842), which
completely altered relations between
China and the West, not only permitting
the British to continue peddling opium
but also compelling the establishmentof treaty ports and expanding beyond
Canton (as the Macartney mission had
wished) the European diplomatic and
economic prerogatives in China. If Ir-
vine’s book had been extended just a
bit beyond the Opium War, it would
have had to include the most celebrated
European literary work on Chinese
musical sensibility: Hans Christian
Andersen’s Danish fairy tale “The
Nightingale” (1843). Children across
late- nineteenth- century Europe knew
the tale of the almighty emperor who
made the almost fatal musical mistake
of favoring a bejeweled mechanical bird
over the living nightingale that dwelled
in his imperial gardens. The Macartney
mission had had the idea of presenting
Qianlong with a mechanical barrel
organ, but soon discovered that he al-
ready possessed an astonishing col-
lection of musical automata, including
marvelous musical clocks that are still
on view today in the Forbidden City.
In the fairy tale the imperial Chinese
sensibility is profoundly susceptible to
music but is compromised by a failure
to appreciate musical authenticity.
In 1910, in an extraordinary enter-
prise of soundscape engineering, thirty
Chinese nightingales were released in
the Stadtpark of Vienna—“to make
their home there, and teach the native
birds some of the bird- songs of the Ce-
lestial Empire.” The “earwitness” was
the Moravian soprano Maria Jeritza,
who imagined the cross- cultural en-
counter from the perspective of the
birds:To see the small olive- green birds
hesitate on the threshold of their
cage- door when it was opened, and
take a preliminary peep into thisnew world... the instinct which
told them they were very, very far
from home, in a strange land and
among strange people.... Soon all
were fluttering about the trees and
some of them, courageous little
souls, actually began to celebrate
their release in song.Like the wind band members left be-
hind in China by the Macartney mis-
sion in 1793, the nightingales would
learn to make music within an alien
soundscape—or so Jeritza imagined.
She would go on to make a spectacu-
lar impression when she introduced the
title role of Puccini’s Turandot at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York in
1926.
When the nightingales were released
in the imperial city in 1910, they could
still be imagined as envoys of the Chi-
nese emperor, in the spirit of Hans
Christian Andersen, but the Qing em-
perors, the descendants of Qianlong,
were about to be toppled by the Chi-
nese Revolution of 1911, soon to be
followed by the dethroning of the Vien-
nese Habsburg emperors in 1918. Half
a century later, during the Chinese Cul-
tural Revolution of 1966–1976, Maoists
denounced and banned Western music
as a lingering symptom of past foreign
domination. Before Lu Hongen, the
conductor of the Shanghai Symphony,
was put to death in 1968, he suppos-
edly asked his cellmate someday to “go
to Vienna, go to Beethoven’s grave...
and tell him that his Chinese disciple
was humming the Missa solemnis as he
went to his execution.”
Beethoven is regularly and enthusias-
tically performed today in post- Maoist
China, and the Cultural Revolution is
rarely discussed, but one musical relic
of that decade may still be heard every
hour from the clocktower bells of the
former British Customs House on the
Huangpu River in Shanghai. Instead
of the Westminster Chimes, the bells
play “Dong Fang Hong” (“The East Is
Red”), the Maoist anthem, based on a
pentatonic folk tune. The musicologist
Barbara Mittler, in A Continuous Rev-
olution (2012), has written about the
pervasive significance of “Dong Fang
Hong” for the Cultural Revolution;
the song even gave its name in 1970 to
China’s first satellite, which was able to
broadcast the tune from outer space.
In its simplicity it would have been im-
mediately recognized as “Chinese” by
Rousseau and Burney in the eighteenth
century.
The Aurora Museum in contem-
porary Shanghai—on the modern
Pudong side of the river, facing the
Customs House on the other side—
contains one of China’s great private
art collections; it includes a marvel-
ous series of sculptured musical bands
from the Tang dynasty, already a thou-
sand years old when Burney was study-
ing Chinese music. In one grouping, a
band of six terracotta female musicians
are captured in the act of music- making,
and we can appreciate the range of their
instruments, the poses of their playing,
and the intensity of their focus from
across more than a millennium. Yet
as our eyes appreciate the beauty of
the Tang sculptures, our ears strain to
hear the harmonies or dissonances, the
rhythms and dynamics, that remain tan-
talizingly elusive, a music forever mute
to us. The sonic turn in monographs like
Irvine’s helps us begin to recover some
of the sound world we have lost. QCharles Burney; portrait by
Joshua Reynolds, 1781National Portrait Gallery, London