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The Bamboo Organs of Nineteenth-Century Shanghai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
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References
1 Alexandre François Debain (1809–1877), inventor of the harmonium, who took out a patent for the instrument (as well as the trade name, harmonium) in Paris in August 1840 (some sources give 1842.) Debain's original instruments are very rare today. The lower part of the instrument has been attributed to Debain (see note 4, below), but as a result of examining the organ with me in December 2011, Thierry Maniguet, the museum's present curator, now doubts the instrument was originally by Debain (personal email communication, 30 January 2012.)
2 Choquet, Gustave, Le Musée du Conservatoire National de Musique: Catalogue raisonné des instruments de cette collection (Paris: Fischbacher, 1884): 241–242Google Scholar; and: Gétreau, Florence, Aux origines du Musée de la musique: les collections instrumentales du Conservatoire du Paris 1793–1993 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996)Google Scholar: 648. Also see online: http://mediatheque.cite-musique.fr/masc/?url=/clientbooklineCIMU/toolkit/p_requests/default-collection-musee.htm. Searching with the keyword, orgue, the instrument is item number 20. Accessed 25 May 2013. The inventory number is E.232, The maker is given an ‘anonymous’. It is, of course, a pipe organ (positive) and not a harmonium at all.
3 Bran-Ricci, Josiane, ‘Un don de l'empereur de Chine au prince impérial’, L'Harmonium, 2 (June 1992)Google Scholar: n.p. All translations, whether of published or unpublished material, are my own.
4 This erroneous idea appears to have started with the 1884 Choquet catalog entry: ‘Cet instrument moderne, offert au fils de Napoléon III par l'empereur de Chine en 1858, n'est autre chose qu'un harmonium de Debain transformé en orgue à tuyaux de bambou.’ (Choquet, , Le Musée du Conservatoire National de Musique, 241–242Google Scholar.)
5 This topic can only be mentioned in passing here. For a comprehensive look at what ‘globalization’ meant in the period leading up to the Second Opium War, see: Gunn, Geoffrey C., History without Borders: the making of an Asian World Region, 1000–1800 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Despite its intriguing appearance, the sheng (and the Japanese shō derived from it) are not pipe organs, or even the ancestors of pipe organs. They lack two of the three defining features of a pipe organ: a continuous artificial wind supply, and a mechanism for opening and closing the pipes from a distance.
7 Mendes used the term, orgaõs, which almost certainly in this context was the usual plural form meant to indicate a single instrument. See Irving, David R.M., Colonial Counterpoint: Music in early modern Manila (London: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 255n.
8 Irving, , Colonial Counterpoint, 55Google Scholar. It is always possible that these ‘organs’ were really a shō, the Japanese version of the sheng. Why else would Mendes have wanted to ‘touch [them] with his hands’, if it were not a hand-held instrument? If they were organs, they must have been portatives. Fr. Diego Yuuki, the late director of the Jesuit Residence Museum in Nagasaki, referred to the organs as the work of Giovanni Niccolò (Cola), S.J., (1563–1626) ‘the great artist of the church of Japan’, who, in addition to his principal activity as a painter, apparently made ‘musical instruments, [including] pipe organs made with bamboo’ in Nagasaki in the early seventeenth century. The source of this information seems to be British Museum [now Library] Add. Mss. 9860 f. 52r, cited in Gay, J.L., Studia Missionalia, la Liturgia en la Misión del Japón del Siglo XVI (Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1970)Google Scholar, and then in Yuuki, Diego, S.J., ‘The College of St. Paul of Macau and the church of Japan’, in Religion and Culture: An International Symposium Commemorating the Fourth Centenary of the University College of St. Paul, ed. John W. Witek (Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1999)Google Scholar: 291.
9 Amiot, J-M, Mémoire de la Musique des Chinois (Paris: Nyon, 1779, reprinted Geneva: Minkhoff, 1973): 63–77Google Scholar.
10 For full details of Cera's life and his pipe organs, see Samson-Lauterwald, Helen, The Bamboo Organ of Las Piñas, second edition (Las Piñas, Philippines: The Bamboo Organ Foundation, 2006)Google Scholar.
11 Samson-Lauterwald, , The Bamboo Organ of Las Piñas, 61Google Scholar. Bamboo is, of course, not a wood but a type of grass.
12 For more on Xujiahui/Zikawei, see Xiufen, Zhou, ed., Zikawei in History (Shanghai: Shanghai Cultural Publishing House, 2005)Google Scholar, and www.xhculture.com.
13 Ravary was the mastermind behind the bamboo organs, and arrived in Shanghai on 9 February 1856. He served as minister of Zikawei (1856–57), then briefly in Haimen (1857–58), before being recalled to Shanghai where he spent seven further years (1858–62 at Dongjiadu, during the Taiping Rebellion, and 1862–65 at Zikawei.) In later years he served at various other mission churches in central-eastern China, before returning to Shanghai in 1878. He was born in Angers, but next to nothing is known about his evidently thorough musical background and training.
14 Born at Soissons, Hélot arrived in China in 1849, and he was assigned to the Jesuit mission at Shanghai. At the time concerned here, he was in charge of the Church of St Francis Xavier (Dongjiadu Cathedral), built in 1853, which served the population of the Chinese city. Later, he was responsible for the establishment and building of the parish church of St Joseph (‘Yang-king-pang’) in the French Concession. He then worked in Guangzhou (Canton), and later at Wuxi in 1866–67. He was very interested in traditional Chinese crafts, especially building and architecture, as well as botany and Chinese medicine. Hélot (along with a Spanish lay brother, Jean Ferrer (1817–56)) oversaw the construction of Dongjiadu between 1847 and 1853. (Ferrer was a talented sculptor who decorated most of Shanghai's Roman Catholic churches and established a school for painting and sculpture at Zikawei. He had arrived in China in 1847.) See Diény, Colette, ‘Hélot, Louis’, in Dictionaire des orientalistes de la langue française, F. Pouillon, ed. (Paris: Karthala, 2008): 487–488Google Scholar; as well as her article, ‘About Louis Hélot's Unpublished Letters on Chinese Technique’, in Historiography of the Chinese Catholic Church: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Louvain: Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1994): 231–3.
15 Deleuze was a Belgian, born near Hainault, who entered the French Jesuit order in 1839. During his novitiate he became experienced with metal founding, as well as all sorts of engineering and mechanical work. In the winter of 1845/46 he left France for China, but the ship carrying him appears to have suffered from some sort of epidemic on board, and he and most of the passengers and crew arrived in Manila in early 1846 more dead than alive. Deleuze and his companions were tended there by Spanish Dominicans, from whom it is just possible that he might have heard something about Father Cera's bamboo organs; he may even have seen Cera's organs at Manila's cathedral and the Augustinian Recollect church, both of which were near the Jesuit mother house in the Intramuros area of the city. He reached Shanghai in May 1846, and was assigned to work at Zikawei from 1851 to 1858. Later he worked at Dongjiadu (‘Tungakdoo’, site of the first bamboo organ), and during the last six months of his life he was at the orphanage of Tou-se-we (Tushanwan). See Augustin-M. Colombel, S.J., Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique à l'orphelinat de T'ou-sè-wè, 1899): Part 3/II, 459–61. See also J. de la Servière, S.J., L'orphelinat de T'ou-sè-wè, son histoire, son état présent (Shanghai: Imprimerie de l'Orphelinat de T'ou-sè-wè, 1914): 25.
16 Letter of François Ravary to Hippolyte Bausiau, 22 August/2 September 1856, French Jesuit Archives, Vanves, France, shelf mark: FCh (Nouvelle Compagnie) dossier personelle, ‘Ravary, F.’ (hereafter, AJFV.)
17 Basuiau was born at Douai, and entered the Jesuit order in 1847. In almost all sources I have found he is said to have studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and to have won a first prize for violin before becoming a priest. Although he was clearly a very talented violinist and composer, the Paris Conservatoire has no record of him receiving a premier prix, nor does his name appear in the inscription lists for the years 1822 to 1847 (the terminus ad quem for his having studied there. I have checked exhaustively the Registre d'inscription des élèves, Conservatoire de Musique et de déclamation de Paris, Archives Nationale, Paris, microforms AJ/37/352 and 353.) He arrived in China in 1865, to Ravary's great pleasure. An obituary in The Shanghai Mercury (23 August 1886) mentions that ‘his musical compositions are numerous, including several masses, oratorios, and music for school entertainments, all of which are characterized by originality and remarkable for loftiness of conception’. I have located only one of his compositions, a ‘Cantique de St. Vincent de Paul; paroles de R.P. Lefebre’, in manuscript in the Vincentian (Lazarist) Archive in Paris.
18 The mass is by Franco-Belgian composer, Henri Dumont (1610-84); the one sung on this occasion was probably an adaptation of the first of the Messes royales of 1660. A later publication from Zikawei includes a simple arrangement of this first mode ‘Missa Regia’ of Dumont (Chants sacrés. Accompagnement arrangé par le P. C. De Bussy [!] (Zikawei: Autographie de la Mission catholique à l'Orphelinat de Tou-sè-wè, 1892)).
19 Ravary to Basuiau, 22 August/2 September 1856, AJFV.
20 Gray and Davidson Op. 10046, 2man/ped, C to F3. The specifications were: Great: Open Diapason, Dulciana (to tenor c, with Stopped Diapason bass), Clarionet Flute (to tenor c), Principal, Twelfth, Fifteenth, Sesquialter III. Swell: Open Diapason, Stopped Diapason, Principal, Fifteenth, Cornopean. Pedal (CC-D1): Grand Bourdon. Sw/G, G/Ped, three ‘composition pedals’, in a deal (pine) case with gilt pipes.
21 Unsigned article in The North-China Herald, 22 August 1857, 14.
22 Dongjiadu then stood somewhat closer to the riverbank than it does today; this is due to landfill, which began with the construction of a roadway and quay (the ‘Chinese Bund’) after a devastating fire in 1894.
23 Colombel claimed Smith was French despite his Anglo name, while Ravary implied in his letters that he was English. Smith had been attached at one point to the diplomatic service in Paris, before coming to China around 1850. In 1854 he was appointed the French customs chief in the International Settlement in Shanghai, and it appears he died there in 1857.
24 Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, Part 3/I, 569–70.
25 The workshop was located at Zikawei, but the organ was always intended for Dongjiadu. Presumably the growing ‘Jesuit village’ at Zikawei offered much more space for the project, as well as the needed tools and workers. Ravary to Bausiau, 22 Aug./2 Sept. 1856, AJFV.
26 Manuels-Roret. Nouvel manuel complet du Facteur d'Orgues, ed. M.-P. Hamel (Paris: Roret, 1849). The three volumes at the Bibliotheca Zikawei have the shelf marks AL10-299, 300 and 301. The fourth volume ‘atlas’ is AL12-346. The Bibliotheca (now part of the Shanghai Library) also possesses a fine copy of Dom Bedos's treatise, L'art du facteur d'orgues of 1766 (shelf marks WAL 12-537 (vol. 1) and WAL 12-536 (vol. 2)). But this does not seem to have been part of the Zikawei Library in the nineteenth century. The two volumes lack the library stamp of the ‘Bibl[iotheca] Major
’, and instead are stamped with an enigmatic Maltese cross. They probably came from a non-Jesuit source into the Library's collection sometime in the early twentieth century, according to Arthur Xu, Assistant Librarian, Bibliotheca Zikawei (personal communication, April 2010).
27 Colombel also referred to the book, ‘Pour toute resource il [Ravary] avait un volume des manuels Roret…’, which he must have had access to in the Zikawei Library at the end of the nineteenth century. (Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, Part 3/I, 570.)
28 ‘Tuyaux à biseau’. As Cealwyn Tagle, who is probably the world's authority on bamboo organ pipes, explained to me in a conversation in 2011, the voicing of bamboo pipes is the major problem in their construction.
29 Ravary to Basuiau, 22 Aug/2 Sept 1856, AJFV.
30 See Samson-Lauterwald, , The Bamboo Organ of Las Piñas, 95Google Scholar. Today's bamboo pipes are cured of their natural sap and starches by soaking in wood preservative for 2–3 hours, and then air drying for some weeks, the process being repeated several times over 3 or 4 months (Tagle interview, see note 33). Unfortunately, most of the pipes of the 1858 positive now in Paris are in very degraded condition, probably because of their arrangement in two tightly attached ‘double syrinx’ rows – it seems, originally even touching each other – which hastened their deterioration.
31 Bamboo Market Wharf Street (Zhuhang matou jie) still exists, but Bamboo Market Street itself had almost all disappeared by 2012–13 due to the construction of a huge luxury housing development (‘Bund Home’) on the site. The walk from the church to the site of Bamboo Market Street is four minutes (I timed it in April 2013).
32 Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, Part 3/I, 46 ‘Le P. Hélot calculait la dimensions à sonner des tuyaux; Le P. Ravary, musicien distingué, les accordait’ (though this contradicts his comment, cited earlier, that Ravary had worked out the scales himself).
33 Interview with Cealwyn Tagle, Manila, Philippines, 9 July 2011. Mr. Tagle is the president of Diego Cera Organ Builders, and curator of the Bamboo Organ of Las Piñas.
34 The North-China Herald, 22 August 1857, 14.
35 André-Pierre Borgniet, S.J. (1811–1862) born in Mainz (then part of France.) He arrived in China in 1856, and was assigned to the Jiangnan mission. In 1859 he was named Vicar-apostolic of Nanjing, but he died of cholera three years later.
36 Ravary to Basuiau, 27 November 1856, AJFV.
37 Ravary to Bausiau, 27 November 1856, AJFV.
38 Ravary to Bausiau, 27 November 1856, AJFV.
39 Ravary to Bausiau, 22 August/2 September 1856, ASJV. Ravary writes here ‘3e. octav[e]’. It is possible he meant that the sheng stop sounded only in the third octave of the organ.
40 Ravary's letter continues by describing the sheng, and providing a small drawing of the instrument in the margin of the paper. Without being aware of Ravary and Deleuze's sheng stop, several recent organs built by foreign builders in China have continued this practice. The sheng stop on the 1858 positive in Paris, however, does not seem to have been a reed stop, judging from an examination of the surviving pipes.
41 Ravary to Basuiau, 27 November 1856, ASJV. From this, we learn that the organ manuals had a compass of low C to C3 (see Table 2).
42 If the 1858 positive can be taken as a model, all the pipes had a pipe shade (like a stiffly hinged box-lid, made of a pliable metal) at the top, which could be bent up and down to adjust the pitch.
43 Ravary to the Scholastics of Laval, 28 April 1857, ASJV.
44 The North-China Herald, 22 August 1857, 14.
45 The canal system that linked Zikawei with Dongjiadu in the 1850s has long since been filled in.
46 Churches in China tend to be oriented North–South, rather than East–West, for feng shui reasons.
47 Ravary to Basuiau (transcribed and edited holograph letter by Fr. A.-M. Colombel, c. 1890–1900), 30 August 1857, ASJV.
48 Probably by Louis Lambilotte, S.J. (1796–1855), one of Ravary's favourite composers of church music.
49 Ravary's practice at Mass was to have quartet of two dizi and two sheng, accompanied by harmonium, though for this special occasion the ensemble was doubtless much augmented. This experience may have led to the dizi and sheng stops on the 1858 positive, though as mentioned below; he was surely aware of their significant role in Confucian ceremonies.
50 The North-China Herald, 22 August 1857.
51 Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, Part 3/I, 571. The unloved orgue harmonium was sent to the museum of the Paris Conservatoire in June 1864 (Gétreau, Aux origines du Musée de la musique, 648.)
52 For more on these instruments, see the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 7, East Asia : China, Japan, and Korea, ed. Robert C. Provine, Yosihiko Tokumaru and J. Lawrence Witzleben (New York: Rouledge, 2002): Alan R. Thrasher, ‘Instruments: Sheng’, 187–90; Frederick Lau, ‘Instruments: Dizi and Xiao’, 183–6; Joseph S.C. Lam, ‘Confucian Ceremonial Music’, 235–37.
53 For example, the Jesuits began a project in the 1580s to translate into Latin the Four Confucian Books (The Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects of Confucius, and the Mencius; this quartet forms the foundation of Chinese culture and literature). J.-M. Amiot published a highly regarded Vie de Confucius in 1790. James Legge (1815–1897), a renowned Scottish missionary, translated a great deal of Chinese philosophical and religious writing, starting in 1841 and including The Life and Teaching of Confucius (1867) and The Life and Teaching of Mencius (1875).
54 Mencius, Book V, Part B (1), trans. D.C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1970): 150–51. Lau translates ‘tubes’, but the reference is much more likely to refer to lithophones of the bian qing (
) variety. Ravary and Deleuze may also have been intrigued by the similarity (and difference) of Mencius's quotation to an aphorism of Cicero (106–43 bce): Jacere telum voluntatis est; ferire quem nolueris fortunae. ‘To throw a dart is a matter of will; but that it hits a person whom you have no intention to strike, is a matter of chance.’
55 Early missionaries in China, such as Matteo Ricci and Tomás Periera had given or built organs and harpsichords for various Chinese emperors, often including a Latin motto from the Psalms (e.g. in cymbalis bene sonantibus) on the fall board. See Lindorf, Joyce, ‘Missionaries, keyboards and musical exchange in the Ming and Qing courts’, Early Music, 32 (2004): 403–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Thomas da Costa Kauffmann and Michael North, Introduction, Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, ed. Michael North and Ernst-Moritz-Arndt (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): 3.
57 The topics of the Taiping Rebellion and Second Opium War would require too long an explanation, and too complex an assessment, to enter into here. A good account of the period, as well as subsequent manipulation of the events as a permanent backdrop for Chinese foreign relations from the 1911 revolution onward, can be found in Lovell, Julia, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011)Google Scholar. See also Platt, Steven, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 2011.)Google Scholar
58 ParkerCharles, H. Charles, H., Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Introduction, 3.
59 Ravary to Basuiau, 22 August/2 September 1856, AJFV.
60 Ravary to Basuiau, 17 June 1861, AJFV.
61 It was completed in 1850 (Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, 3/II, 461.)
62 St Joseph's was completed in 1861. It is one of the few churches in China with an East–West axis, presumably because it was built in the European (later, French) Concession. Hélot and Ferrer (see note 14) also participated in designing the church.
63 Ravary to Basuiau, 17 June 1861, ASJV.
64 Ravary, François, S.J., ‘Le Chang-hai chrétien et le Chang-hai payen,’ in Les Missions Catholiques, 24/1182 (29 January 1892): 56–59Google Scholar. The ‘orchestre’ was the Société de Ste. Cécile, a chamber orchestra of flexible instrumentation which Basuiau founded after his arrival in Shanghai in 1865. This ensemble thus postdates Ravary's brass band (1856/57, the earliest such band established in China), and precedes by a decade the Shanghai Municipal Band (est. ca. 1879), which later became the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
65 Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, 3/II, 461.
66 Colombel, Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan, 3/III, 64.
67 ‘Extract of a letter from Fr. T. Faixpoux to the Reverend Father Provincial. Religious music at Dongjiadu and Zikawei.’ Zikawei, 8 December 1881. In: Lettres des Scholastiques de Jersey No. 1 – Avril 1882 (Bruges: Imp. Saint-Augustin, 1882.) 43.
68 Letter of F. Ravary to P. Dufour, 27 June 1886, in: Lettres des Scholastiques de Jersey No. 6 – Août 1887. In this letter, Ravary also states that Basuiau was a professional musician before he became a Jesuit.
69 ‘A Bishop's Consecration’, North-China Daily News, 4 February 1918, 7.
70 ‘Le vieil orgue de bambou nouvellement réparé était tenu par l'organiste de Yang-King-Pang [St Joseph's]’. Unidentified news clipping about Lécroart, 4 February 1918, AJFV, folder GMC 121/6, file ‘Lécroart’. Lécroart was also responsible for the purchase of an organ from the Viennese firm of Kaufmann for the church of Notre-Dame de Treille at Damingfu, Hebei Province, in 1922.
71 ‘Bamboo Organ of Tungkadoo: Wonderful relic of old time ingenuity’, North-China Daily News, 5 February 1918. 7.
72 ‘Bamboo Organ of Tungkadoo’, North-China Daily News, 5 February 1918.
73 ‘Shanghai's Bamboo Organ’, Scientific American, 119/16 (19 October 1918): 328.
74 Pott, F.L. Hawks, A Short History of Shanghai, being an account of the growth and development of the International Settlement (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1928): 19–20Google Scholar.
75 All About Shanghai (Shanghai: University Press, 1934; repr. Oxford University Press, 1983): 60–61.
76 I was given this information by the sacristan of Dongjiadu Cathedral in April 1990. This man was born in 1920, and told me that the organ had been used in 1940 for his wedding. See my article, ‘China, Churches, and Organs: Part II’, in The American Organist, 27/7 (1993): 51.
77 A favourite quotation from the Psalms, used by early keyboard instrument builders in China such as Tomás Pereira. This research has been undertaken with support from a GRF Grant (‘Keys to the Kingdom: A Documentary Study of the Pipe Organ in China’) from the University Grants Council of Hong Kong, and with support from the Department of Music, Faculty of Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University.