(b Wuxi, 10 Nov 1899; d Beijing, 25 Feb 1984). Chinese musicologist. Yang grew up under the influence of local styles of traditional music in Wuxi, learning instruments from Daoist priests (including Abing) from the age of six and joining the élite Tianyun she music society. He was a fine performer of Kunqu vocal music and the pipa (plucked lute). Under the tuition of the American missionary Louise Strong Hammond, he then studied both Christianity and Western music theory, attending St John’s University in Shanghai in 1923. He took up teaching, becoming professor of music at Chongqing, Shanghai and Nanjing during the troubled 1940s, and publishing many articles.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Yang’s erudition was much needed, and he became head of the newly-formed National Music Research Institute of the Central Conservatory of Music (now the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts). Until the mid-1960s, in collaboration with other fine scholars (notably his cousin Cao Anhe), he managed to do remarkable research on both folk and élite traditions, including Beijing temple music, further work on the ritual ensemble music of his home city Wuxi, a detailed fieldwork survey in Hunan, and major collections and transcriptions of traditional notation. Meanwhile his monumental history of Chinese music, first in draft from 1944, was published, covering the whole of Chinese music history, and élite as well as folk genres, with unique erudition, though couched in the language of its time.
Punished in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) like all academics and representatives of the ‘Four Olds’, he lived to see his history printed, and cultural and academic life restored to normal after the downfall of the Gang of Four. His deep historical knowledge and practical musicianship assure his seminal influence on Chinese music study today.
Zhongguo gudai yinyue shi gao [Draft history of ancient Chinese music] (Beijing, 1981)
Yang Yinliu yinyue lunwen xuanji [Selected articles by Yang Yinliu on music] (Shanghai, 1986)
and other resources
Han Kuo-huang: ‘Three Chinese Musicologists: Yang Yinliu, Yin Falu, Li Chunyi’, EthM, xxiv (1980), 483–529
Qiao Jianzhong and Mao Jizeng, eds.: Zhongguo yinyuexue yidai zongshi Yang Yinliu (jinian ji) [Yang Yinliu, master of Chinese musicology (commemorative collection)] (Taipei, 1992)
Chuancheng: Yang Yinliu bainian danchen jinian zhuanji/Heritage: in Memory of a Chinese Music Master Yang Yinliu, Wind Records TCD-1023 (2000)
STEPHEN JONES