I believe that the same can be done with the music from early guqin tablature. Most people writing today about playing old guqin music from tablature mostly focus on how playing from old tablature is used as a way to make new compositions. This is certainly fine – there is nothing wrong with that. However, because I love very much early Western music, and know how important old written sources are to its modern development; and because I think that the information we have from guqin scores is comparable to the information that is in the old scores for Medieval and often for Renaissance Western music, because of this I have tried to focus on reconstructing the old rather than skipping the old to focus on doing the music in new ways.

However, more than anything else I want to emphasize that this is in no way a contradiction to the aims of using old guqin tablature to create new music. Instead it is a different way of looking how this can be done: how this ancient music can be used to create new Chinese music. As I mentioned, I have so far reconstructed over 300 guqin melodies from old tablature. Some of these pieces have also been interpreted by people playing only in the modern tradition of guqin. In this case, will their inspiration be not so much from the ancient tradition as, by extension, from the modern tradition? Personally I find the ancient traditions more interesting and innovative, but that is a personal opinion, and is certainly not a criticism of those who are developing the modern tradition.

Here my argument is not that it is better to have new compositions inspired by Ming dynasty music than it is to have new creations based on the current guqin tradition. My argument is that really what we should have is both.

Since 1991 I have been attending guqin conferences in China. There I usually talk about some issues dealing with reconstructing old music. I have talked about how during the Ming dynasty modes seemed to be determined by tonal centers, melodic structures including things like couplets, extended couplets, repeated musical contours, variations on musical motifs and so forth. As for the rhythms, I have done my reconstructions with the idea that the music has regular rhythms that are freely interpreted.

More about this in a minute, but first I would like to say a few things about how this kind of analysis could be important to creating new music, more specifically new Chinese music. Here I liked very much a lecture I heard recently from a Chinese calligrapher who is doing new style painting and calligraphy inspired by traditional Chinese techniques. He said that to do this, and to be sure that what you are doing is new art thoroughly based in the Chinese tradition, you need first to master the calligraphy and painting tradition well enough that you can be creative within that tradition. He might also have added that this was also how you could know when elements you add come from outside that tradition.

This seems very reasonable, but how do you apply it to music for which it is not possible directly to experience the original – all you have is tablature; there is no one around who knows how the original melody which led to the tablature was actually played. So what could be the equivalent to this calligraphy example within the guqin tradition?

Here I think the closest you might come would be if you could learn what the structures were in surviving early guqin music, and then make new music using those structures. New music that resulted from people learning these old structures would clearly be new music based in that tradition. Furthermore, new music based in that tradition could also result from people breaking away from these old structures but doing so in a way that showed an influence from having learned them.

Such music might be described as music that is expanding the tradition. It would be music that does more than add some Chinese flavor, or guqin flavor to what are basically Western compositions. If you take little from Chinese idioms when making new creations, instead using basically Western composition techniques, then isn't the result going to be music in a basically Western idiom but with Chinese flavor?

Once again, this is not a criticism of Western-inspired new Chinese music. Rather it is a suggestion that there are other ways to make new music that could be just as interesting.

Another possibility is to be like a truly "modern" "serious" composer and try to create your own musical language. Then, of course, you will have the problem of first getting people to learn your language before they can truly appreciate your music.

So now, perhaps what I should do is to talk in some detail about the structures I have found in early guqin music. But because I have done this a number of times over the past 30 years at conferences, mostly in China, and written about it extensively on my website, I would rather use this opportunity to give a few examples of some new music I have created myself.

Perhaps, also, one reason for playing rather than analyzing is that I am still formulating my ideas about this. I can make observations that may seem true to me, and they may be appropriate for the music I have reconstructed so far, but there is still so much more ancient music out there waiting to be discovered. And here I have to say, for me it is much more fun learning some ancient piece of music that hasn't been played in 500 years or so, and reading about the people who created it, than it is trying to explain my understanding the structures that seem to underlie that music. Especially when I have it in the back of my mind that this analysis should be done not by me, but by someone who is an expert on music analysis.

Finally, on structure the most fundamental issue here is, of course, the rhythm. I can talk about how the tablature can suggest rhythms, but basically the tablature itself does not directly indicate either note values (i.e., note lengths) or rhythm. The main argument about rhythm seems to be about whether there is none (otherwise why would the tablature not say something about it); or vvvabout whether every player can chose his or her own rhythm (nothing here is either right or wrong); or about whether then music has a pulse, in other words, perhaps a regular beat but not meter, 4/4, something like that. My own interpretations are largely based on the idea that the music does have a structure – perhaps I could add a structure logical enough that it helps you remember how to play the melody – but that the rhythms should be freely interpreted.

To sum up, if we really would like to come to a better understanding of this ancient treasure of Chinese music, what is needed is for a number of people to do what I have done, independently reconstruct a number of ancient melodies with the idea being to learn as much as possible about how the melody was originally played. Afterwards we should then get together and discuss how we came to our own personal understandings, then see if, from this, one can come to a consensus about how the melodies actually sounded.