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The Asheville Scholar Blues
To students at the Asheville School
Thank you for your warm reception to my Founder's Day recital. After living overseas for so many years, I was nervous about visiting the school again, and introducing it to my wife, Suzanne, but we enjoyed every minute. You have a wonderful school.
Here I would like to answer more fully the question asked me about improvisation. I said that I had little experience with it, and that I knew of no tradition of improvising on the qin, but that there was no reason it could not be done.
Had there been more time I might have added that, with the aim of learning improvisation, I have put several qin melodies and melodic materials into 12-bar blues structures. My hope is that if I play these arrangements often enough, I'll start to be able to do improvisations on them. The direct inspiration for doing this was speaking several years ago with the guitarist John McLaughlin about his work with Indian musicians. He said that, since a basic part of jazz is improvisation within structured melodies and rhythms, and classical Indian music is based on improvising within modal and rhythmic structures, a jazz musician who can learn the basic Indian structures can do wonderful improvisations together with classical Indian musicians. Traditional Chinese music does not have such structures.
Several times I have played my qin blues creations for Chinese qin players, without telling them what I was playing. They don't know 12-bar blues structures (and in any case my use of them seems somewhat subtle), but do know that everything else they have heard me play was my own reconstruction from ancient notation, and that the modality of that music is in some ways different from that of modern qin music. For this reason, they assumed that what I was playing was another of my reconstructions.
My first effort was China Scholar Blues. In case you find its lyrics somewhat obscure, I have adapted the first verse to make an Asheville Scholar Blues. The top staff has the sung melody, the bottom one has the first of four arrangements I have made to accompany the melody.
I'd be interested to hear any feedback from you about this, or anything else on my website.
Best wishes,
John Thompson
May 2002