MCLC: Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013)
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I am forwarding the following obituary of Rulan Chao Pian, who died on
November 30 in Cambridge, Mass. The obituary was circulated on the
Chinoperl list and was written by Bell Yung, Joseph Lam, and Siu Way Yu.

Kirk 

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Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013)

Rulan Chao Pian, an eminent scholar of Chinese music, an influential
Chinese language teacher, and a mentor to students and younger colleagues
in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and North America, died peacefully on November
30, 2013 at the age of 91 in her Cambridge home.

Much respected and dearly beloved, Pian shaped many academic careers and
lives in America and China. Her seminal publications, public lectures, and
personal guidance expanded the intellectual scope of Chinese music
studies; her many decades of Chinese language teaching laid the foundation
for a generation of scholars who went on to establish the field of Chinese
studies in North America; her mentorship nurtured students inside and
outside Harvard University, where she taught from 1947 through 1992.

Pian’s Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources and Their Interpretation (1967; 2003
reprint) was a path-breaking work in both Historical Musicology and
Sinology, and it received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American
Musicological Society as the best scholarly book that year on music
history. Her extensive fieldwork in Taiwan on Peking Opera during the
1960s resulted in a series of critically important research papers in the
early 1970s. When Mainland China opened its doors to foreign scholars, she
began fieldwork there on narrative songs and folksongs and published
several seminal papers on those subjects. Other distinguished recognitions
include selection as a Fellow of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 1994) and
Honorary Member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2004), as well as
numerous Honorary Professorships and Fellowships in China, Taiwan and Hong
Kong.

She began teaching career at Harvard University in 1947 as a Chinese
language teaching assistant, later being promoted to instructor, lecturer,
and professor; through her tutelage, and using as textbook her own A
Syllabus for the Mandarin Primer (1961), she set her students on their way
to becoming influential Sinologists. In 1961 she started teaching courses
related to Chinese music, and later began mentoring graduate students in
the Departments of Music and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
In1974 she was appointed Professor in both departments, one of the first
women professors at Harvard, a position she held until 1992, when she
retired as Professor Emerita. In 1975-78 she and her husband Theodore H.
H. Pian were appointed Co-Housemasters of South House (now Cabot House),
the first ethnic minorities to hold such a position at Harvard. After her
retirement, she devoted her time almost entirely to the compilation and
editing of the complete works of her father, the pre-eminent linguist and
composer Yuen Ren Chao, published as the 20-volume Zhao Yuanren Quanji
(2002). 

 
Rulan Chao Pian was born on April 20, 1922, in Cambridge Massachusetts,
where her father was teaching at Harvard at the time.  As a child, Pian’s
family moved often, living in various cities in China as well as in Paris,
and in Washington D.C.  When she was age 16, her father, Y. R. Chao, moved
the family back to the U.S. for good, where her father taught for brief
periods at the University of Hawaii, Yale, Harvard, and -- eventually
permanently in -- at the University of California at Berkeley from 1947
until his retirement in 1962. Pian settled in Cambridge where she received
a B.A. (1944) and M.A. (1946), both in Western music history, from
Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. (1960) in East Asian Languages and in
Music, from Radcliffe-Harvard. In 1945 she married Theodore Hsueh-Huang
Pian, who later became himself an eminent Professor of Aeronautics and
Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his
retirement in 1989; he died in 2009 at the age of 91. They had one
daughter, Canta Chao-po Pian.

In 1969, Rulan Chao Pian and several prominent Chinese scholars in North
America, including her father, founded the Conference on Chinese Oral and
Performing Literature (CHINOPERL), a scholarly organization devoted to the
research, analysis and interpretation of oral and performing traditions,
broadly defined, and their relationship to China's culture and society.
She was also a charter member of the Association for Chinese Music
Research, founded in 1975. Until shortly before she died Pian was serving
tirelessly as the inspiration, guiding spirit, and enthusiastic supporter
of both organizations.

Pian’s interest in Chinese music fell into two main areas: music history
and the study of traditional musical genres of modern China. Each of these
two fields demands a different set of theories, methods, and source
materials. Her study of history adheres to a long tradition of historical
musicology at Harvard University, as well as to the centuries-old
tradition of historical studies among Chinese scholars. She consulted
sources exhaustively in Harvard’s own Yenching Library, as well as
libraries and archives in Japan and Taiwan. (Mainland China was
inaccessible at the time.) Her interest in modern China placed her among
the ranks of ethnomusicologists and took her on field trips to Taiwan, and
later after the opening of the Mainland, to many parts of China. In the
early 1970s she was among the first ethnomusicologists to embrace the
latest technology of videotaping in her ethnographic work. The result was
a rare and precious collection of videotapes of traditional performances
that she captured in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, before they underwent
metamorphosis like China itself.

A common thread running through Pian’s diverse research projects was her
theoretical interest in musical notation and its relation to issues of
transcription, analysis, performance practice, and the social contexts of
music. For example, her study of Chinese music history was accompanied by
detailed and careful research into historical systems of notation and the
issues that arose when these old notations, which preserved compositions
from as early as the tenth century, were transcribed into modern notation.
Her study of the traditional music of modern China focused to a great
extent on the recording, transcription, and analysis of repertory from the
oral and performing traditions.

Pian’s music associates may not realize that she made two other important
contributions to Chinese studies outside the area of music – contributions
that in turn exerted a significant influence on her musicological
orientation and thinking. The first of these was in linguistics and
language teaching. Under the influence of her illustrious father, and
through her long years of language teaching and self-study, she acquired a
strong linguistic training and developed her own pedagogical method. Such
intimate knowledge of the workings of a language and of linguistic
theories provided her with insights into the workings of music and of
music research, which are reflected in several of her publications, the
most notable being the substantial research paper “Text Setting with the
Shipyi Animated Aria” (1972).

Straddling the realms of language and music was the second of Pian’s
contributions, namely her research into the nature of and the issues
related to the oral and performing literature. Although the Chinese people
have placed great emphasis on the written word since antiquity, they also
developed and preserved rich traditions of oral literature, ranging from
elaborate and complex systems of drama and narrative to simple, short,
idiomatic sayings. Spoken words have performative and musical dimensions
that are suppressed when these words are represented in written form.
These dimensions – tonal inflections, rhythmic patterns, dynamic levels,
timbral manipulations – must be taken into consideration if oral
literature is to be fully appreciated and evaluated. Chinese oral
literature, which broadly defined includes the performative aspects of
everyday speech, has served the literary and artistic aspirations of the
majority of China’s illiterate and semi-literate population for centuries;
yet, until recently, it failed to receive the scholarly attention it
deserves. To rectify that neglect, CHINOPERL was created, thus recognizing
the importance of oral literature not only in its own right but also as an
indispensable medium through which popular culture can be explored. Music
specialists tend to ignore such literature because it has not been labeled
as “music” and does not sound particularly “musical” to their ears. Pian
was among the first to study such literature from a musicological
perspective. No one disputes the fact that speech and music are wedded in
song; Pian showed that there is also music in speech.

Pian’s lively mind, warm personality, and generous disposition nurtured
many young scholars and inspired others who crossed her path. To students
who worked with her closely, she set an example not only of how to be
scholars and teachers, but also how to live fully, joyously, humbly, and
generously. Pian made it clear to her students that her home and her
private library were open for them to visit at any time, whether for a
brief stop or an extended stay of a few months or more. Ever inviting,
ever stimulating, the house in Cambridge that she shared with her husband
Ted for over half a century was filled with friends and colleagues.
Visitors remember countless hours of discussion in her study, around the
fireplace in the living room, or over food at the dining room table, often
extending into the wee hours of the morning, when she would magically
bring out more food for xiaoye. Even more than the content of the
discussions, visitors remember the way in which she expressed ideas, asked
questions, stated propositions, and forwarded counter-arguments—quietly,
gently, persuasively, leaving strong and everlasting impressions on her
students and friends. Later in the 1980s, these occasions were formalized
into monthly gatherings called Kangqiao Xinyu (New Dialogues in
Cambridge), organized by her and her former student (and later close
friend) the writer and poet Loh Waifong. In these gatherings, notable
local scholars and those visiting from China were invited to give
presentations to the concerned community in Cambridge on a great variety
of subjects related to China. The gatherings would attract a huge crowd,
sometimes numbering up to 50 or 60, completely filling every seat and
square foot of floor of their spacious living room. Then Pian would bring
out an enormous pot of hongdou xifan (red bean porridge) to nourish the
body and warm the heart.

As a teacher, Pian’s influence reached far beyond her Harvard classrooms
and her Cambridge home: she broadened the intellectual horizon of a
generation of music scholars in China. Pian was the first music scholar
from the West to lecture in China after the establishment of the Peoples
Republic when she visited in 1980, and in the following years and decades
she continued to visit regularly and frequently. In formal lectures and
informal gatherings, she introduced her Chinese colleagues and students to
contemporary Western theories and methods of research in musicology and
ethnomusicology, to recent scholarship in Chinese music outside of China,
and to her own work. Along with ideas, she also brought gifts of books and
recordings, as well as the most advanced electronic equipment, which she
would leave in China for her colleagues. Through Pian, a generation of
Chinese scholars gained a broader perspective on musical scholarship than
would otherwise have been available to them. In 2009, she donated almost
the entirety of her personal collection, including over 5,500 items of
audio-visual material and 250 boxes of books and notes to the library of
the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Pian is survived by her three younger sisters, Nova Huang of Changsha,
China, Lensey Namioka of Seattle, and Bella Chiu of Arlington MA; her
daughter Canta (and husband Michael Lent) of Washington D.C., and her
granddaughter Jessica Lent of New York City.

Bell Yung, University of Pittsburgh
Joseph S. C. Lam, University of Michigan
Siu Wah Yu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
December 8, 2013