Picken, Laurence (Ernest Rowland)

(b Nottingham, 16 July 1909). English musicologist. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge as a scholar of Trinity College (BA 1931, MA 1935, PhD 1935, DSc 1952), becoming a Fellow of Jesus College in 1944. He became assistant director of research in zoology at the university (1946–66). His research into Asian music dates from 1944 when as a member of the British Council Scientific Mission to China he had the opportunity of studying the ch'in (board zither) with Hsü Yuan-pai and Cha Fu-hsi. From 1951 he frequently visited Turkey, collecting instruments and related data on Turkish art and folk music. He studied the kanun (board zither) with Nejdet Senvarol (1951) and the baglama (lute) with Saz Evi (1953), both in Istanbul. After acting as Walter Ames Visiting Professor of Zoology at Washington University, Seattle (1959), Picken was appointed assistant director of research at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge (1966–76). During this time he was also an editor of the Journal of the International Folk Music Council (1961–3) and founder-editor of Musica asiatica (1977–84). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy (1973), Docteur Honoris Causa of the Université de Paris X, Nanterre (1988), and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College (1989) and Trinity College (1991), Cambridge, and of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1991). He received the Trail Medal and Award of the Linnean Society in 1960 and the Curt Sachs Award of the American Musical Instrument Society in 1995; he has also been honoured with two Festschriften, the first one on the occasion of his 60th birthday (Asian Music, vi/1–2, 1975, ed. F.A. Kuttner and F. Lieberman) and the second one honouring his 70th birthday (Music and Tradition: Essays on Asian and other Musics presented to Laurence Picken (ed. D.R. Widdess and R.F. Wolpert, Cambridge, 1981); for a list of his publications on music see CHIME: Journal of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research, iv, 1991, pp.63–5).

Picken's particular areas of musical research are China and Turkey, though he has also directed attention to other regions of Asia, including Central Asia, South-east Asia, Korea and Japan. The main emphases of his work are historical and organological. The latter is characterized by a scientific approach which embraces a range of aspects such as terminology and taxonomy, manufacturing processes, regional distribution, historical relationships, acoustic properties, ritual connotations or functions, repertory and technique. This work culminated in The Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (1975), the most comprehensive study of Turkish instruments (and perhaps of any folk instrumentarium); it is organized according to the Sachs–Hornbostel system of classification, and includes a defence of that system with reference to scientific taxonomy. Smaller studies of organological problems have appeared in the pages of Musica asiatica.

Picken's early studies of Chinese music concentrate on the music of the Tang and Song dynasties, and particularly on the transcription, analysis and cultural history of notated repertories in Tang and Song sources. The search for further records of the secular court repertory of Tang dynasty China led him to investigate the Tōgaku (‘Tang music’) repertory of Japan. Recognizing similarities between the historical scores of Tōgaku (from the 9th century onwards), Chinese notations of Tang and Song date, Chinese song lyrics from the Tang period, and musical idoms of Central Asia (where much of the Tang court repertory originated), he concluded that the Japanese belief that the Tōgaku repertory was imported from Tang China to Japan is correct; however, transformations in performing practice – including a substantial retardation of tempo – occurred after its arrival in Japan. From 1972 he established a ‘Tang Music Project’ to undertake the elaboration of this hypothesis and the analysis of the earliest Tōgaku scores; transcriptions of the latter, analyses of the music, and evidence for the history of the music from Chinese and Japanese sources, are brought together in the multi-volume Music from the Tang Court (1981–). The first volume of this series contains a full statement of the objectives and methods of this project, perhaps the most extensive yet undertaken in the historical musicology of Asia. In October 1990, Picken and N.J. Nickson were guests of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where they supervised a performance of his transcriptions of Tang and song music.

WRITINGS

‘Bach Quotations from the Eighteenth Century’, MR, v (1944), 83–95

‘A Fugue by “Bach”’, PRMA, lxxvi (1949–50), 47–57

‘Instrumental Polyphonic Folk Music in Asia Minor’, PRMA, lxxx (1953–4), 73–86

‘The Origin of the Short Lute’, GSJ, viii (1955), 32–42

‘Twelve Ritual Melodies of the T'ang Dynasty’, Studia memoriae Belae Bartók sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956; Eng. trans., 1959), 147–73

‘Chiang K'uei's Nine Songs of Yüeh’, MQ, xliii (1957), 201–19

‘The Music of Far Eastern Asia’, NOHM, i (1957), 83–194; part I repr. as ‘Chinese Music’, Readings in Ethnomusicology, ed. D.P. McAllester (New York, 1971), 336ff

‘A Note on Ethiopic Church Music’, AcM, xxix (1957), 41–2

‘Three-Note Instruments in the Chinese People's Republic’, JIFMC, xii (1960), 28–30

‘Musical Terms in a Chinese Dictionary of the First Century’, JIFMC, xiv (1962), 40–43

‘Early Chinese Friction-Chordophones’, GSJ, xviii (1965), 82–9

‘Secular Chinese Songs of the Twelfth Century’, SMH, viii (1966), 125–71

ed., with E. Dal and E. Stockmann: A Select Bibliography of European Folk Music (Prague, 1966)

‘Central Asian Tunes in the Gagaku Tradition’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 545–51

‘The Musical Implications of Line-Sharing in the Book of Songs (Shih Ching)’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, lxxxix (1969), 408–10

‘Music and Musical Sources of the Sonq Dynasty’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, lxxxix (1969), 600–21

‘T'ang Music and Musical Instruments’, T'oung pao, lv/1–3 (1969), 74–122

‘Tunes Apt for T'ang Lyrics from the shō Part-books of Tōgaku’, Umakhak ronch'ong: Yi Hye-Gv paksa song'su kinyom (Seoul, 1969), 401–20

‘Some Chinese Terms for the Musical Repeats, Sections, and Forms, Common to T'ang, Yüan, and Tōgaku Scores’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, xxxiv (1971), 113–18

‘A Twelfth-century Secular Chinese Song in Zither Tablature’, Asia Major, xvi (1971), 102–20

with K. Pont: Ancient Chinese Tunes (London, 1973)

with R.F. Wolpert, A. Marrett and J. Condit: ‘“The Waves of Kokonor”: a Dance-tune of the T'ang Dynasty’, AsM, v/1 (1973–4), 3

‘An Afghan Quail-lure of Typological and Acoustic Interest’, Festschrift to Ernst Emsheimer, ed. G. Hilleström (Stockholm, 1974), 172–5

Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London, 1975)

‘The Shapes of the Shi Jing Song-texts and their Musical Implications’, Musica asiatica, i (1977), 85–109

‘Some Children's Sound-Producing Toys and other “Primitive” Musical Instruments from Afghanistan’, Neue ethnomusikologische Forschungen: Festschrift Felix Hoerburger, ed. P. Baumann, R.M. Brandl and K. Reinhard (Laaber, 1977), 177–90

‘Medieval Musics of Asia’, PRMA, civ (1977–8), 57–66

with Y. Mitani: ‘Finger-Techniques for the Zithers sō-no-koto and kin in Heian Times’, Musica asiatica, ii (1979), 89–114

ed., with others: Music from the Tang Court (Cambridge, 1981–) [7 vols., 1981–2000]

‘Tang Music and its Fate in Japan’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 191–206

with R. Wolpert: ‘Mouth-Organ and Lute Parts of Togaku and their Interrelationships’, Musica asiatica, iii (1983), 79–95

‘String/Table Angles for Harps, from the Third Millenium B.C. to the Present’, Musica asiatica, iii (1983), 35–51

‘T'ang Music and its Fate in Japan’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 191–206

‘The Sound-Producing Instrumentarium of a Village in North-East Thailand’, Musica asiatica, no.4 (1984), 245–70

with E. Markham and R. Wolpert: ‘Pieces for Biwa in Calendrically Correct Tunings, from a Manuscript in the Heian Museum, Kyoto’, Musica asiatica, no.5 (1988), 191–209

with N.J. Nickson and M. Wells: ‘“West River Moon”: a Song-Melody Predicted by a Lute-Piece in Piba Tablature’, CHIME, x–xi (1997), 172–85

‘A Preliminary Note on Didactic Modal Expositions in the Late T'ang’, Essays in Ethnomusicology: an Offering in Celebration of Lee Hye-ku on his Ninetieth Birthday (Seoul, 1999), 567–81

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Perspectives on Asian Music: Essays in Honor of Dr. Laurence E.R. Picken’, AsM, vi (1975) [incl. list of writings]

F. Kouwenhoven: ‘An Interview with Laurence Picken: Bringing to Life Tunes of Ancient China’, CHIME, no.4 (1991), pp. 40–65 [incl. list of pubns on music, 63–5]

LUCY DURÁN/RICHARD WIDDESS