搶救絕響音樂 ·1950年九月的無錫錄音傳奇Rescuing Music on the Verge of Extinction: The Legendary Wuxi Recordings of September 1950
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician AbingRescuing Music on the Verge of Extinction: The Legendary Wuxi Recordings of September 1950
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician Abing搶救絕響音樂 ·1950年九月的無錫錄音傳奇
中國的貝多芬·瞎子阿炳

In the summer of 1950, the Institute of National Music at the Central Conservatory of Music acquired a portable wire recorder—an extraordinarily rare piece of equipment at the time.

Unlike the tape recorders that came later, this machine recorded sound onto a spool of extremely fine magnetic steel wire. It was heavy, expensive, and difficult to operate, while the supply of recording wire was severely limited. Yet in an age before digital recording, when the music of folk artists was preserved primarily through oral transmission from teacher to student, this machine held the power to rescue a musician’s voice from the hands of death.

The first person who came to Yang Yinliu’s mind was Abing, the folk musician from his hometown of Wuxi who had fallen silent for many years.

Yang Yinliu had not merely heard Abing’s name in passing. He had known Abing since his youth, had once sought his guidance in the pipa and Taoist music, and had even referred to Abing as his “pipa teacher.” He understood that the blind man who had spent so many years performing on the streets of Wuxi was no ordinary street musician, but a folk artist with profound training in traditional music and an intensely individual style.

Li Songshou, meanwhile, was the crucial intermediary who helped bring the recording project into being.

He had grown up near Abing and had known him for nearly twenty years. As a young man learning the erhu, he had also received instruction from Abing. According to Li Songshou’s recollections in his later years, when he learned in 1950 that the Central Conservatory of Music had acquired a wire recorder, he told Yang Yinliu that Abing was old and frail and that his artistry might soon be lost forever. He urged Yang to record him as quickly as possible.

Yang Yinliu had already been planning to collect and record the folk music of Wuxi. At last, the rescue of Abing’s music was formally placed on the agenda.

In late August 1950, Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe returned to Wuxi from Tianjin.

At the time, Yang Yinliu headed the Institute of National Music at the Central Conservatory of Music and was one of the principal founders of modern Chinese traditional-music scholarship. Cao Anhe was a pipa performer and a scholar of Chinese national music, as well as Yang Yinliu’s longtime academic collaborator. What they brought back to Wuxi was that precious wire recorder.

Accompanied by Li Songshou and others, they met Abing, who had not performed regularly for a long time.

In the summer of 1950, the Institute of National Music at the Central Conservatory of Music acquired a portable wire recorder—an extraordinarily rare piece of equipment at the time.

Unlike the tape recorders that came later, this machine recorded sound onto a spool of extremely fine magnetic steel wire. It was heavy, expensive, and difficult to operate, while the supply of recording wire was severely limited. Yet in an age before digital recording, when the music of folk artists was preserved primarily through oral transmission from teacher to student, this machine held the power to rescue a musician’s voice from the hands of death.

The first person who came to Yang Yinliu’s mind was Abing, the folk musician from his hometown of Wuxi who had fallen silent for many years.

Yang Yinliu had not merely heard Abing’s name in passing. He had known Abing since his youth, had once sought his guidance in the pipa and Taoist music, and had even referred to Abing as his “pipa teacher.” He understood that the blind man who had spent so many years performing on the streets of Wuxi was no ordinary street musician, but a folk artist with profound training in traditional music and an intensely individual style.

Li Songshou, meanwhile, was the crucial intermediary who helped bring the recording project into being.

He had grown up near Abing and had known him for nearly twenty years. As a young man learning the erhu, he had also received instruction from Abing. According to Li Songshou’s recollections in his later years, when he learned in 1950 that the Central Conservatory of Music had acquired a wire recorder, he told Yang Yinliu that Abing was old and frail and that his artistry might soon be lost forever. He urged Yang to record him as quickly as possible.

Yang Yinliu had already been planning to collect and record the folk music of Wuxi. At last, the rescue of Abing’s music was formally placed on the agenda.

In late August 1950, Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe returned to Wuxi from Tianjin.

At the time, Yang Yinliu headed the Institute of National Music at the Central Conservatory of Music and was one of the principal founders of modern Chinese traditional-music scholarship. Cao Anhe was a pipa performer and a scholar of Chinese national music, as well as Yang Yinliu’s longtime academic collaborator. What they brought back to Wuxi was that precious wire recorder.

Accompanied by Li Songshou and others, they met Abing, who had not performed regularly for a long time.

Abing’s home was extremely humble. Its few pieces of furniture were broken and incomplete, and the place could almost be described as four bare walls. By then, Abing’s health had greatly deteriorated, and he had gone a long time without performing on the streets or practicing his instruments regularly.

According to the recollections of some who lived through those events, Abing’s old erhu had been left unused for so long that mice had gnawed through its snakeskin soundboard, rendering it unplayable; his pipa was no longer with him either.

Confronted by Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe, who had made the journey especially to see him, Abing was both excited and somewhat embarrassed.

He told them candidly that he had not played properly for a long time, that his hands had grown rusty, and that he was afraid he could no longer play well. He asked them to give him a few days to practice first.

Yang Yinliu and the others naturally understood.

They borrowed an erhu from the Zhongxing Musical Instrument Shop in Wuxi, while Cao Anhe lent Abing a treasured old pipa of her own. Abing restrung and tuned the instruments, then practiced for several days in succession, struggling to recover the feeling in his fingers and bowing arm.

Those few days may have seemed brief, but in truth they were Abing’s final contest with fate.

Those melodies had accompanied him through the streets and alleys of Wuxi. They had remained beside him through the long years of blindness, poverty, humiliation, and displacement. Now he had to awaken the music buried deep in his memory and gather it once more into his fingers and bow.

According to Li Songshou’s recollections in his later years, the formal recording session began at 7:30 on the evening of September 2, 1950, at Sansheng Pavilion near Wuxi Public Garden.

At the time, Sansheng Pavilion was used by the Wuxi Buddhist Association. Li Songshou’s father-in-law, Cao Peiling, was both a dentist and an active member of the association. To provide a relatively quiet place for the recording, he enthusiastically arranged for them to use a room inside the pavilion.

According to this version of events, eight people were present that evening.

Besides Abing, there was his wife, Dong Cuidi, who had long cared for and accompanied him. Blind and physically frail, Abing needed her not only to accompany him to the recording site; she was also the most important source of support in the final years of his life.

Yang Yinliu was the principal organizer of the recording project. He understood Abing’s art and recognized the value these compositions held for the study of Chinese national music.

Cao Anhe brought the wire recorder and was responsible for its care and operation. She understood not only recording technology but also the art of pipa performance. When the pipa pieces were later recorded, Abing played the old instrument she had lent him.

Li Songshou was an old acquaintance of Abing and the principal local coordinator in Wuxi. It was he who traveled back and forth among Abing, Yang Yinliu, and Cao Anhe, helping to locate instruments and arrange a recording venue.

Li Songshou’s wife, Cao Zhiwei, was also present. Musically knowledgeable, she had worked with Li Songshou to listen to Abing’s playing, transcribe his music, and check the resulting scores. She was a practical participant in this effort to rescue Abing’s musical legacy.

Cao Peiling provided the recording venue and was also a local supporter who cared deeply about Abing’s music. A little more than twenty days after the recordings were made, he presided over an event marking the establishment of the Wuxi Dentists Association and helped arrange the final public performance of Abing’s life.

Zhu Shikuang was a local musician familiar with Wuxi’s musical culture. He later wrote about how The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring received its name. As a witness to this episode in history, he also appeared on Li Songshou’s list of those present at the recording session.

Eight people, a small room, a blind musician whose body had been ravaged by illness and hardship, and a wire recorder of extraordinary value in its time—none of them knew that the sounds they were about to preserve would become some of the most precious in the history of Chinese music.

The recorder was carefully set in place, and the room gradually fell silent.

Abing sat upright in a chair, holding the borrowed erhu. As his bow drew out the first note, the melody that had accumulated within him over so many years began to flow once more.

It was not merely about moonlight and spring water.

Within that music was the grief and indignation of a man who had fallen from a gifted youth to a street performer; the anguish of losing his sight and never seeing light again; the humiliation of destitution and relentless abuse; and the dignity of a folk musician who refused to bow his head before fate.

At times the music sank into darkness; at others it surged with passion. It wept and pleaded, yet it was never merely sorrowful. It seemed to struggle, question, and resist again and again within the darkness, until everything Abing had been unable to express throughout his life was entrusted to the erhu in his hands.

The steel wire revolved slowly inside the recorder, preserving inch by inch the melody that would one day move countless listeners.

When the piece ended, the recorder played back what had just been captured.

According to Li Songshou, Abing was astonished and deeply moved when he heard his own erhu emerging from the machine. Feeling his way toward the recorder, he called Dong Cuidi and Li Songshou over to listen and repeatedly exclaimed that it truly was the sound he himself had just played.

This may have been the first time in Abing’s life that he had ever heard his own performance from outside himself.

Yang Yinliu asked him the name of the piece.

At first, Abing replied that it was merely something he had improvised during his years of playing on the streets and that it had never possessed a formal title. After thinking for a moment, he proposed calling it The Moon Imprinted on the Second Spring.

Yang Yinliu suggested replacing the character meaning “imprinted” with the character meaning “reflected,” believing that it would create a more vivid poetic image. Abing readily agreed.

From that moment on, the piece that had evolved and changed through Abing’s many years of performance, and which had previously possessed no formal title, acquired the name by which it would travel around the world:

The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring.

According to Li Songshou’s account, Abing also recorded two other erhu compositions that evening: Listening to the Pines and The Cold Spring Wind.

Listening to the Pines is lofty and impassioned, filled with a proud and unyielding heroic spirit; The Cold Spring Wind is profound and desolate, as though life amid the bitter wind were still waiting for spring. Together with The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring, these pieces preserved different dimensions of the spirit underlying Abing’s erhu artistry.

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The following day, using the old pipa lent to him by Cao Anhe, Abing recorded three pipa compositions: Great Waves Washing the Sand, Zhaojun Leaving the Frontier, and Dragon Boat.

Great Waves Washing the Sand is profound and vigorous; Zhaojun Leaving the Frontier is tragic, majestic, and far-reaching; while Dragon Boat is exuberant and unrestrained. These three compositions demonstrate that Abing was not only an outstanding erhu performer but also a pipa player of extraordinary depth and accomplishment.

The two recording sessions ultimately preserved three erhu pieces and three pipa pieces—a total of six priceless recordings.

However, the recollections left by the participants in their later years do not fully agree about the exact locations or sequence of these recordings.

Li Songshou recalled that the three erhu pieces were recorded at Sansheng Pavilion on the evening of September 2 and that the three pipa pieces were recorded at Cao Anhe’s home the following day. Cao Anhe, however, later remembered that the session took place on a rainy afternoon, with the pipa pieces recorded first and the erhu pieces afterward. Yang Guolan, the daughter of Yang Yinliu, also left an account that differs from the Sansheng Pavilion version.

After so many years, it has become extremely difficult to reach a single, definitive conclusion about these specific details.

One fact, however, remains beyond dispute:

In the early autumn of 1950, Yang Yinliu, Cao Anhe, Li Songshou, and others used a wire recorder to preserve six pieces performed by Abing himself. Whatever their precise recording sequence, and whichever rooms may have been used for particular compositions, these six sounds—rescued from the edge of death—were truly preserved in the human world.

Because recording wire and time were limited, and because Abing’s health had already become extremely fragile, the sessions could not preserve more of his repertoire. According to some recollections, other pieces may also have been recorded, but they were ultimately lost.

Those involved in the project originally hoped that, once they had obtained more recording wire, they could return and record more of Abing’s music.

But fate gave them no such opportunity.

A little more than twenty days after the recording, on September 25, 1950, Abing was invited to perform at an event celebrating the establishment of the Wuxi Dentists Association.

He appeared onstage and performed Dragon Boat, The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring, and other compositions. It was one of the very few formal stage appearances of Abing’s life and the last documented public performance he ever gave.

On December 4, 1950, only three months after the recordings were made, Abing died of illness in Wuxi at the age of fifty-seven.

He never lived to make a second recording.

Had Yang Yinliu, Cao Anhe, Li Songshou, and the others arrived only a few months later; had there been no wire recorder; or had Abing refused to perform because he had gone so long without practicing, then The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring, Listening to the Pines, Great Waves Washing the Sand, and the other six compositions might have vanished forever with Abing in the winter of 1950.

The history of Chinese national music would have lost a voice that could never be replaced.

This was no ordinary recording session.

It was a piece of a nation’s memory, rescued from the hands of fate by a group of people who understood the value of music—and who reached it just before death arrived.

(To be continued)